Krakow Festival Office
Divine Comedy 2010
Divine Comedy 2010
Babel
Director: Maja Kleczewska
The monstrous linguistic chaos of Elfriede Jelinek’s work brings to mind the Greek formula of the nekyia, the summoning of all the deceased since the beginning of the world, giving the floor to the innocent victims of war, and listening to the lame accounts of witnesses, and the ceaseless curses of the executioners. Our “so-called humanity gone mad” has built no tower of languages; on the Bydgoszcz stage, Babel assumes the form of a cemetery, a mortuary, the morgue of the Brave New World. In Babel, Kleczewska uses the notion of “post-death”, that is a death unfinished, lasting in every moment, and repeatedly blotting the line that separates it from life. It seems to be oozing out of the actors flayed live of their skins and becoming part of geometrical ice-cold cultural images of death. The play falls into three parts. In the first, we are snowed under scraps of bodies and words, we are within the dying monologues delivered by the protagonists who are already dead. The second is an intensification of the blasphemous Passion, where the laments of mothers over the bodies of dead sons: soldiers, terrorists, lovers... end in a funeral cortege chanting in an Einar Schleef-like choir Jelinek’s poetic insults. In the last scene, the plane turns into a pastiche concert of the so-called “involved, anti-war, anti-civilisation pop music”.
Photography: Tomasz Wiech
Divine Comedy 2010
Divine Comedy 2010
Babel
Director: Maja Kleczewska
The monstrous linguistic chaos of Elfriede Jelinek’s work brings to mind the Greek formula of the nekyia, the summoning of all the deceased since the beginning of the world, giving the floor to the innocent victims of war, and listening to the lame accounts of witnesses, and the ceaseless curses of the executioners. Our “so-called humanity gone mad” has built no tower of languages; on the Bydgoszcz stage, Babel assumes the form of a cemetery, a mortuary, the morgue of the Brave New World. In Babel, Kleczewska uses the notion of “post-death”, that is a death unfinished, lasting in every moment, and repeatedly blotting the line that separates it from life. It seems to be oozing out of the actors flayed live of their skins and becoming part of geometrical ice-cold cultural images of death. The play falls into three parts. In the first, we are snowed under scraps of bodies and words, we are within the dying monologues delivered by the protagonists who are already dead. The second is an intensification of the blasphemous Passion, where the laments of mothers over the bodies of dead sons: soldiers, terrorists, lovers... end in a funeral cortege chanting in an Einar Schleef-like choir Jelinek’s poetic insults. In the last scene, the plane turns into a pastiche concert of the so-called “involved, anti-war, anti-civilisation pop music”.
Photography: Tomasz Wiech