Four Characters Caught in The Author’s Tenets
Paradoxically, the name of Witold Gombrowicz and his works are nonexistent for our erudite public. The reasons of this gap are inexplicable; neither the deluxe Ukrainian edition of his Diaries, nor several Russian collections of his prose change the status quo as a whole. Gombrowicz is too much of an oddball for readers living east of Poland, so that the post-Soviet intellectual mentality is just beginning to perceive him.
Therefore, his Ferdydurke performed on the stage of the Youth Theater by a mixed cast from Lublin’s Provizorium and Teatr drama companies was doomed to at least some attention from Kyiv’s intelligentsia. However, fewer intellectuals attended than expected due to poor advertising, and the anonymity of the Polish cast was not even made up for by the name on the posters: Gombrowicz, for it has not as yet become a symbolic code word as with his more fortunate colleagues Borges or Pavlic. Yet most in the audience expected little more than a passable stage reading of the world- renowned text. Fortunately, the one-act play obviously surpassed the restrained expectations.
The task facing the producers, Janusz Oprinski and Witold Mazurkiewicz (the latter also playing one of the principal characters) was not an easy one. Gombrowicz is not so much a visual as a tactile author; many of his motifs and images are built on a phantasmagorical, at times shocking irritation of all human senses. His sensual prose is specific and all-embracing precisely because, when reading it, one experiences the amazing effect of being inside; the reader finds himself swallowed up by the author. The producers found their own way to convey the plot, using the sharpest variety of comedy, farce. Their stage version of Ferdydurke was not a mechanical and reverent recitation, but a real spectacle. The four character and very plastique actors felt quite at home inside Gombrowicz, at times even too comfortable. Keeping to the comic side at all times, they started shouting rather than talking, which, combined with constant attempts to fool around, produced a sort of welter, especially at the beginning of the play. In other words, the desired effect is achieved and the audience is ready to bust laughing after the first fifteen minutes. Then what? And so toward the middle of the play there was a dangerous moment when an intellectual play of harlequins could become only that, buffoonery with nothing to add, inevitably causing revulsion in the audience. Fortunately, nothing of the kind happened, owing to the precise rhythm diversified techniques, when wittiness did not merely make people laugh, but also made them think of jokes cracked by fate and then showing their other side. Just the way it happens in real life.
This life a la Gombrowicz — rather this life in Gombrowicz’s tenets — was successfully dramatized by Ferdydurke’s producers. They chose only two episodes from the novel, titled conventionally “School” and “Love,” with many changes, transformations, and reincarnations taking place in the characters’ life; they lived through the whole gamut of emotions, from teenage swagger to bitter adult disillusionment. The physiological aspect is emphasized with special accuracy and vividness, as Gombrowicz considered it of particular importance; even the most elevated feelings are impossible without active carnal involvement. The cast’s dramatic talent became more conspicuous in the adult scenes. Jaroslaw Tomitz (in fact, the best of the cast), Witold Mazurkiewicz, Jazek Brzezinski, and Michal Zget were equally convincing in the different keys of stage emotions, raising Lublin’s Ferdydurke to the level of a tragicomic farce, a parable on the nature of desire and its reverse dark side.
People left the theater having laughed to their heart’s content, but also with a special aftertaste, after spending at least an hour in the captivity of Gombrowicz’s magic fragrant prose.
