Pałyga, Artur

A play about anti-Semitism that remains hidden in Polish society, but is nevertheless still alive. The thing takes place in a declining school in a smaller Polish town. The school is falling apart, it has debts, it is in danger of being closed down. One day the headmaster of the school receives an e-mail from the titular Jew, David Wassersztajn. The man asks for the return of an essay he wrote when he was a student of this school. The headmaster sees in this event a chance to get a big donation that will save the school. For this reason, he calls for a night meeting of the school's board of teachers: Polish, English, PE, and after a while a priest who teaches religion at the school joins them.

These few people constitute a gallery of colourful, highly diversified characters outlined with a rather broad but efficient strokes. An inexhaustible PE Teacher, a modern female English Teacher, an intelligently mischievous female Polish Teacher with a complex of superiority.

The director called this meeting to reflect on how to accommodate an old pupil, today, as everyone believes, a rich and generous man.

As the meeting proceeds and more and more absurd ideas are gathered (such as naming the school after Mosze Wassersztajn), Polish anti-Semitism, saturated with stereotypes and ignorance, is revealed. Artur Pałyga's play is a good lesson in history, free of bias, in harmony with Gross's 'Fear'. It contains reverberations of post-war pogroms, digging up Jewish graves in Treblinka, post-war persecution, the unwillingness of many people to admit that they hid Jews during the occupation, emigration. It turns out that before the war Jews constituted 50% of the town's population. None of the heroes (not excluding the youngest of them, the English Teacher Agnieszka) is without blame. Things that have been kept hidden for years come to light.

The play is written very seriously and very directly, there are no understatements or ambiguities. They are dry and therefore terrifying, although mostly known facts, which, among others, thanks to Gross and other writers and journalists, have seen the light of day.

The tone was skillfully undercut by the author's comedic presentation of characters, funny, intelligent, naturally sounding dialogues and a form that opens the play up to interpretation.

A theater triptych exploring the problem of Polish anti-Semitism and general xenophobia from three very subjective perspectives: a victim, a witness, an executioner. Each part can actually make a separate whole, and each follows a different literary convention (from a social discourse to a poetical drama). The first one is a contemporary story of a young woman, a public person pursued by gossip about her being Jewish. The second is made up of statements from eyewitness reports concerning the post-war pogroms (Kielce). The third story, based on facts, describes an encounter between a female prisoner and a former concentration camp guard, a sadistic SS woman. Although it is a true story, its plot draws on both a dream and reality.

Pałyga avoids arbitrary judgment, he does not see the world in black and white. Asking questions is far more important to him. In what way may one’s background influence intimate relationships? Why are ordinary, quiet people able to perform inhuman evil deeds? Why is it so easy for a victim to become an executioner? 

What are the inhabitants of a typical Polish tenement house like? Aniela Dąbkowa and Wiktoria Dworniczek are two pious old ladies. They often visit each other and go to church. One day Dąbkowa finds the absence of her friend terrifying. It soon turns out that the old lady fell in the hallway and died. Her death is reported by successive residents of the tenement house, whose names do not accidentally refer to the biblical ones. Andrzej - an ambulance driver, waiting for the body of the deceased - tells a well-known radio presenter his dreams about angels. Aniela Dąbkowa is visited by her grandchildren, Anna and Paul... but they actually just give her a pot of anti-wrinkle cream and run away quickly. Jacob, pushed by some mysterious force, makes a purchase in the antique shop "Gilgamesh". In his dreams, Matthew learns the secret of the Holy Trinity, but just after waking up he forgets everything. In Artur Pałyga's play, even everyday objects get their chance to shine, such as the Calendar or A Piece of the An Old Yellowed Newspaper.

The drama shows the protagonists right after waking up, when the boundaries between sleep and reality are still blurred. It is a poetic fresco about the crisis of faith and passing away.

• translated into German

The play is a kind of continuation and development of the masterful Unfinished Story. However, Artur Pałyga here touches upon a darker sphere of life and human experiences - because he tells about the mystery of the end of the world that has just happened, or actually occurs every day in front of people. It is a record of the endless history of horror, in the light of which the end of the world can be a sudden, unexpected death of a loved one, a deadly illness - every incomprehensible loss that clashes with the human desire to live. The ends of the world of the drama's protagonists have been framed by a performance that starts with three characters: Lucy, Spark and Ashes. They are the survivors of the end of the world, hiding in a shelter. Now they emerge from the darkness and ashes to remember what just happened, evoking memories and real people who experienced the disaster. This process takes the form of a ritual to help us understand.

The poetic title refers to a paradoxical scientific fact: in the middle of a hot star, the Sun ("ultra-heated furnace"), it is cold and dark, because the ashes accumulate there. The dazzling, apocalyptic glow of the sun constantly accompanies the protagonists of the drama. This suggestive metaphor reminds us that death and destruction are an integral part of every form of life.

The axis of the play is composed of poetic, sensual images of the tragic death of a woman in a fire, which nobody could have done anything about. It was the result of coincidences that emerge in the course of the plot's development: objects become sharper, situations are symbolic, but this does not bring us any closer to unraveling the mystery of life and death. Even Aristotle and Alexander the Great, who comes alive from the pages of books. This will not be understood by a woman suffering from cancer, who wants to photograph herself before death or a drastic procedure, or by a father who unsuccessfully tries to communicate with his paralysed son by means of Janusz Laskowski's album. The closest to understanding are Lucy, Spark and Ashes, who see that the incomprehensible death is always the fault of another man, too busy with his own life.

So, just as in the Unfinished Story, the action and stage activities of the characters are arranged by human death - but there it was the death of an elderly woman - Wiktoria Dworniczek, here it is a tragic death, less understandable. The text is equally, or perhaps even more universal, philosophical and poetic than the Unfinished Story. The action takes place in an undefined space, equally undefined are the characters who impersonate the people they knew before the "end". Apart from poetic metaphors, the very form of writing resembles the best traditions of linguistic poetry.

The play won the Grand Prix in the competition for the Gdynia Drama Award 2013.

Artur Pałyga's play, maintained in a quasi Różewicz's style, with motives from Franz Kafka's Letter to Father, is an anti-apotheosis of paternity as an authority of violence.

The father is a tyrant, the head of the family and the lord of the house, a dictator who arouses fear and respect. The father is a helpless man who does not know how to play and fulfil this role in life. As he confesses to his son in a pre-mortem conversation, only during the journey could he be nicer, because he took off the burden of responsibility. The role of the patriarch of the family did not allow him to show his feelings and be a nice "understanding daddy". In the Father's understanding this would be his end, the denial of being a strong man. Showing affection would be like admitting one's weakness, becoming an object of mockery on the part of his military colleagues and his extended family. Military discipline was effective in covering up helplessness and fear.

Fathers' time has passed, now we have only mummy's partners and sweet dads. Such a reflection on paternity is the starting point for Artur Pałyga's play. The old fathers have passed away, they are gone with the arrival of new times, but the memory of them is not gone. Our Father speaks about such old, unfashionable fathers. It begins and ends with the memory of the funeral. The content of the play is filled with single scenes/pictures in which the play's protagonists, remembered through the eyes of Franio, appear. Not only does it show the figure of the Father, the severe lord of the house, who arouses fear in everyone, but also the image of the family and its relations, where the Father was a kind of axis.

Scene by scene, we follow the fascination, pride, longing for the eternally absent, for whom we waited for hours. When at the end of his life the Father asks his son why he was afraid of him, Franio cannot answer.

The play gives an impulse to reflect on the contemporary role of the father and the patriarchal model of the family: do we miss our former fathers or do we want a different model? Does the word "father" still have its place in our language?

"The biographical monodrama about the life of Maria Skłodowska-Curie by Artur Pałyga takes on the shape of a poetic epistolary drama, in which the heroine writes letters addressed to herself. Radiant is a work enclosed in the form of correspondence between eighteen-year-old Mania and adult, dying Maria, portraying an intimate and complicated picture of the life of an exceptional and extremely sensitive woman: daughter, mother, beloved wife, widow, lover. [...] Pałyga frees Skłodowska-Curie from the stiff image presented in schools, filling her character with the reality of experiences, human tragedy, but also unspeakable happiness and fulfilment. She gives voice to what she valued most in her life - honesty, passion, perseverance, truth."

− Agnieszka Górnicka, Letters to oneself, "Teatr" 12/2016

"Radiant has nothing to do with a commemorative compilation of Skłodowska's letters or their critical "transcription". Rather, it is the writer's personal response to those thoughts of the scholar that caught his attention the most, and the amplification of those motifs present in her correspondence that most strongly appealed to his imagination. Pałyga reads Maria's letters and literally grabs her by the words, but not in order to point something out to her, sneakily deforming the meaning of the quoted phrases."

− Jacek Kopciński, Faust/yna. Radiant by Artur Pałyga, Załącznik Kulturoznawczy 4/2017