It's about the soup

Polish classic Krystian Lupa showed “Zarathustra”

The classic and avant-garde artist of the Polish theater, Krystian Lupa, was invited to the third Meyerhold readings, representing “world-famous directors at the peak of their creative life.” At the Center. Meyerhold's four-hour play Zarathustra was shown twice. As in “The Seagull,” staged last season at the Alexandrinka Theater, Lupa here communicates almost directly with the cosmos. True, no longer with the World Soul, but with the abyss into which he carefully peers. If you wait patiently through the first two parts, then by the third you can even figure out her answer.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is not the most obvious material for a theatrical production. This is not the most obvious material at all. The desperate poetry and angry prophecies of the book are reliably melted into a collection of excellent aphorisms; Once you start quoting, it’s impossible to stop; the flow of words pulls you into a funnel. The performance is also born from a funnel formed in the middle of the auditorium. Most of the spectators have already taken their seats, but some are still looking for a seat, jostling in the aisles. An unexpected cry from a young man pushes them onto the stage - in sweaters, with bags on their shoulders, someone holding a bottle of water, they surround him, looking at each other and quietly talking, trying to understand what happened. “A man is a bridge,” he shouts, “the important thing about a man is that he is a bridge, not a goal.” And he points his finger into the darkness of the stage. Everyone lifts their heads - a tightrope walker is slowly moving above in a striped tights. The performance also moves forward slowly. The spectators turn out to be disguised actors, portraying a crowd into which any of Zarathustra’s truths disappear, like into sand.

The first part - and Lupa actually made a trilogy with three Zarathustras (played by Sebastian Pawlak, Zbigniew W. Kaleta and Krzysztof Globisz) - is a long and rather monotonous, like a landscape in a train window, sketch on the theme of a misunderstood poet. The poet speaks a lot, emotionally and extremely convincingly (the translation runs as a running line above the stage), but no one (including the audience in the hall) can understand, remember or retell what he says. A bed moves into the center of the stage, lying on which, huddled together, two young men listen to Zarathustra - the program explains: John and Matthew. Occasionally they intervene in the conversation and make a couple of catchy remarks, but they do not at all spoil the overall impression of what is happening, as of a rich, albeit rather boring report.

In the second part the action thickens. The matured and somewhat coarsened Zarathustra has interlocutors. He moves from one to another, as if from one installation in a museum to another; Lupa is a great master of spectacular mise-en-scenes. The Killer of God, for example, is an invalid wrapped in bandages, chained to a dirty couch, and Donkey is a naked young man with a bell. Shaking his head to the beat, he runs out into the hall and good-naturedly amuses the audience. But the main image invented by Lupa is, of course, the hunched last Pope, sitting at the head of either a bed or an aquarium, where there is a humanoid creature covered in leeches. The Pope, connected to the creature by tubes, has trembling hands and a slightly clouded gaze from worldly years, but he finds the strength to bless those remaining on earth - and does this in an exact copy of the gesture of John Paul II.

However, the real theater begins only after the second intermission; the third part seems to be a completely independent performance, and the first two seem like tests sent by the director that must be passed in order to deserve the finale. It is no longer based on Nietzsche's text, but on a biographical play about his life by Ainar Schleef. True, there are no special biographical details here, what is more important is the general balance of power - an aging loving mother (Iwona Bielska), a nervous sister embittered by the world (Malgorzata Chajewska-Krzysztofik), the clumsy, taciturn, sick Fritz, who raised Zarathustra within himself. The family is preparing to receive guests - the sister and mother wash Fritz, set the table, listlessly quarrel, and this tangible everyday life is gradually, like rust, corroded by gloomy revelations about human nature. And now Fritz, dressed in the same suit in which he was supposed to have dinner with guests, ends up in a homeless shelter for a food distribution, where, among drunken prostitutes and crazy people, he is overtaken by perhaps the most important truth: hot soup spreads inside a person. It's all in the soup. And not at all in God. Or does Lupa leave some hope for the retreating Fritz-Zarathustra with the maiden unsteadily standing on her feet, or is it all about both of them?

Yulia CHERNIKOVA