A Great Reckoning in a Little Room - Hamlet IV
I always hesitated to write about the experience of seeing a play, because it’s like trying to describe what water tastes like.
Ironically, my daughter, when she was six, actually gave the best description of water that I can think of when she declared that it was “a big wet nothing.”
Writing about performances is a time-honored activity, but what can’t be conveyed is the experience of seeing that play. It’s like when you translate a poem, the poetry is the untranslatable part. So, let me hereby set out to write about my experience of seeing an extraordinary performance and fail in my own way.
In 1990, Andrzej Wajda, (Ahn-Jay Vye-dah) the Oscar-winning Polish director of stage and film, premiered Hamlet IV at the Teatr Stary (Old Theatre), the most prestigious theatre in Krakow. It was called Hamlet IV because it was the fourth time that Wajda had directed it. The scenic and costume design was by his wife, Krystyna Zachwatowicz.
Globally, Wajda’s robust theatrical career was fiercely overshadowed by his extraordinary film work. He created many famous and groundbreaking theatre productions in his native Poland - including his contemporary staging of Sophocles’s Antigone, which premiered shortly after Poland’s martial law of the1980s. In Wajda’s staging, Creon and Thebes signified Poland’s then-current regime, and Antigone was a rebel of the Solidarity Movement. Ordinarily, such an incendiary production would have been shut down by the powers that be. But Wajda was so famous that closing it would have reflected badly on the Polish People’s Republic in the eyes of the world. So Antigone was allowed to play, but it was restricted from touring outside the country. It was in repertory at the Teatr Stary for over eight years.
Andrzej Wajda and Krystyna Zachwatowicz in 2010
I was a visiting artist at the time, a guest of Teatr Stary, and had been invited to watch them rehearse a play called Fantazy. I had planned to see everything that was currently running in repertory and that was 30 plays. The dramaturg said that I would need a ticket for Wajda’s Hamlet IV and I asked her not to go to any unnecessary trouble. I had seen several plays in their large proscenium theatre and told her that if it was sold out, I could just stand in the back. She said, “No, you’ll need a ticket for this.”
The reason is that the performance did not take place on the stage with the audience sitting in the 500-seat auditorium. The audience, only 30 of us, were led into a small room that was directly behind the back wall of the stage. That small room was outfitted like a dressing room and the audience sat on two of the four sides. It was in this tiny room that the play would take place. The empty theatre was visible through the open doorway which connected us and the stage. And we could see the 500 empty seats beyond the footlights. Wajda was one of the leading directors in Poland, and if he had wanted to do the play in the auditorium, he could have, and filled it every night. He chose not to.
Teresa Budzisz-Krzyzanowska, an astounding actress who was 48 at the time, played Hamlet. She entered the dressing room as herself, the way an actress might arrive at the theatre, and then dressed in Hamlet’s Elizabethan costume.
Wajda had cut the first ghost scene and the play opens with the coronation scene. And here is where it gets good.
Teresa Budzisz-Krzyzanowska
Courtesy of Teatr Stary / Photo: Wojciech Plewinski
The play occupied two different spaces simultaneously. Claudius and his court are out on the stage, not playing to us, but playing to the empty auditorium with their backs to us. Hamlet is in the room with us listening and watching.
When Claudius addresses Hamlet he turns and extends his hand. He tries to get Hamlet to enter the stage and become part of the Elsinore court, but Hamlet refuses to leave the dressing room. And it is to be this way for the rest of the play until the fencing match. Characters come into the dressing room or stand at the doorway to play a scene with Hamlet. But Hamlet never leaves. And every scene that Hamlet is not in is played onstage by the other actors to the empty house.
The Coronation Scene: Left to right: Teresa Budzisz-Krzyzanowska (Hamlet), Jerzy Gralek (Claudius) Dorota Pomykala (Gertrude)
Courtesy of Teatr Stary / Photo: Wojciech Plewinski
As Budzisz-Krzyzanowska simultaneously plays both Hamlet and the actress playing Hamlet, the play becomes a metaphor for theatre itself - and Hamlet’s famous inability to act becomes a literal inability to act. This explanation sounds facile as I read it over, and it is, because it can’t convey what the audience experiences in that room. There is an indescribable feeling of safety in that room and of danger on the stage and beyond. But not a comfortable safety. It is the safety of being in a bomb shelter as explosions incinerate the outside. The safety of being in a storm cellar while a hurricane destroys everything above. We are in that room with her and not out there with the palpable evil of the court. I cannot underline the power of this conceit enough. Through this extraordinary staging, we become Hamlet with that actress.
Hamlet and Claudius “Oh my offense is rank”
Courtesy of Teatr Stary / Photo: Wojciech Plewinski
After the ghost scene Hamlet slams shut the sliding metal door which separates the two spaces - thrillingly isolating the audience and the actors in that small room as Hamlet, Horatio, and the guards argue about what they had just seen. (Something you could never do in the United States with our “pesky” fire codes.) Being suddenly sealed in the room with those characters generated feelings of real horror. Something outside might try to get in.
In Act V, the fear and dread we feel as Hamlet finally leaves the dressing room to take part in the fencing match on the stage is indescribable. I’ve never felt that in any other production of Hamlet and it was only possible because of the way Wajda and Zachwatowicz used the space.
At the end of the play Hamlet is dead. The actor playing Fortinbas enters in street clothes, as the actor would, and with his eulogy, the play seems to end. Teresa Budzisz-Krzyzanowska, rises from where she fell and, once again the “actress,” puts on her coat and exits the space.
Then something remarkable happens.
The play begins again.
The Coronation Scene with Fortinbras (Jerzy Radziwilowicz)
Courtesy of Teatr Stary / Photo: Wojciech Plewinski
We are now back at the coronation and Claudius starts his coronation speech, just as before, while the Fortinbras actor changes from his street clothes into Hamlet's costume. Claudius talks to Fortinbras as Hamlet, using the lines at the beginning of the play and extending his hand to join the court. The performance ends with Fortinbras going onto the stage, accompanied by a thundering tattoo of drums, something Hamlet could never do until the end.
This performance has been written about in the context of the crumbling Communist regime - Claudius’s court symbolizing the declining Soviet power. Yes, of course that is there - but it’s a conventional and common interpretation of the play. For me the extraordinary staging and what it created in us far superseded the politics.
And I’ve seen the version they filmed for Polish television. It is quite faithful, but once again points up the impotence of film and video when trying to translate a stage experience.
To circle back - The moment when Hamlet finally left that small room, (which we had shared with her for two hours) to "act" onstage during the fencing match cannot fully be communicated. For us in the audience, the wave of terror that it created could not be duplicated in a conventional production. It is as close as anything I've ever experienced in the theatre to pure magic or conjury.