The Village Is on Fire! The Village Is Burning Down! Notes on the Oliver Frljić Production of Klątwa in Warsaw

Abstract

The text is a critical assessment of various aesthetical and political strategies used in The Curse directed by Oliver Frljič. It starts with the hypothesis that what is staged in the performance is not only the problem with which it is overtly dealing (namely the dominant position of the Catholic Church in Poland) but also mechanisms and symbolical codes that surround and condition theater as such. It is only together with the excessive and often highly ideologized reactions by the press and audience that one can understand it as the theater in the extended field. It's critical load but also its gentleness, or even tenderness. The biggest scandal in the Polish theater in recent years is in fact organized around a fundamental deadlock, which points at the emptiness of society at large. Thus the real curse consists of the repetitive clash between the utopian vision of critical art and the overwhelming production of fake symbols organizing society around the quintessential, yet undisclosed, void. The production acknowledges this deadlock and exacerbates it in order to exorcise it. And perhaps its strongest effect stems from the fact that it is impossible to distinguish between its success and its failure.