On The Other Side Of The Conundrum – A New Drama Inspired By “Picnic At Hanging Rock” In The National Theater Of Warsaw Poland [Part II]

To read PART I of this interview, go to this link. For Part III, click here.

Men – rulers of destiny

It might seem that such an expressive image of women relegates male characters to the margins of events. However, in the dramatic version of the story of Picnic at Hanging Rock, every slightest scene pulses with tension, revealing to the viewer a horizon of unexpected content.

In Lindsay’s novel, the two main male characters are young friends. The nephew of the rich Mr. and Mrs. Fitzhubrt, who came to them from England, and the coachman Albert. The extremely drawn-out story of friendship, which in the novel centers around the main plot of the disappearance of the four women, in the drama gains an almost extraordinary energy and seriousness. This is due, among other things, to the excellent stage roles. Created by Mateusz Kmiecik, Albert is an energetic and confident character that every boy would like to have as a friend. Piotr Kramer, playing Michel, perfectly balances between the pretentious gentleman and the dignified partner of the wild and intelligent Albert. The duo of such matched characters is, of course, well known to the readers of the novels and the audience of popular narratives in our culture. Michel is a model flawless young man, whose task is to rescue a beautiful woman, with the help of a faithful best man. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, it is Michel who finds the lost Irma, which will become the beginning of a not-so-successful, but nevertheless romance. The drama takes this trumped-up motif under the magnifying glass of critical analysis, revealing to us the weaknesses of such fictionalization. In our fantasy, Michel, like many other youthful saviors, is an idealized character without flaw, whose heroic deeds are supposed to redeem all our greater and lesser evil deeds. Flawlessness, however, is pure fiction, which is exposed in subsequent dialogues between the friends. First, when Michel accuses Albert of not taking enough interest in his missing sister, Albert retorts “And you, Master Fitzhubert, what are you doing on our land? After all, everyone who comes here is either a British colonizer or a British villain. And sometimes both. You, who are you? A colonizer or a villain?”. Later, when Michel, fulfilling the pattern of a savior, decides to set out to find the missing girls, the coachman makes him (or rather us) aware of the absurdity of the project, in which an inexperienced young man finds a woman in a foreign land of thirty thousand square kilometers, which the local police have been searching for days. Meanwhile, Michel is already dancing the Haka that Albert taught him. After all, it is he, the colonizer, who is supposed to prove braver, stronger and more righteous than the natives. How we need such fantasies, don’t we? The thing is that they are not only absurd and humdrum, but they also affect the lives of those around us. In the play, this influence is revealed in the metaphysical order of fate. Michel, finding Irma, does not save her at all but only change her fate abruptly. For Irma, uprooted from the path to enlightenment, does not even return to the order of the world she left. That’s why in the scene at the boarding house she remains silent or responds perfunctorily. While heroic deeds change our reality, most often we fail to bear the responsibility that follows them. How many times, following the example of film and novel heroes, have we taken breakneck actions that satisfied our pride, hiding it under the cover of love or kindness? How many times have we found that in the further course of our daily routine, a change that was supposed to be a liberation turned out to be an unbearable prison?And yet, Albert had already warned his friend when Michael admired the beauty of the board school girls skipping across the creek. “They don’t know yet, but most of them are already promised to contractors. Contracts are already signed. In a well-prepared life, there is no room for surprises. Events, like threaded beads, flow one after another without losing their order. Sometimes, however, out of nowhere appears someone who shatters this order. Master Fitzhubert, you are an unexpected surprise. Be careful that you do not shatter the order…”. For in the theatrical version of Picnic at Hanging Rock nothing happens suddenly. The order that is slowly revealed, however, is more frightening than soothing.

The endless picnic of the colonists

The picnic of the title is not limited to an afternoon spent under a rock. For it is a metaphor for the totality of human life, the image of which escalates into a gargantuan party in the form of a Garden Party in Lake View organized by the Wife of Colonel Fitzhubert, the richest man in Australia. The Wife of Colonel, played superbly by Gabriela Muskała, is a ruthless and unintelligent person. The Colonel, played by the equally good Wiesław Cichy, is more reflective, and it is from his mouth that the prophetic words “we will party ourselves to death” come unexpectedly, as a response to his wife’s plans to throw the biggest ball in the world. But don’t let the Colonel’s human reflexes fool you, both he and the Wife of Colonel are the picture of ruthless colonizers. In the world we get to know through the play, above the logic of causes and motivations stands intrigue and the will of rich people. The marriages of the young girls of the boarding house have long been contracted while the fate of the boarding house itself has been a foregone conclusion since the Wife of Colonel decided to support the Pastor in his fight for a seat on the city council. At the same time, Mrs. Appleyard’s pension is an ambiguous place in the estimation of today’s viewer. On the one hand, it embodies the rules of a ruthless regime. On the other hand, it performs a subversive function against the social order, in which a woman remains the subject of a marriage-economic contract. Lessons in mathematics or reading Freud as news in psychology are knowledge that is seen by parents and the rest of the community as an unnecessary and even dangerous thing. Boarding school thus remains a salt in the eye of local elites, who take advantage of the girls’ disappearance to eliminate her. Unlike in the book and film, the collapse of the pension is not caused by a lack of payments from parents concerned about the tragic accident, but is an arbitrary decision by the people holding power, which is announced to Appleyard by Pastor. What is most poignant, however, is not the truth itself about the hierarchy of power in our world, but the terrifying powerlessness of the school board owner, whose courage and awareness of her rights turn out to be a complete illusion. For when Appleyard firmly declares that she will not allow the boarding school to be closed by emphasizing “It’s my property… My money… You can’t,” in response she hears the Pastor’s words, calm in their ruthlessness, “But of course we can. We even have to…”. It’s a truly frightening scene when one realizes that this situation is not limited to the invented world of fiction. At the same time, the strength of the National Theater’s production is not the mere statement of the immense powerlessness to which we are sometimes condemned, but the incredible course of the emotional change that the character of the boarding house owner undergoes. The strict headmistress of the boarding house suddenly becomes weak, lost, and at the same time free from the social role she has had to play for the past years. It is impossible to put into words the myriad of emotions that flit through the character’s body during her final monologue. The genius of Ewa Wisniewska, who plays Mrs. Appleyard, makes all we have to do be to watch and listen.

Gabriela Musała (Wife of Colonel Fitzhubert), Piotr Kramer (Michel Fitzhubert), Ifi Ude (Maid Betty), Adam Szczyszczaj (Pastor), Wiesłau Cichy (Colonel Fitzhubert). Foto: Magda Hueckel/Arkiwum Artystyczne Teatru.

Truth is a bad habit of thought

The entire performance plays out between the precisely dissected motivations of actions and events and the world order overriding them. However, in order to free the viewer from deciding which type of theater, incarnational or critical Brechtian, is the binding rule for understanding what is happening on stage, the events of the picnic are framed in a reconstructive frame. It appears through the character of Albert Fitzhubert, Michel Fitzhubert’s son, who is absent from the novel. In the play’s opening monologue, Albert presents himself as a worthy successor to his father, who, in fulfilling his filial duty, “multiplied his fortune.” However, in contrast to his parent, he is a highly reflective person and is tormented by the question of whether there is something more, some secret, behind his life consisting of mere successes? Inquisitiveness prompts Albert to travel to Australia, where he first hears the story of the missing boarding school girls. Following this lead, he decides to solve the mystery, which he accomplishes by organizing a great reconstruction of past events, which for us viewers becomes a performance. All the spoken words and events thus become only a certain intellectual speculation, on the one hand underpinned by the emotion-based attraction of uncovering the mystery, on the other hand by the rational mode of inquiring into the truth. However, the mystery of the disappearance of the boarders at the Hanging Rock represents a false trail. Over the years, readers and viewers of Picnic have tried to explain the cause of this tragedy by reaching for countless tools of humanistic reflection on the narratives we produce to capture the reality around us. The extraordinary popularity of the cinematic and literary story of the disappearance of the girls from Mrs. Appleyard’s boarding house was based on this tantalizing mystery. Meanwhile, the drama boldly exposes the false direction of such a search. It turns out that the mystery of the disappearance of the girls hides a much deeper secret. In fact, we can see this already at the beginning of the play, when Albert notes with concern that, in the perfect line of his father’s life, “yawns an abyss of mystery.” To uncover it, however, one has to go to the other side of the mirror and, instead of solving the mystery, see what lies behind it. And there is a lot hiding.

Gabriela Musała (Wife of Colonel Fitzhubert), Ewa Wiśniewska (Mrs. Appleyard). Foto: Magda Hueckel/Arkiwum Artystyczne Teatru.

Albert Fitzhubert, however, does not get to the bottom of the mystery. For in his investigation he is unable to go beyond the questions that mark the horizon of possible answers known to him/us. Answers that guarantee the shape of our safe, tame world. A perfect embodiment of such an attitude is in the play the scene of the pastor’s examination of Irma to check whether the girl was raped. When it turns out that nothing of the sort happened, the Pastor’s concern grows. The abduction or attack on a woman, without sexual overtones, does not allow one to find the desired explanation on moral grounds. Evil and awe-inspiring mystery creeps into the space of the world. For mystery appears wherever we are afraid of discovering the truth. This fear, on the other hand, is a consequence of a murmured past, while in the dramaturgical version of “Picnic at Hanging Rock” it becomes the domain of those who have trouble sleeping.