Polish play Sonka’s director Aleksander Wegierko decided to stage the play at NSD because it was based on facts and talked about the brutal history of the Nazi regime, writes UK Banerjee
Sonka, presented recently by Aleksander Wegierko Drama Theater from Poland, at NSD’s Bharat Rang Mahotsav, recapitulates one of the most shameful chapters of Europe’s modern history: using also a most ingenious form of theatre. While Sonka’s story takes place on the Polish-Belarusian border-land, and narrates a war-romance without any sentimentality — touching upon an episode from the war-ravaged Eastern Poland that its people would like best to forget — the actual play explores a quest for an entirely new dramatic form: the “theatre of memory”
During European Holocaust from 1941 to 1945, Jews were systematically murdered in one of the largest genocide in contemporary annals which was part of a broader aggregate of acts of oppression and killings of various ethnic and political groups: by the Nazi regime in Germany. A network of about 42,500 facilities in Germany and German-occupied territories were utilised to concentrate victims for slave-labour, mass murder, and other major human abuses. Over 200,000 people were estimated to have been Holocaust perpetrators, used to ‘exterminate’ around 2,000,000 victims.
In the play, a chance meeting between a well-known, director, Igor and an old Belarusian woman, Sonka, on a remote, rural road gives rise to the play’s story that becomes the subject of a new and hard-hitting performance. Sonka re-calls the world of Holocaust passing into oblivion, where the wounds are raw and the problems still unsolved.
Incidentally, “theatre of memory” owes its genesis to Giulio Camillo who identified the faculty of “intending” with the “practical intellect”: quite distinct from the “acting intellect” as well as from “the force of intelligence”, which is nothing but “ingenuity”. In Camillo’s Theatro, each image signifies intelligible things that cannot fall under the senses, but can only be imagined by the acting intellect. For instance, Igor becomes a confidante of the history of Sonka and transforms the old woman’s history into a “theatre of memory”: creating his own version of events.
In a visually-gripping theatre-scape, Sonka’s front-stage re-call of memories are fleshed out: both in the mid-stage (where Sonia, Sonka’s alter-ego, slowly dresses up her German military-lover) and in the back-stage (where video- images catch the facial play of her emotions). As though these were not enough, there are sitting characters on the right-stage (who sing and dance or just make up the mobs), as may be ordained by Sonka’s re-call. Igor interrupts the acting scene from time to time — as an inter-play between his practical intellect and the acting intellect — and have the re-call enacted: tempered by his ingenuity. For instance, he directly speaks to the audience — in English, not Polish — during the ignoble gang-rape scene of Sonia and explains that a mock-undressing of the hapless girl was crucial for credibility of the re-call and proceeds to re-enact the actual mob-scene.
In this audience-encounter, one also gets a glimpse of Jerzy Grotowsky (1933-99), Poland’s icon of ‘Poor Theatre’. According to him, through the actor’s action, his art — in which the living organism strives for higher motives — theatre provides an opportunity for what could be called “integration”: the discarding of masks; the revelation of real substance; and a totality of physical and mental reactions. This opportunity is used discretely in this play: with a full awareness of the responsibilities it involves. Almost as a therapeutic function, Sonka (while squatting, with legs dangling, on front-stage and gradually disrobing) accomplishes this act, but she can only do so through an encounter with the spectator — intimately, visibly, not hiding behind a camera-man, wardrobe mistress, stage designer, or make-up girl — in direct confrontation with him.
The last word must be the director’s: “Sonka is based on facts: great, but intimate; simple, but not easy; calm, but seething emotions; pacifist, yet brutal history. In the present social and political situation, this voice sounds incredibly current and fresh.”