ARTICLES: ZOFIA KALINSKA AT CUMBERNAULD

8/10/06

© MARK FISHER published in Scotland on Sunday

Quiz any drama student about Polish avant garde theatre and they'll give you two names in tones of awe-struck wonderment. The first is Jerzy Grotowski, a formative influence on Peter Brook and a director so obsessed with getting rid of extraneous details that he eventually did away with the audience and started working with his actors in private. The second is Tadeusz Kantor who developed a form of theatre more akin to visual art in which actors, props and text all carried equal weight.

Actor and director Zofia Kalinska knew them both. She was at university with Grotowski and later had to turn down his invitation to join his company because her daughter was only two at the time. In the case of Kantor she became a long-time colleague, appearing in legendary performances such as Dead Class which toured the world for many years after its creation in 1975.

Her several visits to the Edinburgh festival brought her further acclaim, not least for her own Fringe First-winning shows, Requiem for Kantor and Plaisirs d'Amour. With such a pedigree, Kalinska is not the first person you expect to find in the rehearsal studio of Cumbernauld Theatre, a venue which, for all its charms, has never been associated with the Eastern European avant garde.

But here she is with Cumbernauld's recently installed artistic director Ed Robson, looking back on her days as the missing link between two of the world's greatest directors. "Grotowski wanted me to come to his first theatre, 13 Rows, in Opole, but I couldn't because it was impossible to take my daughter with me," she says. "He was a bit angry with me, but years later I met him and said, 'I wonder what it would have been like to work with you.' He said, 'Fortunately, you met Kantor,' which was nice. But Kantor hated him. He said Grotowski had stolen his idea of 'poor theatre'. It was impossible to mention the name of Grotowski in front of Kantor. He would fly into a rage."

No such artistic tantrums here where Kalinska has travelled from her home in a similar-sounding new town outside Cracow to collaborate with Robson on a performance inspired by Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Working with four actors, including Sandy Grierson and Itaxo Moreno, the two directors are taking a sideways look at the story of the man blessed with eternal youth while his portrait gets old in the attic. Cumbernauld, says Robson, is exactly the sort of place where we should be able to find The Privately Personal Lives of Dorian Gray.

"I want to return to a situation where we're producing two or three really interesting projects that no one else would think of doing," he says. "We can do that because we're on the periphery. In a geographical sense, we're on the periphery of the Central Belt and in an artistic sense, we're on the periphery of Scottish theatre. Everyone's heard of us but they're not that sure what the work's always about. That allows us to make some really interesting projects that are on the edge of things."

Kalinska is quick to point out that they're not being wilfully obscure, merely approaching their work in an open and questioning way. "We want to make this show simple," she says. "It's not so completely sophisticated and different that people can't understand it. It will be emotional so people will understand it. I want to make something new that will amaze myself."

Quite how the show will turn out is hard to say, not least because it's a bit of an adventure for the directors themselves. They're taking four characters from Wilde's book, but all dialogue will be their own, as will be the story which speculates about what would have happened if Dorian Gray had been differently brought up. "We are inspired by Dorian Gray and the idea of eternal beauty," she says. "Now it is very in fashion that people have operations: they want to be young forever. We're trying to make a morality play that says you can't have eternal beauty without becoming inhuman."

What Kalinska brings to the performance, says Robson, is a way of developing a deep psychological awareness of character in the actors. "She brings a wealth of knowledge and a richness of experience that's rare in any artist," he says. "She has an ability to work with actors on a really significant level. We tend to think of improvisation in terms of Who's Line is it Anyway?, but for Zofia it's not about developing material, but about developing an emotional depth. The material emerges out of that."

The Privately Personal Lives of Dorian Gray, Cumbernauld Theatre, October 12-14

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