Princess Dramas

Elfride Jelinek’s Princess Dramas directed by Michał Borzuch speaks neither of princesses nor of women, but about a wall or rather the powerlessness of humans to reach into the fullness of that potential called life. It speaks about the entrapment into a cocoon of emotional and intellectual dead ends with a single radical exit: a head in the oven. Five stories of repetition with small differences can, in this staging, be read as a story of one person or a story of one world, and the director-dramaturg duo have managed to achieve the almost impossible: they have chiselled a forest of symbols from Jelinek’s speech slates, and from this forest, familiar eyes are staring back at us. The stage landscape, defined with minimal scene elements, among them, a magnifying glass and a washing machine looming over head, the hypnotic dialogue partner of the awakened Sleeping Beauty; landscapes in which words don’t message only with meanings, but with their sonority, cleverly intertwined into a complete sound image; and finally acting, distinguished by exceptional technical precision and at the same time lightness, are thus only some of the characteristics of the performance that are responsible for the fact that we can imagine Princess Dramas also in the street, not just the stage.

Led by the director Michał Borczuch and the author of the adaptation and dramaturg Tomasz Śpiewak, the Polish-Slovenian theatre team and the acting ensemble of the Mladinsko Theatre have directed a piled mass of words and meanings into an intimist reading of female existence. The performance meticulously avoids loudness and boasting, socially critical excesses and feminist theses, which otherwise the text can easily spur. It places under the microscope the antagonism between the publicly accepted image and the concealed, private facet of human existence, it emphasises the inner confusion, entrapment into social patterns and structures, impermeability of the invisible walls between numbed existence and life that seems glittering and full. With this it turns to what the title insinuates – to the painting of princesses, who aren’t princesses, of girls constantly inhabited by death. [...] Anja Novak, Daša Doberšek, Maruša Oblak, Damjana Černe and Janja Majzelj successfully form the unease of the body and take on the linguistic outburst with precision, for the most part leaving to it a dislocated autonomous power which floods them and seizes them as an inner response to the public disposal of their images […].

Director Michał Borczuch and dramaturg Tomasz Śpiewak first conceived the notoriously difficult-to-stage Princess Dramas in a brutally honest dialogue with the acting ensemble of five actresses (Damjana Černe, Daša Doberšek, Anja Novak, Maruša Oblak, Janja Majzelj) along with Boris Kos. At last, a performance for almost an exclusively female cast, because – grand characters are reserved for male actors. Are women really less suitable and appropriate for theatre stagings? Jelinek deconstructs the fate and the role of a woman using famous icons, fairytale, literary and political characters – from Sleeping Beauty, Rosamunde to Sylvia Plath, Ingeborg Bachmann, Jackie Onassis – and deconstructs them into complicatedly 'readable' units. Jelinek’s text, particularly her bizarre stage instructions, her linguistic plains, is like a battle zone.  First of all between the director and her inventions, then between the actors and the difficult writing. It is certainly not easy to confront her 'installations', her verbal somersaults, as she continuously transplants words from the usual into foreign contexts, intertextuality is pronounced … Borczuch has daringly and very differently embarked upon the mission à la Jelinek. Among these forceful mythological icons and popular half-icons, the intriguing Polish team have focused on a single one, the one who is the source and to blame for everything – the author herself. In Rosamunde, she is in fact first-person and present. And the scene with Maruša Oblak as Jelinek in the front live and on the video in the bath tub is a splendid vivisection of Jelinek’s (self-)destructive attitude towards her environment and herself. Death is a Leitmotiv, the drive of the play, the trigger of it all. The stories of the writers and Snow White are connected. And not through the vomited apple of knowledge, but through the mirror.