The unabridged "Dziady" will open the Beijing People's Art Theater International Festival. (Photo/CNTV)
If an uncut version of Shakespeare's "Hamlet" can run four hours, why shouldn't Poland's signature play? The unabridged "Dziady" will open the Beijing People's Art Theater International Festival.
It may be an endurance event for audiences, but the poetic drama "Dziady" -- by Poland's most revered poet, Adam Mickiewicz -- is considered one of the great works of European Romanticism, up there with Goethe's "Faust".
Director Michal Zadara says he wants to offer his audience the luxury of hearing the entire play.
"Nobody has ever done the whole play because it's too long, and because it's about so many different things. So directors always make three hours, two hours, about one thing. And for me it's such a pity, because I want people to come to the theater to really get the play. And the whole play is very long and very challenging. And that was the intention of the author," said Michal Zadara, theater director.
The play consists of three acts. The first act, depicting the "feelings of 19th-Century people", was never finished. So it ends with a dead body sitting up from a body bag to tell the audience the author "didn't finish this bit."
For Act Two, Zadara uses the style of a horror film shot on a hand-held camera. At night, peasants are summoning ghosts to ensure them access to Heaven. Those who have never suffered, never done good deeds, or never returned another's love, do not achieve salvation after death, and remain stuck between the two worlds.
The third act is believed to be somewhat biographical, to the extent that it shows a man in love with a girl who later marries a rich duke. There, the similarity ends, however, as the protagonist of the story, Gustaw, takes his own life.
This part of the play was written in response to the poet's own depression, and is regarded as one of Poland's most beautiful love poems.
The word, "Dziady", brings together a wealth of different meanings in Polish, including a sticky plant that serves as a metaphor for how pain sticks and haunts after love is gone.
"It's the title of a ceremony where you call the spirits of your grandfathers and their grandfathers, of your grandmothers, of your forefathers. But it's also an insult if you call somebody dziad; it means they are old and are like this. But it's also a plant that will stick to your clothes, difficult to get off - it's also 'dziad'. Also one's grandfather, it's simply 'dziad'. So he picks the word that has very very very many different meanings. That is why the themes of the four plays that make up dziad are very different. But it's always about some mutation of this word," Zadara said.
