CORE OF DARKNESS directed by Paweł Łysak

Premiere 18 June 2021 Powszechny Theatre in Warsaw

Before the premiere, I spoke to Paweł Sztarbowski, the playwright of the production

Tomasz Ostrowski: "Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness was first published in its entirety in 1902. Despite the long perspective of time, the themes of this novel are still relevant, which is confirmed by successive reissues and stagings on domestic and foreign theatrical stages. The novel has also been adapted into a film. The book deals with the barbaric colonial conquest of Africa, in this case the Belgian Congo, where Joseph Conrad stayed in 1980. The book 'King Leopold's Ghost' also deals with the terror in colonial Congo, the murder of many millions of people. When preparing the play's dramaturgy, you must have drawn on other sources and inspirations?

Paweł Sztarbowski:  Yes, there were a lot of these contexts. Paweł Łysak and I prepared for this work for over a year. We read and watched practically everything and, as it usually happens in theatrical work, we discarded everything and searched for our own interpretation track. Joseph Conrad himself, and especially Heart of Darkness, are still extremely popular. It seems to me that this author is even experiencing a renaissance. Perhaps this is influenced by the Conrad Festival, which takes place every year in Krakow, where guests are invited and new translations are commissioned. We are currently using Magda Heydel's translation, which is strong, contemporary and linguistically extremely beautiful. An important impulse for us to deal with Heart of Darkness was the biography of Conrad written by Maya Jasanoff - Joseph Conrad and the Birth of the Global World, hailed by the New York Times as the most important book of 2017. It shows - and this was a big inspiration for us - a young boy, Joseph Konrad Korzeniowski, who uproots himself somewhere from provincial Poland, or even from the territory of today's Ukraine, goes to Marseille dreaming of becoming a sailor, of discovering the white spots that still remain on maps, including Africa and various corners of the world. He dreams of sailing on sailing ships. He associates it with a romantic adventure. But unfortunately, as Jasanoff writes, this was already the end of the age of sailing ships. The world was moving on to steamers, which were much more comfortable, faster and easier to manoeuvre. At the same time, the kind of romanticism, the spirit of adventure that was associated with sailing, with being on the high seas, with sailing skills, was becoming a thing of the past. All that matters is business, profit. Joseph Conrad describes just this in his work, this change. Suddenly, before his eyes, the world begins to change in an abrupt way. This seemingly minor change in the way we travel, new ways of communicating, makes the world start to shrink. This global perspective slowly becomes the prevailing perspective.
The journey to Africa was a unique experience for Conrad. He later described it in "Heart of Darkness" and "The Outpost of Progress". He could not find work on any sea vessel. He ended up on the Congo River because a Belgian trading company was looking for an experienced captain. He went there as an experienced seaman who had sailed to Singapore, Sydney, America, on long-distance sea voyages on sailing ships. And suddenly he finds himself on this river and sees instead of a decent ship some tin can, a pile of scrap metal. The steamer he was to sail on was called the Roi des Belges. He was terribly disappointed. At one point he began to fall ill and barely escaped with his life. And at the same time he became a witness to violence and genocide. At the time, the word may not have been used yet, but reading 'Heart of Darkness' we have no doubt that he has no illusions about the nature of the conquest of the Congo under Leopold II, King of the Belgians. "Heart of Darkness" is an empathetic and ethical response to what he saw in the Congo.

"THE SPIRIT OF KING LEOPOLD" by Adam Hochschild in 1999 is a book, a reportage about the genocide in the Congo, the merciless farm of the Belgian King Leopold II. The colonisers took entire villages captive. They used them bestially in hard labour and at the same time amused themselves by shooting people as if they were animals. When they were ordered to keep a record of the cartridges used, in order to confirm their legitimate use e.g. for defence against rebels, they ordered that each victim's right hand be cut off. Sometimes these hands were cut off just to keep the number of bullets in line. We saw a scene referring to these events during the media rehearsal.

You recognise this well, because indeed Adam Hochschild's books 'King Leopold's Ghost' and Sven Lindqvist's 'Exterminate all these cattle' were areas of inspiration for us. Also important to me at the stage of writing the adaptation was the bandied book 'Congo. The Story of a Ruined Country' by David van Revbrock. Based on Heart of Darkness, we sometimes add small contexts, as well as our own authorial comments, in order to highlight the themes of the work, to embed them also in our experience, to show that Kurtz is not some fictional character, but is the personification of the system in which we live. In this sense, each of us, whether we want it or not, has this gene of conquest, of race, of competition written into us.
'Heart of Darkness' is a very interesting piece when it comes to narration. We have two narrators here and in our performance we follow this very faithfully. The first narrator is an external narrator. He tells us that he is sitting here on a yacht at the mouth of the Thames and one of his companions, Marlow, who is a sailor, tells us about one of his adventures. This narrator sort of triggers the other narrator - Marlow. He sometimes comments ironically on his story, interrupts it. Joseph Conrad cleverly masks himself behind the backs of these narrators.

In our performance, the first narrator is played by Oksana Cherkashina, who is precisely the ironic and critical commentator of this whole Marlow story. She is the one who narrates the genocide. She looks at the text from today's perspective, noting Conrad's dislike of women, racism, colloquialist schemes.

What Conrad's contemporaries are reproaching him for.

Exactly. We were inspired by the character of Oksana Cherkashina by the aforementioned Maya Jasanoff, who, in the introduction to her biography of Conrad, also writes about her distance from and rage at this author, at the language he sometimes uses. And on the other hand, she appreciates how perceptively he noticed things that others did not. So this problematic nature of 'Heart of Darkness' is also an important theme for us. It seems to me that it is impossible to simply stage this work. Przemysław Czapliński wrote of Heart of Darkness that it is a dangerous masterpiece. And there is something in that, on the one hand it is extraordinary literature, wonderful, beautiful language that seduces the reader, and on the other hand, unfortunately, this beautiful language reproduces many stereotypes of the time, such as the description of the inhabitants of Africa, evidently racist today. Already in the 1970s, Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian writer, wrote about this. An excerpt from his text 'The Image of Africa' is also included in our performance in Mamadou Go Ba's monologue.
The second narrator, Marlow, in our production is played by Michał Czachor. Thus, one could say that following Conrad's work, we are not staging Heart of Darkness, but telling it through these two narrators. We build the story within the story, we create a network of brackets, but only to highlight certain themes and to show that Kurtz is not some man conquering Africa, but the Kurtz gene is in each of us. Kurtz is not a living man, but a voice, an idea, bringing together the logic of all of Western modernity, colonialism, capitalism, conquest and the programming of us all to participate in the race.
Conrad came up with it as a sailor's storytelling. But a very specific storytelling. He uses the phrase "misty halo", which we even laugh at a little in the play, but also take very seriously. "The 'misty halo' of the story. So it's not about a mere anecdote, but about creating a certain kind of atmosphere, an impression, in the senses of the listener and in their brain. For us, the primary tools for producing this misty halo are the headphones and the entire phonosphere. This is a story very much based on sound. We decided that we are not going to build a river Congo on stage, a Roi des Belges ship, that it would be a terrible misrepresentation, like trying to make it about banks or credit. That's why the sound atmosphere is the most important thing in our show. Sometimes you can even close your eyes and let these sounds affect your imagination. We don't really have a set design. The viewer's imagination is only helped by beautiful lighting and video elements, but they don't create an illusion either.

Speaking of 'Heart of Darkness', it is impossible to omit the person of Kurtz, an agent of a London trading company, a ruthless dictator extracting ivory and other valuable materials and raw materials in a bestial manner. A symbol of his cruelty was the fence built around his hut with stakes on which he placed the heads of rebelling indigenous villagers. Recognised as an outstanding person, noted for his writing and painting skills, Kurtz was a great speaker and was considered a genius in colonial Africa. Such gifted geniuses, populist speakers, history has recorded many. They have led to the extermination of populations in many parts of the world.

Conrad writes of Kurtz that Kurtz was little more than a voice. Several times this phrase falls. We took it very much to heart. There is no actor in our production who plays the character of Kurtz. We felt that even the best actor could not create this character before our eyes, who, after all, only speaks a few sentences in the novel itself. By contrast, for almost the entirety of the piece, everyone talks about Kurtz. From the beginning, in fact, Marlow wonders, who is this Kurtz? What does he look like? What is he creating? Is he a painter who writes for newspapers? Or just a writer who paints pictures and listens to music? Some kind of extraordinary humanist? Kurtz's persona is shrouded in mystery and is propagandistically created. We learn gradually that he is a genocidist. The whole of 'Heart of Darkness' shows how absurdly this balloon called 'Kurtz' is pumped up by everyone. Unfortunately, this also rhymes with contemporary political reality. After all, we are the ones pumping up these propaganda tubes of our leaders. Those populists who seduce the crowds with their beautiful speech. We comment on their every gesture, we regard them as great strategists, we take seriously statements that perhaps would have been better kept quiet. Of course, Marlow also somehow becomes infected, becomes marked by this Kurtz gene.

At certain points, he even masks Kurtz to Kurtz's fiancée or the trading company, for example.

Yes, he himself builds Kurtz's position on this lie, he wants to sustain it. And it seems to me that there is an element that rhymes very much also with our reality, and in general with any kind of reality based on propaganda, on populism, on bending reality in the narrative about this reality. Our reality is built on lies.

This is despite Marlow finding a note in Kurtz's notes saying "Cull these cattle".

Yes, this is the aftermath of his report, according to Marlow. He probably didn't take the time to delete this note. The report was written about how it was the white man who carried the great mission of civilisation to Africa. 'Cull all these cattle' in some translations appears as 'Exterminate all these cattle'. It is one of the most famous sentences in the entire history of literature. A cautionary phrase, valid in all times. It is interesting that in virtually all times this need to exterminate suddenly appears. The need to eliminate certain individuals from society. I'm not saying to kill them outright, but, for example, to "create free zones from these individuals", or "send them to Madagascar", say they carry parasites", "slaughter the pack", and so on and so forth. We know plenty of this from our contemporary times as well. That is why in Heart of Darkness, on the one hand, we are talking about the human monster that murdered people in the Congo, and on the other hand, there is no doubt that we are talking about our here and now.

It is estimated that between eight and several million people died as a result of the brutality of the Belgian colonisers in the Congo. To this day, Belgium has not attempted to account for these events.

Yes, I was somehow very surprised recently during the events in the United States, after the death of the black man George Floyd and the activity of the Black Lives Matter movement, that in newsreels from Belgium we saw monuments to King Leopold being drenched in red paint. I was very surprised that there are still monuments to King Leopold responsible for the genocide in Belgium at all. It is a bit like there are still monuments to Hitler standing in Germany. I understand that there is a problem of accountability here. It is not only about Belgium. Europe in general has a problem settling accounts with colonialism. Poland has a problem coming to terms with its colonialism in the eastern borderlands of the former Republic. I have the feeling that we are all operating in the realm of a monstrous hypocrisy, that after all the torch of civilisation was carried. But we somehow easily forget that it was not carried in the name of civilisation, but in the name of greed, profit, exploitation of people and nature. Conrad had no illusions. He writes in Heart of Darkness: "The whole of Europe contributed to the creation of Kurtz". In other words: all of Europe is built on violence and lies.

Despite the passage of time, colonialism has not died and in various forms continues. Today, the practice consists, among other things, of precious territories being taken over not by states but by corporations. They lead to the impoverishment of the local population, slave labour in their mines and the destruction of the natural environment. Reports indicate that 62 countries are affected by landrabbing, of which almost half of the appropriated land is in Africa.

This kind of colonialism, especially in the Congo, is still very visible and leads to low-paid, illegal work. Children in Congolese mines are involved in the extraction of rare metals. We do not deal with the theme of the modern Congo. We simply felt that our knowledge of it was too limited, that we were not in a position to research it properly. We do not want to pretend to be experts on the African situation, because we simply are not. Our story, like Conrad's, takes place in the centre of Europe, at the mouth of the Thames, or perhaps the Vistula...

We are dealing with modern methods of colonialism.

It is sometimes said that Joseph Conrad, in Heart of Darkness, foreshadowed the entire 20th century, its violence, its totalitarianisms. And as we can see, he also foreshadowed the 21st century, with its increasing destruction and exploitation of nature, with the threatened climate catastrophe associated with this exploitation. This journey to the end of the human experience that is 'Heart of Darkness', which cost the author himself almost his life, can be read in very different ways. For us, an ecocritical perspective was also important. The way Conrad describes nature, the plants, the jungle, the river, the giant trees is unparalleled in classical literature. These are not mere descriptions of nature.

The respect and reverence for nature is evident here.

He has managed to capture in this narrative that the human being is just a dot, a tiny, insignificant element, at the moment he is in this abyss of the jungle.

In 2019, on the occasion of the launch of 'Damascus 2045', we talked about the international project 'Atlas of Change. New geographies for an intercultural Europe'. The message of this project was brilliantly integrated into the earlier premiere: "How to save the world on a small stage", but also the current premiere of "Heart of Darkness".

For several years now, global themes have been of particular interest to us at the Teatr Powszechny. This is also reflected in the acting ensemble of our theatre. As far as "Heart of Darkness" is concerned, Paweł Łysak and I are really treating it as a continuation of our work on "How to Save the World on a Small Stage". That show ended with a reading of the Climate Report and an apocalyptic vision. The main thing that interested us in Heart of Darkness was the anxiety about the future, about what the future of the planet and the human species will look like. Will we continue down the path of exploitation and degradation of the planet? But will we come to our senses?

"Heart of Darkness" provides strong material to describe this state of emergency on a global scale. Precisely through the character of Kurtz. Through the character of this greedy, irrepressible monster who is able to murder people, to destroy nature. It is said there that he was even able to dig underground to extract ivory fossils. And this Kurtz seems to be a figure describing today's greedy capitalism and modern corporations. And this is not about such a banal translation. That's what we wanted to avoid in the play. We are more creating a kind of metaphorical story, but these two themes: the theme of colonisation and the ecological theme were the most important for us.

Is there a positive emphasis?

It seems to me that the very fact that we are dealing with anxiety about the future is positive. To look at this cruelty, but precisely to consider whether another world is possible at all. Can we build alternative narratives, create new visions of the world. Art gives us the tools to do this.

Perhaps a pandemic situation will bring reflexion and remembrance to the world?

The pandemic situation highlighted a certain crisis that we had been in for years and of which, rushing around like these rats in a reel, we did not realise. We had no time to stop and look around, that we were rushing somewhere, swimming, conquering something, not knowing ourselves in which direction it was all going. The destruction of the planet, the exploitation of people, the building of fences on borders, social inequalities, money treated almost like an animistic deity, the pressure of constant competition. The modern world really isn't much different from Kurtz's outpost. Only what is inconvenient is hidden under a layer of propaganda and pretty pictures. So maybe the pandemic will bring some sort of reassurance. Or maybe it won't. We'll see.

Thank you so much for the conversation.

Thank you.

 

CORE OF DARKNESS

CREATIVES:
directing – Paweł Łysak
dramaturgy – Paweł Sztarbowski
music – Dominik Strycharski
Light Direction: Jacqueline Sobiszewski
sound engineer – Kuba Sosulski
video projections – Karol Rakowski
scenographic consultation – Robert Rumas
stage manager - Barbara Sadowska

CAST:
Michał Czachor
Oksana Czerkaszyna
Mamadou Góo Bâ
Oskar Stoczyński