Review of the play “Austerlitz” by Krystian Lupa at the Vilnius Youth Theater

A play based on the German novel by W. G. Sebald, the most complex and most relevant writer of the late 20th century, is being staged in Vilnius. It was directed by Polish director Krystian Lupa, whose performances are often called the ethical justification of theatre. Tells Alla Shenderova.

Let’s say you’re looking at photographs. Architecture, landscapes, unfamiliar faces. Ordinary black and white photographs cause inexplicable anxiety, you return to them again. Only notes in the margins can clarify it. Such “marks” can be called the novels of Sebald, who was born in 1944 in Bavaria and died in a car accident in 2001, the year his books were nominated for the Nobel Prize.

At the age of 20, philology student Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald witnessed the trials of employees of Auschwitz and Treblinka. He was shocked not only by the facts, but also by the enthusiasm with which the Germans, while reviving their country, simultaneously sought to suppress the memory of the past. Soon Sebald abandoned his triple name, shortening it to the letters V.G., moved to England, taught literature, wrote poetry and prose, and traveled endlessly.

“In the second half of the 60s, partly for educational purposes, partly for other, sometimes not entirely clearly understood, purposes, I repeatedly traveled from England to Belgium. On one of these trips, for some reason I felt uneasy…” – this is how the novel “Austerlitz” begins, which arose from the desire to get rid of that cloudy, spasmodic sickness that the author gave to his hero, whose name the book is named after.

The same age as Sebald, Christian Lupa was born in Poland and did not experience such shocks in his youth. In his performances, he equally tirelessly explores the history of the twentieth century. The director turns the novel, written in the first person, into a dialogue between the Author (the famous Valentinas Masalskis) and his hero Austerlitz, who, having first glimpsed at the station in Antwerp, becomes the Author’s friend and guide to those “cellars of memory” that, under the pressure of circumstances, are repressed and forgotten – and Author and hero.

A random guy, who never parted with his camera (as Sebald himself never parted with in reality), tells the Author his story: how he became aware of himself in Wales, in the foster family of a pastor whose wife fell ill and the boy was sent to a boarding school. Only at the final exam did he learn that his name was not David Smith, but Jacques Austerlitz. By that time, the pastor’s wife had died, and he himself was passing into other worlds in the hospital – Jacques never learned the story of his adoption. He entered Oxford and became an architectural historian. He retired early, settled in London and, overcome by a strange nervous illness, burned everything he had written.

Meetings between the Author and the hero take place from the 1960s to 2001, flashbacks date back to the late 1930s. But Austerlitz, as in the novel, looks surprisingly young: except that the cap of his curls – white in the novel and red in the play – is replaced by a bare skull in the actor Sergeyus Ivanovas. A shabby leather backpack, as the Author notes, gives the hero a resemblance to the philosopher Wittgenstein, good-quality boots on bare feet and some kind of special, uncertain gait – weakness in the legs, first experienced at a train station in Belgium by Sebald himself – Lupa made all this part of the image of Austerlitz . The actor “put it on” so naturally that someone who has not read the novel will not suspect that the image is constructed from such details, gleaned from the book.

The signature red frame framing the portal and becoming Lupa’s “autograph”, repeated from performance to performance; a translucent curtain, sometimes turning into a projection screen, sometimes disappearing altogether; the dilapidated luxury of a station waiting room, an ascetic room in London and a hotel in Marienbad, and finally, a room in Prague where the hero remembers himself as a four-year-old – the scenes are transformed with the help of video projections by Mikas Žukauskas and scenography invented by the director himself. Every detail is important here, just like in dreams or horror films.

The bright green dress of Austerlitz’s girlfriend haunts both him and the audience until the ghost of his mother appears on the stage, wearing a similar dress, but of a different shade. The melancholy experienced by the hero, brought by his friend to Marienbad, will be visualized with the help of dreamlike beautiful frames from Alain Resnais’s film “Last Year at Marienbad”, over which unclear shadows will creep until the hero discerns in them his mother, father and his little self: in 1938, a year before the occupation of Prague, the three of them were there.

Leaving real horrors outside the narrative, Sebald called his book an “elegy in prose.” We are talking, of course, about the Second World War, concentration camps and the Holocaust, but the viewer will not understand this immediately. That’s why Sebald felt unwell at the station in Antwerp, because nearby is Fort Breendonk, which the Nazis turned into a camp. Something like a figure writhing in agony will flash on the screen and immediately disappear. The screen here generally complements and clarifies reality: the desk in Austerlitz’s shabby room is empty, only photographs lie on it. But his desk on screen is covered with stacks of books.

Modern interactivity (characters constantly descend and wander around the hall), as well as the twists and turns and recognition characteristic of antiquity – all this is in the play. Although today’s theater has long forgotten how this is done. This is how, for example, Austerlitz should react, having finally obtained the address of the Prague apartment where his mother, father and their friend Vera lived before the war. He had no idea about its existence until he saw the walls corroded by fungus and an old woman who exclaimed: “Jacques?!” In reality, the actor sees only a projection of the wall and the actress Danute Kuodyte, babbling in French. Then he silently freezes and, as if from dizziness, bows his head towards the portal. A fragment of Bach’s “Mass” doesn’t even sound, but just flickers—as childhood memories and forgotten Czech speech flash through the hero. Catharsis – as if even a slightly indecent word today – is right there.

“History only comes to life at the moment when we start thinking about it,” says Christian Lupa in an interview. Therefore, the past, future and present can occur in parallel. Jacques’s mother, father, childhood – all this is happening now, while he remembers it. But then the crunching of the joints of a prisoner suspended by the arms (in this novel, as in other essays, Sebald cites the memories of Jacques Améry, who went through Breendonk and Auschwitz) is happening now. The world is beautiful and monstrous. The shadows of victims and tormentors come to life and again find themselves in some kind of, as Sebald repeated, sickening proximity.

Krystian Lupa visualizes all this at the Vilnius Youth Theater. 150 meters from the entrance to the theater there is a charming medieval passage. If the newspaper format allowed, it would be worthwhile, as the writer Sebald did, to place his photo in the text. Almost immediately beyond this passage begins the ghetto, where 40 thousand Vilnius Jews were herded in 1941. By 1943, the issue with them was finally resolved.