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21 November 2009

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Polish Culture in the World Polish Cultural Institutes
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Jan Klata
languages: Polish  / English 
 

Theatre director and playwright, born in 1973.

Klata studied directing at the Warsaw Theatre Academy, then moved to the State Theatre School in Krakow. He assisted Jerzy Grzegorzewski with "La Boheme" after Stanisław Wyspiański in the Warsaw Teatr Studio (1995), Jerzy Jarocki with "Grzebanie (Burial)" after Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz in Krakow's Stary Teatr (1996) and Krystian Lupa with "Plłatonow Wiśniowy i Oliwkowy (Cherry and Olive Platonov)" after Anton Chekhov in the Krakow State Theatre School (1996).

Klata's first independent, professional staging was Nikolay Gogol's "The Government Inspector" in the Szaniawski Theatre in Wałbrzych in 2003. One of the most interesting debuts of recent years and one of the most attention-grabbing performances of the season, it moved the plot from Russia's 19th century province to communist Poland of the 1970s. This gloomy and at the same time funny, sneering and distinctly political staging focused on the moral decay of the Polish society of that time, but equally referred to the Polish realities of recent years. Klata used Walbrzych unemployed as extras and flashed photographs of post-1989 politicians, such as Lech Wałęsa and Andrzej Lepper.
"A real shock came with another scene added by the director, though", noted down Roman Pawłowski. "After the town folk had given bribes to Khlestakov, one of them, Dobczyński, calls on his son to say a poem. The boy, wearing a miner's hat, recites: "Who are you? - A little Pole". The naive, simple truths - love your country, give your life for it - sound like a most severe accusation in this hypocritical reality, especially that it is a child who accuses" ("Gazeta Wyborcza" 2003 no. 89).
One month after "The Government Inspector" Klata had another performance ready - "Uśmiech grejpruta (Grejprut's Smile)". It was based on his own text, a staging of which he had previously presented at a workshop during the 2002 Eurodrama Wrocław's Forum of Modern Drama. The play put on at the Teatr Polski in Wrocław, about a TV crew waiting in Rome for the moment of the Pope's death, exposed the world of the media and denounced the inner emptiness of young people who are cynical hostages of their careers. Like Klata's debut, this staging too grew out of his disagreement with the reality.
"First comes rebellion," says Klata. - "Defiance against the hypocritical reality, against all those supermarkets, sales, promotions and 'Las Ketchup', 'Tatu', against nonsense and falsehood. Young people look at things in a fresh, sometimes desperate, sometimes angry and malicious , yet valuable way ...Behind this anger there is despair, sadness, sorrow on the one hand and passion for change on the other" ("Słowo Polskie" of 18th April 2003).
In 2004 Klata put on André Gide's "Le caves du vatican" at Wrocław's Teatr Współczesny. Punctuated with references to the present times, this staging showed society to be superficial and to falsely profess its faith.

Klata's latest performance is "H" after William Shakespeare's "Hamlet". Made for Teatr Wybrzeze in Gdańsk, it is played inside the Gdańsk shipyard.
"When in the early 17th century Shakespeare wrote "something is rotten in the state of Denmark", he had his country, and not Denmark, on his mind. When I am reading it, I too think of my country. I was wondering where to locate Elsinor. It matters a lot what space you put it in", says Klata. "I went in the footsteps of that great man of the theatre, Stanłslaw Wyspiański, who wrote a fantastic study of Hamlet. He knew that space was essential in this drama. ... He wanted it to be a place where the spirit of the nation, society, history, or whatever we should call it, focuses. In his times it was indeed the Wawel compound. To me such a perfect place is the Gdansk shipyard with its Anna Walentynowicz overhead crane and its location close to the Three Crosses monument and to where the history of Europe and the world was made" ("Gazeta Wyborcza", Trójmiasto edition, 2nd July 2004)
Out of "Hamlet" Klata extracted the story of a generation: of the Prince of Denmark, Horatio, Laertes, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He examined the attitudes of young people at a time of personal or political crises, the symbolic choice of the location of the staging providing the obvious background of Poland's newest history.

Awards:
  • 2004: Award for directing at the 3rd Festival of Premieres in Bydgoszcz for "the attempt to develop a special language of the theatre" in the staging of André Gide's "Le caves du vatican" at Wrocław's Teatr Współczesny; Grand Prix ("Złamany Szlaban") at the 15th "No Frontiers" International Theatre Festival in Cieszyn for the staging of Nicolay Gogol's "The Government Inspector" at the Szaniawski Theatre in Walbrzych.
  • 2006: winner of "Polityka' s Passport" in the theatre category.

Author: Monika Mokrzycka-Pokora, November 2004.

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