Elwira Grossman

Transnational or bi-cultural? Challenges in reading post-1989 drama written ‘outside the nation’

ABSTRACT: 

By comparing and contrasting two plays written ‘outside the nation:’ Głowacki’s Antigone in New York (1992) and Grosvenor’s Cherry Blossom (2008), the paper explores the possibility of creating a transnational drama that is supposed to facilitate mutual understanding and intercultural experience.

Jan Kott pronounced Antigone in New York to be one of the three most important Polish plays in recent years, meaning the last few decades of the twentieth century.  And although, in my reading, the Polish version is hardly a clone of the English original, the texts’ differences have been mostly ignored by critics and scholars. Moreover, the mistaken assumption that the original play was written in English and its Polish ‘translation’ has been linguistically amended for the sake of the Polish audience has not been questioned either. This duality of perception indicates that the play has happily led a dual rather than a transnational existence and while it subverted one set of myths, it almost inadvertently perpetuated another due to the fact that the dramatic convention left the linguistic reality of migrants out of the text.

The challenge left aside by Głowacki was undertaken by the collaborative team who worked on the Scottish production of Cherry Blossom. The Traverse Theatre introduced it as ‘a bilingual performance with a Scottish and Polish cast, using a mixture of written, devised and verbatim text with a state of the art multimedia design to create a powerful production that explores the myths, ideas and realities of migration and identity in the 21^st century.’  The spectacle was performed in Scotland and Poland in the autumn of 2008 with the same script, cast and a mixture of the two languages. Yet, the reviews of the show focused on its different cultural aspects. The British press stressed the effort of breaking through the language barriers and the painfully confusing reality of such a process. The Polish press focused on the cultural differences and – unlike the British critics - did not treat the predictability of plot as a conscious design but a flaw. The emphasis on the linguistic issue was read as the main reason behind the play’s shallowness. So, who ‘got it right’ Poles or Brits?  

The questions that frame my discussion of both plays (and their bi-cultural perception) relate to

the phenomenon of transnational writing which escapes an easy definition in terms of nationality, linguistic belonging or a mono-cultural practice. What frame of cultural reference should we apply when reading a mobile/travelling wor(l)d?  What/who shapes the set of assessment criteria for artistic products of transcultural idioms?  How can such idioms be deciphered, if true ‘intercultural readers’ are – in most cases – still a dream only?  I shall address these and other questions when discussing the plays’ reception, the critics’ voices and the experience of both texts in my pedagogical practice.

Stepek Lecturer in Polish Studies

Comparative Literature Programme Director

SMLC – University of Glasgow

Hetherington Bldg

Bute Gardens

Glasgow G12 8RS

e-mail: elwira.grossman@glasgow.ac.uk