As a longtime fan of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), and never forgetting
the spell under which I fell on seeing Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu (1979) for the first time, together with the fact that I
am a somewhat dilettantish follower of contemporary Polish dramaturgy, the
anticipated appeal of Grzegorz Jarzyna’s Nosferatu
was greater than the apparent inaccessibility of Nosferatu in Polish with French surtitles playing in the Odeon
satellite theatre on the péripherique. And indeed it was worth every bit of the
effort to get there and sit through it.
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| Renfield in his cage |
The performance was spellbinding and in so
many ways reminds of the relationship between the cinema and theatre as it
thrived in Germany in the 1920s when Murnau made his silent film. Even
though his Nosferatu is closer to Bram
Stoker’s original with the inclusion of the secondary characters, Jarzyna makes
multiple references to the narrative silent cinema of Murnau’s time. Which is
to say, the performance was not necessarily cinematic, but it was in productive
relationship with previous visual examples of Stoker’s book. Perhaps the most
obvious and striking reference is in the use of the lighting to create multiple
scenes on a single stage with a single set. As day turns into night, the steel
cold light by which the vampire comes to life drenches the stage entrances and
exits. And when daylight returns, the diffuse lighting that provides the stage
for scientific and philosophical conversations softly illuminates the Harker’s
living room and van Helsing’s office. The morgue, the cemetery, and the perspex cage
at the front right of the stage that holds Renfield as he writhes in madness,
eating his insects and nurturing his connection to the mysterious force, are likewise
created as much by the sculpting of light as they are by the placement of the furniture
(the same used in all other locations) and the positioning of the characters
around it. This dramatic use of the lighting to command the mise-en-scène was also underscored by the fades to black at the end of
each brief scene, as if we were indeed watching a silent film. Simultaneously, the scenes mirrored the epistolary form of Bram Stoker's original, but without that mode of address.
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Jarzyna’s
production, that which made it somewhat trancelike to watch, was the
predominance of silence, movement without speech, a mysterious space carved in
the air by sound effects that were often no more than hinted at. While the
characters talked fast and animatedly when they spoke, there were many pauses and
spaces in the conversation. When the women entered their illicit communication with the vampire, whole scenes passed without a sound being
uttered. Into these spaces, even when physically absent, the vampire entered
and overtook the house which was the stage carved in harsh blue light. And when his spell drove
the characters wild, he breathed in the air between people in a room, stopping
their conversations, or distending them so that everything adjusted to his
presence. Again, Nosferatu himself was nowhere physically present. And so,
while Murnau used shadows and editing techniques to convince us of Nosferatu’s curse
(or seduction), Jarzyna uses light and a score that itself could have
accompanied a silent film. When the vampire eventually arrives to dinner, we hear menacing winds
blow through the trees, rats teeming the streets of the town outside, the threat of illness
and death made visible through sound. The spell, the irrational, and the
heightened arousal of Nosferatu crawl through the air, becoming visualized only
when dry ice consumes the stage and envelops Lucy and Mina as they are charmed,
impregnated, and violated by his apparent irresistible seduction.
Like the Herzog/Kinski vampire who, in one
of the most poignant moments of postwar European cinema, reminds us that “the
absence of love is the most abject pain” Jarzyna’s Nosferatu searches
throughout the play, for love. Really, in the end, this is all he wants. And though
he comes close — he has a similar kind of repulsive attraction to Kinski’s
Nosferatu, even for us — his disease, his unsociable habits and undead-ness make it
impossible. But our own desire for and identification with him makes his eventual disintegration
in the daylight, anything but a happy ending.
Ultimately, Jarzyna demonstrates that Bram Stoker’s novel is as relevant to our contemporary world as it was to that of late-Victorian England. His staging of the story raises (as did Stoker's book at the turn of
the 1900s) the most confrontational social issues, but within what for today is
a non-confrontational narrative. The book, and Jarzyna’s staging of
it extend between issues such as the power of female sexuality, through rape, adultery, AIDS, the
danger of our innermost sexual and spiritual desires to make the spell of Nosferatu a challenging pleasure.
All Images Courtesy of Théâtre de l'Odéon
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