ALMOST exactly a year ago, a Polish immigrant to Canada died in Vancouver airport after being tackled by police using taser guns. Robert Dziekanski had become agitated after taking more than ten hours to clear immigration procedures.
Footage of his final minutes was filmed by a bystander on his mobile phone and posted on YouTube, sparking worldwide outrage. It is not known why Dziekanski failed to move through the system in the way that most people do, but eventually anxiety, exh
austion and the inability to make himself understood overwhelmed him. Minutes later he was dead.
In all the multitextured stories of Polish migration all over the world, Dziekanski’s stands out as one of the most tragic. It stood out to playwright Catherine Grosvenor and director Lorne Campbell, engaged to produce a bilingual piece of theatre for the Traverse about Polish migration, which reaches the stage this week after many months in the making.
Cherry Blossom is Grosvenor’s second play for the Traverse, following her debut One Day All This Will Come to Nothing in 2005. It is an ambitious co-production with acclaimed Polish repertory company Teatr Polski Bydgoszcz, which will involve all four actors (two Poles, two Scots), two languages, and the work of leading video artists Mark Grimmer and Leo Warner.
All the actors – John Kazek, Sandy Grierson, and Marta Scislowicz and Malgorzata Trofimiuk of Teatr Polski – will perform in both Polish and English, aiming to create a piece which will be understood (albeit with different nuances) by English-speaking, Polish-speaking and bilingual audiences. It will open in Edinburgh then travel to Bydgoszcz and Warsaw.
“One of the touchstones of the project was doing something we don’t entirely know how to do,” says Campbell. “The Traverse is about new writing but this is a new way of writing a play, the directorial process is very different for me, it’s the first time that Fifty-Nine Productions [Grimmer & Warner] have designed a set. We’ve posed a very big technical challenge for the actors and they’ve coped with it brilliantly and bravely.”
Dziekanski’s tragic story is only one aspect of the play, which has grown from several months of research about migration in both Scotland and Poland. Some 86,000 Poles are believed to have settled here since Poland was admitted to the EU four years ago, in addition to those who were already here, marooned in the UK after the war or refugees from the Communist Bloc.
“There is an amazing spectrum of Polish people out there,” says Grosvenor. “We talked to journalists, shopkeepers, factory workers, architects. We all have images of who we think a Polish migrant is, the pretty woman working in the coffee shop, or the man in the factory. One of the things we realised as we started talking to people, is it’s much richer than that. We talked to women who work in coffee shops but also people in arts organisations, website designers, priests, politicians, architects who work as architects, social workers who work as barmaids.”
Campbell realised early on that language would be a crucial theme. “Language is a huge barrier. Until you acquire a sufficient degree of language you are robbed of your personality, your identity and your skills. Then there comes a magic moment of osmosis when your language catches up with your personality and skills.
We met some people who have achieved remarkable things, who arrived with nothing, no English, no money, no contacts, no social capital, and within unbelievably small amounts of time they have businesses and houses and mortgages and kids doing well at school.”
“But there are both sides,” Grosvenor adds. “We talked to a woman who works at the Cowgate Centre, which is the most acute of the homeless hostels [in Edinburgh], and they have a rolling Polish population there. It’s much easier to yield to addictions if you are a long way from your home and your family.”
Grosvenor, who spent four months living in Poland thanks to a grant from the Scottish Arts Council, said that the time gave her a valuable insight into why young people leave. “It’s not a case of, ‘I have to leave, I’m going to starve to death,’ but, ‘I have to leave because I can earn 4-5 times what I can earn at home,’ and that’s in a bar job. We spoke to doctors and anaesthetists working behind bars, that says something very profound about a reason for leaving.”
They met doctors who work in Scotland in their summer holidays to top up their wages, parents who migrate temporarily to fund their kids through university and professionals in Poland who are furious that the people they train are making up our shortfall. They also saw a situation which is changing. The growing economy in Poland means that more young people have reason to stay, and the country is working hard to win back its talented young people.
The research left Grosvenor with “enough material for 15 plays about Poland” which was gradually whittled down to a single story: Grazyna Antkiewicz, who leaves her two teenage children to come to Scotland to save money to send her elder daughter to university.
“She arrives with very little English,” Grosvenor says, “so it’s her struggle to get through, to be treated the way she wants to be treated, to create a life for herself which is the life she wants. My time in Poland was invaluable in terms of background experience. I don’t think I would have dared to create a Polish family as the main characters if I hadn’t spent time there meeting Polish families.”
Robert Dziekanski’s story is the “counterpoint” to Grazyna’s. His death, which is still being investigated, seemed to have been the product of a catalogue of failures, exacerbated by stress and the language barrier. Dziekanski was a 40-year-old construction worker who was travelling to join his mother in British Columbia, he had never flown before and spoke no English.
Grosvenor says: “He arrived on a plane with a ticket, a passport, a visa and ten hours later he was a violent, drunk ‘Russian’ man who ‘may be on drugs’ and gets tasered. When you know the story, you see that he is a profoundly disorientated, terrified Polish man who is neither drunk nor on drugs, hasn’t harmed anybody or attempted to harm anybody.”
It is another story in which the issue of language is crucial. Campbell was determined from the start that Cherry Blossom would “play with ideas of language and communication”. “Questions of how you read somebody or understand are built into the structure of the piece. All four actors will play all the principal characters at different moments. Who is speaking which language at which time won’t always be naturalistic. We’re trying all the time to pose these questions: what do you understand? what do you miss in nuance?”
Added to this is the further “language” of video. Fifty-Nine, whose work has featured in shows such as Black Watch and Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray and whose future assignments include Dr Atomic at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, are leading innovators in the use of video in theatre.
Campbell says: “From a purely aesthetic sense, video is an odd medium to use in theatre because it’s simultaneously more and less real than anything else. But that speaks right to the heart of what this play is trying to be about, how your place can change in a heartbeat, who these people are, and why they are who they are in certain moments.”
• Cherry Blossom is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh until 11 October. Tel: 0131-228 1404 or visit
www.traverse.co.ukPOLE ACTSOctober 2006: Polish Art Scotland is founded by Gemma Bentley to promote Polish visual art, motivated by the number of Polish residents who “had Fine Arts degrees but were working a cleaners”.
June 2007: Polish-Scottish theatre group Gappad release their sell-out first show RE-ID, at The Tron theatre in Glasgow.
August 2007: Polish Art Scotland launches exhibitions We are Working and I don’t want to talk about Communism.
Sept 2007: Out of The Blue in Edinburgh exhibits work by 12 Polish émigré artists inspired by their adopted home.
February-March 2008: Edinburgh’s Collective Gallery runs a Polish Season.
July 2008: Craigmillar Arts runs It’s My Place, a Scottish-Polish exhibition.
August 2008: Acclaimed theatre company TR Warszawa brings Sarah Kane’s 4.48 psychosis to The Edinburgh International Festival.
September 2008: Co-produced by The Traverse and Teatr Polski in Bydgoszcz, Cherry Blossom opens.
The full article contains 1464 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
