Dramatic escape from no-man's land

Published on Sunday 27 May 2007 00:44

WHEN Agnieszka Bresler followed her sister to Coatbridge she couldn’t have expected a better welcome. In the summer of 2005, they revelled in being the only Polish girls in town. Taxi drivers would know them just by reputation and they were made to feel at home wherever they went.

But moving to Glasgow some months later, at a time when increasing numbers of Polish migrants were seeking their fortune in Scotland, she found attitudes had started to shift. Only the other week at Queen Street station, she and her sister were abused by a stranger who accused them of stealing his job and opening corner shops selling food he didn’t like. “I was terrified,” says the 22-year-old actress and director from near Gdansk in the north of Poland. “I think the attitude of Scottish people has changed because there are so many of us.”

What’s interesting about the current influx of workers from Eastern Europe, however, is the force of its impact on the Scottish cultural scene. The change is most visible in the Polish delicatessens and bars springing up in the big cities, but it’s also infiltrating places of entertainment. Throughout this month, for example, the Edinburgh Filmhouse has been offering weekly helpings of ‘Poland Through Animation’ and, in March, the capital’s Ceilidh Culture festival included Polish traditional music, dancing and food. Meanwhile, a Polish comedy night was held at Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall earlier this month and Inverness theatre company Dogstar is on tour with Henry Adam’s E Polish Quine, starring recent Glasgow arrival Magdalena Kaleta.

The rise in activity prompted the recent foundation of a Polish Art and Culture Association in Glasgow, aiming “to help Scottish people have more of an understanding of Polish culture and help Poles feel more welcome in Scotland”. Already over a dozen painters, photographers, DJs and bands are listed on its website.

Bresler is making her own contribution to the culture in the form of Gappad, a theatre company comprising Polish ex-pats living in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Influenced by the physical theatre practices of Jerzy Grotowski, with his belief in “poor theatre” and the primacy of the actor-audience relationship, the company makes its debut at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre next month with Re:ID.

“I realised I couldn’t find the type of theatre I was looking for in Scotland,” says Bresler, who studied drama at university in Poznan. “There’s a lot of mainstream theatre, whereas in Poland, mainly because of the oppression of communism, we have a lot of underground, physical theatre. In Scotland there are not many companies who work organically as a group for a number of years.”

Determined not only to create theatre for the Polish community but also to form a bridge between the new and old cultures, Bresler is creating a play that will speak to as wide an audience as possible. “From the very beginning I wanted to do a show that would be English and Polish at the same time,” she says. “I wanted a Scottish person to sit next to a Polish person and they could both understand. If they get frustrated because they don’t understand for 30 seconds, that’s good, because that’s exactly the feeling an immigrant experiences.”

Significantly this play, which is devised by the company and will also play on the Edinburgh Fringe, is a direct response to the questions of identity faced by the actors in their daily lives. Using an original score by Edinburgh-based Polish composer Krzysztof Mielczarek, Re:ID is about leaving one culture without being fully subsumed into a new one. The result is a spiritual no-man’s land.

As the company sees it, there are three psychologically stressful stages emigrants go through: first, rejection of their country; second, loss of social identity; and third, loss of personal identity. “Polish people who move to Scotland think Poland is not good enough,” says Bresler, who whittled down the company to its present line-up of six after a series of workshops last year involving as many as 30 actors. “When they move, they experience a loss of social identity because their surroundings are different and people cannot understand them. The third stage is the disturbance of their personal identity because they have left all the things they were sure of in Poland. They either have to become stronger and re-identify themselves or go back.”

For the economic migrant, however, there’s often no turning back. “In every Polish family there’s a story of one person who went to the beautiful west and got all this money,” says Bresler. “But no one talks about what that person had to go through to get that money. There are people working 70 hours per week in not very good conditions. Yes, they can afford what they want, but they’re not happy. People who have been less successful don’t want to admit they have failed. And going back is admission that you’ve failed.”

As a first-rate English speaker, Bresler has suffered fewer problems than many of her compatriots moving to this foreign land to seek their fortune, but even in the best circumstances, making the transition from one country to another is hard. Language problems only compound the feelings of loneliness and isolation.

“I work for the city council as an interpreter so I meet Polish people and hear their stories every day,” says Bresler, who has also worked as a cleaner and a waitress since moving here. “There are a lot of people with depression and mental problems, people just not coping with emigration, with the language barrier and with losing all the things they were sure about.”

The combination of serious subject matter and Bresler’s belief in the serious traditions of Polish theatre means Re:ID will not be a bundle of laughs. But Scottish theatre does easy entertainment without any help and it’s exciting to think this latest influx of people to the country will open up new creative avenues. “I don’t really do happy theatre,” Bresler smiles. “But it’s true and the truth is not happy, so why should I pretend?”v

Re:ID, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, June 19-20; Apostolic Church, Edinburgh, August 3-11 www.myspace.com/gappad

HANSEL AND GRETEL

Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh Wednesday

****

ONCE UPON A DRAGON

Cammo Estate, Edinburgh Wednesday

***

PERFORMANCE IN WHICH HOPEFULLY NOTHING HAPPENS

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Wednesday

***

IT'S NOT often you get to see two versions of Hansel and Gretel in one day. Still rarer to see two promenade productions in which you go with the neglected children into the woods. But it's that time of year when the Bank of Scotland Children's International Theatre Festival takes over and normal rules cease to apply. With performances as good as Catherine Wheels' Hansel And Gretel and Grid Iron's Once Upon A Dragon, long may the anarchy continue.

The Catherine Wheels show puts the scariness back into the Grimm's fairytale. It's odd to see a bedtime classic being pitched at the over-eights, but you can see why younger children would be freaked by Gill Robertson's production. This is Hansel And Gretel with a Blair Witch Project edge, where the trauma of the children's rejection by their mother and their betrayal by the old lady in the house full of cakes is played for all its psychological truth.

That's not to say it lacks a sense of fun. When the children (Susan Harrison and Tommy Mullins) return home, having survived their mother's first attempt on their lives, the audience follows them into their kitsch 1970s house, complete with Bay City Rollers on the record player and a ghastly green soup prepared from fish bones on the table. To enact her wicked plan, the mother (Cath Whitefield) seduces the well-meaning father (Steve Kettley) with a night of rumpy-pumpy in the bedroom.

It is funny, believable and as vivid as the forest full of creepy children's toys on our journey through the Brunton's main hall. Performed with conviction, the play gives full rein to the archetypal forces that drive this story about our transition into the adult world.

This is the aspect I miss in Pauline Mol and Moniek Merkx's Once Upon A Dragon, which is given an inventive outdoor production by Ben Harrison for Grid Iron. The Dutch play mixes and matches a plethora of fairy tales - including Hansel And Gretel - in a way that celebrates the liveliness of a child's imagination but trivialises the power of the stories themselves.

All the same it's delightful on a spring evening to follow the buoyant cast as they stomp their way from ruin to glade past a landscape decorated with dragon eggs, poisoned apples and the feathers of princes turned into crows.

I'm sure I caught Theatergroep Max's Performance In Which Hopefully Nothing Happens on an off day in front of a cynical audience. There were many inspired moments in this exercise in time filling (imagine a comedy Waiting For Godot), but it lacked the tension needed to compel us from one idea to the next. Still, my 10-year-old voted it the best of the three, so what do I know?

The Bank of Scotland Children's International Theatre Festival, until tomorrow, various venues, Edinburgh