Ghosts in the machine

ABOUT ten miles outside Tel Aviv, on the road to Jerusalem, there's a mighty land development in progress. Judging by the half-finished motorway bridge that overlooks it, it involves an extensive expansion of the transport infrastructure. The bridge ends mid-span, and below it an acreage of Israel's reddish sandy soil the size of several football pitches has been cleared. As I pass it on the bus, I see a cluster of huts put aside perhaps for the workforce at one end of this extensive space, next to these a massive yellow earth shifting vehicle, its bonnet decorated, as so many vehicles are in Israel, with two Israeli flags.

Some hundred yards beyond this, in the middle of a vast empty space, a man, a tiny dot on the landscape, kneels, prostrating himself with face to the soil in the direction of Jerusalem in the Muslim gesture of prayer. It is an image that has stayed long in my mind, an everyday epiphany in which so much of this troubled land is summed up. Religious division, modernity, tradition and nationalism appearing in a single image.

The symbol of the bulldozer, at once an emblem of progress and, in the flattening of Palestinian homes, repression, seems apt to this land. A walk through the often narrow, hilly streets of Jerusalem is a little like walking through the Bible, with each place name setting off memories of cultural and religious tradition, be it for Jew, Christian or Muslim. No matter how secular you might claim to be, these names will seem as real as the heat that oppresses the streets of Jerusalem, as tangible as the soldiers with their automatic weapons slung on their shoulders that seem to be everywhere, from parks to bus stations to synagogues. But it is not the history that we remember – that which seems real at the conjuring – that will be the subject of my show tonight, but rather the histories, personal and political, we choose to forget.

Before the piece goes up, as the shadows lengthen and the heat begins to diminish in a light breeze tinted with the all-pervasive smell of jasmine, I meet director and adaptor Krzysztof Warlikowski outside the vast, modern Sherover Theatre. He takes me through the armed security, ever-present at the door of pretty well every public building of any size in Jerusalem, and we sit in the capacious caf bar. The story he tells me is one of ghosts, history, religion and national identity. It seems so purpose-built for the city that it's surprising that Jerusalem is just another stop in a successful world tour. But it is a particularly important one.

The Dybbuk, Szymon Anski's classic tale of possession, first performed in Warsaw in 1920, tells the story of a young couple, separated at birth, but promised to each other in marriage by their respective fathers. The two are reunited as young adults and fall in love, but the girl's father prevails upon her to marry another, wealthier suitor, for her family's sake. The rejected lover dies in a fire at his synagogue, and returns on the night of the girl's wedding to possess the bride's body. Warlikowski's version, for Polish company TR Warszawa, combines this traditional tale with an adaptation of a story by Hanna Krall, about a contemporary, secular Jew haunted by a dead relative, who troubles him with memories of the Holocaust, and inescapable Judaic traditions.

But like all ghost stories, The Dybbuk is about repressed history. From Kubrick's Overlook Hotel in The Shining, to the summer camp of Friday The 13th and way back to the century-old tales of MR James – which often witnessed scholars uncovering hidden histories to reveal the source of disturbance in some troubled place – the narrative of the ghost is that of a history margin-alised, forgotten and returning to haunt us. This, Warlikowski maintains, is the source of his production's power.

The play is, in a sense, a text contested between Poland and Israel. "It's the first and most important play for Israel and the beginning of the Hebrew theatre, since it was instrumental to the Habima Theatre in Moscow," he explains. "It was written in Yiddish, and performed in Warsaw in Yiddish, and it's still a top play in Yiddish theatre. But then it was translated into Polish and became part of the Polish repertoire. Before the war in the 1930s they made a big Polish movie of The Dybbuk, even bringing a big star of Yiddish theatre in New York to perform it."

The problems emerged from the strained relationship between Poland and Israel. "At the end of The Dybbuk there's an element of the end of something bigger, it's very ambivalent, is it the end of the Yiddish world? When you read it you ask yourself if it was written with a feeling that the war would come soon and destroy this universe," Warlikowski explains. "It's not just this story itself which makes it meaningful but the whole context which makes it much richer. And of course, today in Poland where there are no Jews anymore, when we'd had such a big community which made up one tenth of Poland's population, the thing is there is no longer this part of the audience after the war. For us, this context of the Holocaust is more problematical than it is for Israeli theatre."

The more so, Warlikowski attests, because of the moral ambivalence felt in Poland about the Holocaust. "With Isaac Singer winning these literary prizes for his novel, suddenly there's a big revival in interest in the question of who were these people who are not living anymore among us? And Singer talks about Dybbuks, and that whole cultural context to bring it back. We told ourselves the story of the poor Polish people who were invaded and occupied by the Germans. But the Holocaust wasn't the subject we'd deal with too much for 60 years after the war. The attitude was: 'Let's cover it up, let's not talk about it.' We didn't talk about how we dealt with our neighbours who were killed in our country, our common country. Did we react or help them? Did we do our best or our worst?"

To illustrate a dilemma that affects Polish/Israeli relations to this day, Warlikowski alludes to the Jedwabne pogrom of July 1941. "At the beginning of the Russian-German war, there was a time when the Russians left Poland ahead of the German invasion. There was this dramatic moment before the Germans arrived. Suddenly there was no Russian, German or Polish government. There was a pogrom; Polish neighbours burned, we don't know how many, maybe a thousand Jews in a big wooden stable in the woods. They took the houses of the Polish Jews, and told the Germans they had been collaborating with the Russians. So suddenly this history we'd been told about, that we were the only victims, began to fall down after 60 years. We collaborated; some wanted to kill the Jews as much as the Germans. This all emerged as I was first working on this production."

Yet if this new version of a classic metaphorises the kind of historical ghosts seen in many political cultures, it also speaks of the ghosts created by sexual repression. The choice of a passionless marriage creates Dybbuks of its own. "Sexuality is created by religion in its whole invocation of a forbidden zone," says Warlikowski. "When you are orthodox it is almost accepted that certain sexual relationships are closed. This creates a hole in people, it produces the most perverse dreams and desires.

"I hate the Catholicism of Poland, but at the same time I prefer this to Germany, which hasn't any religion. The Catholic church is evil sometimes in my country, but enemies for theatre makes theatre very strong. I prefer this to Holland, where it's, 'Talkie, talkie we have no problems with gays, we have no problems with minorities, no problems with our parents.' I might as well go home. I mean, I say to these countries, 'That's great, go on like that, you don't need me. When you have something bad happening you might need me.'"

The British Empire certainly created a few Dybbuks, which, like those of Israel, still haunt it, so perhaps we need this theatrical exorcist here.

Dybbuk is at the King's Theatre, 9-11 August, in the International Festival.

Ghosts in the machine - The Dybbuk