The inspirational Patrice Chéreau
I meet the young Polish theatre director Michal Borczuch for the first time in his home town of Krakow. He chooses a bohemian café in the city’s old Jewish quarter for our initial conversation. At first he is diffident, a little unsure of his English, though it is serviceable. But after a few minutes the ice is broken by the intervention of an old gypsy woman, who is working the tables in the café, offering to read palms.
She reads his, predicting success. His response is fascinating: he greets her warmly, is interested in everything she says, gives her 20 zloty (about five euros), touches her on the arm affectionately. Most people, I suspect, would have brushed her away – he tells me later gypsies are not popular in Krakow – but he takes her seriously. “I like gypsies,” he says. “I like them very much.” He sees her appearance as an augury; I see his response as the mark of a young man – Borczuch is 33 when we first meet in October 2012 – with an instinctive sympathy for the marginalised.
Borczuch strikes me at this first meeting as sensitive, thoughtful, searching for something. He comes from a family of scientists and engineers, but always favoured the arts – his parents worried how he would make a living – and painted from an early age. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, but became bored and transferred to the Ludwik Solski State School of Drama at 25. He had doubts about moving into theatre – if anything, his interest in film was greater and he still hopes to makes films – but his progress as a stage director has been rapid. His style is intense, iconoclastic, expressionistic, and Polish critics have linked him with a group of emerging directors called the “Young Discontented”, though he resists such labelling.
Much of his work has involved adaptation. He is less happy working on classic plays. He directed Twelfth Night in 2010 – his innovation was to put the audience on stage and the actors in the auditorium – but found the process difficult. “The world Shakespeare created is so strong, so hermetically closed, so complete,” he says. “It’s like a stone. You have to go with the Shakespearean logic. If not, it’s impossible to make any move. To make this comedy was a fight.” Borczuch prefers work with holes where he has to fill the gaps, such as Georg Büchner’s unclassifiable play Leonce and Lena and Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which he adapted for the stage. He needs to give himself space in which to work; even to make mistakes; he doesn’t want the writer to have resolved everything.
He recognises that Patrice Chéreau, his mentor, approaches theatre very differently. “His way is much more realistic, more classical. He takes care about the plot and the psychological logic of the story. When we are talking about the libretto of Elektra [during the 18 months of the mentorship, Chéreau is preparing a production of Richard Strauss’s opera for the 2013 Aix-en-Provence festival], we are talking a lot about the Hofmannsthal play on which it is based. We are talking all the time about psychological reasons and the intensive inner logic of the text. This is something that for me is really interesting because it’s usually something I try to omit. For me a performance is a space for much more surrealistic expression of characters and human relationships, and I try to tell something about people in relationships that are sometimes out of psychological logic.” This may explain his affection for the gypsy. “I like the situation where I believe that she is right,” he says.
The fact that he and Chéreau are so different in outlook, as well as age and background, is the key to the relationship. “There is a kind of distance between the two of us and I like that,” says Borczuch. “I asked him ‘Why did you choose me?’, and he said it was because when he saw my productions on DVD he realised that I think totally differently about theatre. He said he didn’t want to be a mentor in the strict sense of the word – to make a pattern of how to make a movie or a piece of theatre. When he said it, I thought ‘That’s wonderful’. I look at it as a relationship where I can take a lot from him, but I don’t have him behind my back. I don’t feel his shadow.”
Chéreau has achieved so much in theatre, film and opera – a rare trinity – that he no longer needs extravagant displays of ego. This is the man who, in 1976 when he was in his early 30s, revolutionised opera with a production of Wagner’s Ring cycle at Bayreuth which reimagined the world of gods and Nibelungs in terms of 19th-century industrial capitalism. He had been a theatrical celebrity in Paris since his teens. Born in 1944, he was running his own theatre by his early 20s and produced his first opera in 1969. Much of the past 20 years has been taken up with films – La Reine Margot, Intimacy, Gabrielle, Son Frère, Those Who Love Me Can Take The Train, Persécution. It is a formidable, formidably intelligent career, and does not need to declare itself.
We meet just before Christmas 2012 in the Marais district of Paris, where he has an apartment. He is dressed as usual in a functional bluish-grey suit, and has the friendly face of a world-weary bloodhound. He speaks slightly idiosyncratic English, and laughs at the thought of him and Borczuch conversing in what he calls “Pidgin” – a sort of halting, stripped-down global English. But what Chéreau says is both wise and beautiful. He talks about how to approach a production, and wonders whether a young director such as his protege – a word he dislikes since he says he has no desire to protect him – gets too excited too soon. “Before you start rehearsing,” explains Chéreau, “it’s always good to have lost any hope of doing something interesting. If you arrive at the rehearsal full of hope and expectation, of course you are disappointed. You have to be disappointed before rehearsals, not during them. Expect nothing, and then you can be free.”
Chéreau says his relationship with Borczuch is a conversation, not a seminar. “I don’t want to be a teacher,” he says. In the spring of 2012, he had been to see Borczuch’s production of Ibsen’s Brand in Krakow – a characteristically bold interpretation which drew in elements of another Ibsen play, Little Eyolf. Chéreau disliked the production, and wrote a long email to Borczuch outlining what he thought the problems were. This was a defining moment in the early part of their relationship. Chéreau says he is not there to judge, but here he was passing judgment, questioning the fusion of two plays, the choice of lead actor, everything. How did Borczuch react?
“It was OK, I think,” says Chéreau. “I try to push as far as I can. If I feel he is reluctant or reacting badly, then I stop. You can criticise only with the agreement of the person; otherwise they don’t listen. I tried to say things quite carefully, not making any lessons, watching if he was ready to hear it or not. He belongs to a tradition that is not my tradition. The Polish theatre has evolved its own style. They have no problem in mixing two or three pieces. For me it doesn’t work, though I can understand why you might want to do it. But as a mentor I shouldn’t say no. For me to say ‘You’re wrong’ is not a good method. I say, ‘Well, that’s what I have seen; that’s what I haven’t seen.’ “
It is the fact that their approaches are so different – realist v expressionist, textual exactitude v rip-it-up-and-see-what-happens – that makes the collaboration fascinating and unpredictable. Chéreau says the divergence was the reason he selected Borczuch from the shortlist he was offered. He could have chosen an acolyte who would hang on his every lyrically expressed word, but he craved resistance. “I watched what Michal did on DVD and I thought he was funnier than the others. It was nothing to do with what I’m doing; nothing; sometimes I don’t like it, but sometimes he dares something.”
I meet the two of them again, this time together, in April 2013. Chéreau is in Berlin rehearsing the two principals in Elektra – Evelyn Herlitzius, who is playing the title part, and Waltraud Meier, singing the role of her murderous mother, Clytemnestra. Borczuch has sat in on all five days of rehearsal, keeping a discreet distance from Chéreau as the latter attempts to flesh out parts which too often can be garishly hysterical. He sees his role as coaxing performances from his singers, and talks about creating a “safe” environment for the performers, one where they feel able to express themselves. Borczuch, who is fascinated by the way Chéreau sets about building a relationship with Herlitzius, says he prefers a “more anarchistic space”. Again, I am struck by how different they are. But when I suggest this must make the mentoring process problematic, Borczuch says no, they are comfortable with their divergent views of theatre, and neither attempts to impose his will on the other.
In many ways it is a conversation of equals. “I don’t see it yet,” says Borczuch, when they are discussing one scene. “It’s because I am not correcting everything,” explains Chéreau. “I give her [Herlitzius] a possibility of the role, which she can follow if she agrees. She has changed many things in her mind in five days, but she will do even more in May [when rehearsals would resume]. So I have time.” He says that at a future rehearsal he will ask her to speak, rather than sing, the part. “I’m always happy when they are talking rather than singing,” says Chéreau. “It gives me some space. The piano [in rehearsal a pianist plays a reduction of the score] steals my space.”
To be in Berlin for these rehearsals, Borczuch has had to take a break from a production of French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès’ Quai Ouest which he is preparing in Wroclaw. It astonishes me when I discover that he and his mentor have not so far discussed the work, because Chéreau worked closely with Koltès until the latter’s death in 1989 and staged many of his plays. Why have they deemed it a taboo? “It is Michal’s decision,” says Chéreau. “He can talk to me whenever he wants, but I can understand if he doesn’t want to do that.” Borczuch says he would have felt in a “weak position” working on Quai Ouest with Chéreau watching him.
Quai Ouest is “an impossible mixture, a mélange of many different and contradictory things,” argues Chéreau, who says that when he wrote it Koltès was preoccupied with the idea that it should have no stars – the play was to be truly democratic. This notion offends Chéreau, but appeals to Borczuch. Chéreau plans to attend the opening night in Wroclaw, but fears what his reaction might be and warns his protege to expect the worst.
Have the differences between them been greater than they imagined at the outset? “Probably yes,” admits Chéreau. “From what I have seen in Krakow, yes for sure. I wanted somebody totally different and I have it.” They both laugh. “That was my choice.” “That is the pleasure of it,” adds Borczuch. He describes a sensationalist play in Berlin he wants to see where the actors go among the audience and seek to provoke extreme reactions. Does that constitute theatre in Chéreau’s eyes? “Probably not,” he says. Even in the 1960s he had little interest in that decade’s “happenings”. “I was looking for something different. Since the beginning I always thought that theatre and cinema have to do with the story. It’s an obsession for me.”
Borczuch does not share the obsession, but his frame of reference has been expanded by proximity to Chéreau, and he says he has been overwhelmed by the precision with which the French master works. “With every passing year, the text for me is more and more important,” says Chéreau. “I am the slave of the text.” “What I saw during these five days,” Borczuch tells his mentor, “is that you tried to describe the situation on stage in a very realistic way in an attempt to create something metaphysical. That was a kind of lesson for me.” “It has to be real,” explains Chéreau. “It has to be related to something in my life. Then you can make everything you want.”
In an interview earlier that day with a film crew, Chéreau had said that he constantly asked himself why he made theatre. When I had lunch with Borczuch before our meeting with Chéreau, he said something similar. He was disillusioned working with bored ensemble actors in Polish state theatres and planned to do more in independent theatres, including a production in Poznan that combined professional actors and children from local orphanages. From their different starting points, they were both asking profound questions about the point of theatre.
“I can only work if I have desire myself for a project, a story,” says Chéreau. “I created my own theatre more than 30 years ago. It was beautiful at first, but after eight years I said I should leave because it was becoming incredibly heavy, as it is in many other theatres. You are reproducing something you don’t want. If you are doing something just because you have to do it …” He doesn’t complete the sentence, but you feel how dead such automaton theatre would be.
I ask Borczuch if there is something in the arc of Chéreau’s long career from which he can learn, but Chéreau rejects the terms of my question. “I haven’t made a career,” he insists. “I haven’t built anything. I’ve never had any plans about a career.” I express scepticism – artists always say this. But Chéreau is insistent, and Borczuch believes he is right. “I am also not making a career. It’s easy to make a career in theatre. You need a good text, a good subject, and you have to push as much as possible, but I’m not doing this. I try to choose something that has some personal meaning for me, and I feel I lose by this in career terms. In Polish theatre, critics are waiting for material that is talking about important political and social questions.” He says some directors adopt a strategy to get the chatterati onside, but he refuses to play that game. He will go on defiantly being his own man. For all the differences in their approaches to theatre, at heart perhaps they are the same.
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