aktuality.sk // Interview // One Side Wants to Create and Live, While the Other Boos and Feels Left Out
Author: David Žák
According to Dávid Paška, holding up a costly mirror to society and criticising it with a smile is both a privilege and a duty. He does not approach theatre merely as fulfilling a programme.
At the Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav Theatre (DPOH) in Bratislava, an unconventional combination of a classic and an urgent one-act play comes to life.
In the production The Merchant of Venice/Mauser, director Dávid Paška connected Shakespeare with a text by Heiner Müller, creating a work that responds sharply to current social tension.
According to Paška, the production is exceptional because of its unconventional combination of two distinct dramatic worlds, through which an entirely new parabolic image of the final trial was created on stage. He emphasises that the production consciously works with caricature and omnipresent antisemitism.
You have staged an exceptionally demanding production. In it, you combined two different dramatic texts – Mauser and Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. Was that demanding for you as someone belonging to Generation Z?
Because I have a classical drama-theatre education in theatre directing and dramaturgy, I already had experience with Shakespeare before university. My approach to the text was therefore not generational, but rather academic. It was similar with Heiner Müller: it was an academic kind of experience, as well as an encounter with productions from the German-speaking world, where I studied and where I actively work.
What was more challenging was combining these two texts, which is unconventional in itself. The Merchant of Venice has its own problems and its own rhythm; once you break that rhythm, you have to rebuild it. Heiner Müller's text, on the other hand, is not intended for repertory theatre. In fact, the rules for staging the play suggest rather the principle of an exercise: to search for universality within it, rather than for answers as in study material. In it, he speaks about proletarian revolution.
To cut these elements out with surgical precision so that they would fit into a universal parable for The Merchant of Venice and the principles of Christian humanism was extremely demanding. It succeeded when the texts were no longer merely interwoven, but when an entirely new scene emerged within the entrails of the play. In this way, a parabolic image of the great final trial from The Merchant of Venice was created.
Does Shakespeare also reflect the present day? Is he timeless as an author?
Definitely. In his works, he essentially creates a paradox. His plays are full of work with the audience and with the reflection of the audience's gaze upon the play itself. That is why we can speak of universal texts that will survive any era.
The Merchant of Venice is also infamous for having been performed during some of the worst periods of human history. Our approach to it must therefore take the 20th century into account, especially the Second World War and Nazi Germany, when this play was very often staged by party theatres.
We must therefore consider how to approach this play with all of this historical experience, which is actively or passively connected to the work itself. That alone is an undeniable factor: the play is marked by history.
Does it fit the current situation we are experiencing in Slovakia?
We are discovering that it does, since it is a model situation and a model conflict. It does not only raise fundamental questions regarding Judaism or the nation as such. It is about principles: one side speaks of legality and law, while the other speaks of ideals. Principle and ideal stand opposed to each other here, which is immensely interesting, because this is a primordial conflict. It contains enormous contradictions concerning hypocrisy, truth, cruelty and mercy, which can be applied to any situation.
As for the Slovak situation and what we see in our judiciary, this is a direct reference. One does not even need to be well-versed in day-to-day politics to sense the lawlessness and the bitter aftertaste that arise in these matters. The audience may perhaps find parallels in it.