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Michal Zadara
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The Paul Street Boys is compulsory reading in Hungarian schools but it is rather surprising that generations of readers have grown up on this novel even in Poland. Is it still a compulsory reading there?
It was one of the compulsory books during the communist era but that was a much more centralised system. Today it is optional reading and teachers can decide if they want to include it in the curriculum or not. There are children who read it even today, but back in the 50s up until my generation it used was compulsory.
Why did you decide to adapt it to the stage?
The director of the Warsaw National Theatre invited me to direct anything that I would like. I thought a national theatre is a rather conservative institution and even though its repertoire is completely normal, not specifically national, I still thought that once I do a piece for the National Theatre, it will somehow be about everyone. This has turned out to be the The Paul Street Boys, which is serious in a certain form, but at the core extremely ironic. Right from the beginning, my aim was to make it for adults and with adults. This is somehow a metaphor for the entire country, because we are all orphans of communism.
The actors that play the boys are not children but grown-ups. Does this mean that the original story was more like a vehicle for you to tell your own story?
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No, we stayed very truthful to [Ferenc Molnár, the author of The Paul Street Boys]. The framework for the performance was rather autobiographical from the point of view of the actors, because just when we were preparing for the play, there were plans to close down the theatre where we were playing and build a supermarket or something similar in its place. Just like at the end of the story, when they build a house on the playground. All they fought for falls victim to capitalism and perishes. This system devours what's precious, and turns it into cash. Molnár sensed this in his time and we can also see it today. This is more than simply telling a story. It does not really matter whether someone is a boy or a man because there is always somebody in me who is 14, someone who is 30, obviously, and in a way someone who is potentially 60. I do not think this matters, I look at my life today the same way as I did when I was 14. I do not tell the story of the boys from the point of an adult, but rather tell a story of adults from a child's perspective. The whole world is about boys playing wargames. There's Iraq for instance, where completely crazy people play war. The same applies to children. Nemecsek gets killed in the novel. To me, this is the most terrible thing in the world and in reality: that nobody grows up really. Children are like adults because they are just as horrible as adults, and vice versa. There is no difference, which is very sad.
You have said about The Paul Street Boys that they believe in fiction and pretend that their playground is their home, and adults act the same way when they choose which group to become a part. Where would you place the issue of nationality?
For me this story is somehow a Jewish story. Even if Molnár never defined himself as a Jewish writer and he did not make Nemecsek a Jewish character, the aura of Jewishness hangs around this book and this subject I believe can only be felt and understood from the perspective of the 20th century European Jewish fate: people without a home who fight for a country because they would like to have a home. From the point of the boys this means that once they loose the playground, they will not have a home. Nemecsek wants this home even more than the others and this story for me is about assimilation. He really wants to assimilate, he wants to be just like the people that he lives with, but then he does. The whole thing does not mean that much to the others, they can just find another playground, but Nemcsek gave his life for it, for nothing. My take on this performance is...a parody of patriotism, of the boys who play war. Waving a flag around is always ridiculous, a joke.
Considering that you grew up in different cultures, in Vienna and Frankfurt, do you look at Polish traditions in a different way, from the outside?
They often say that. But it should be put to the test. I should be brought up again, but this time in Poland, and then it could be seen what becomes of me. I suppose I would hate this kind of patriarchal system even more than now.
Interviewer: Éva Kelemen / Photo: Bálint Fejér
