ARCHIVES 2015 / Wycinka Holzfällen

Taking place in the cultural and artistic circle of 1980s Austria, Woodcutters is a quasi-autobiographical tale, by turns ironic, funny, and violent. Through the power of Thomas Bernhard's writing, it becomes a sort of novelistic fiction that betrays the irritation of its author, both witness and player of the games people who belong to the same world play. By choosing to adapt and direct it, Krystian Lupa creates a wonderful reflection on art and artistic creation that goes beyond the anecdotal description of the squabbles inherent to the oversized egos of the people gathered for a dinner in remembrance of a dead actress. Faithful to Thomas Bernhard's “frantic” style, which exposes his wounds and contradictions, Krystian Lupa once again develops a dramatic aesthetics based on a slowing down of time, alternating with an acceleration in moments of crisis, supported here by thirteen actors whose work aims to uncover the essence “of people and of things.” This artistic process, bright and clear, which goes beyond the simple psychological incarnation of the characters and is unique in European theatre, is presented for the first time at the Festival d'Avignon.

After studying as a painter, then as a graphic artist, at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts, Krystian Lupa enrolls into the National Film School in Łódź, then into the Ludwik Solski Academy for the Dramatic Arts in Kraków. He directs his first play in 1976, and soon comes to be associated with the Teatr Norwida de Jelenia Gora (1977-1985), where he adapts primarily the work of Polish authors such as Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz or Witold Gombrowicz. He then works at the Stary Teatr, in Kraków until 2013. There, he adapts the works of Russian, German, and Austrian authors: Robert Musil, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Rainer Maria Rilke, Mikhail Bulgakov, Anton Chekhov, Werner Schwab, and particularly Thomas Bernhard, playing his dramatic texts as well as his literary works, which he adapts for the stage himself. Krystian Lupa does his own scenography and designs the costumes and the lighting for his shows. He has written several theoretical texts about his work, in which he says he thrives to explore the spiritual situation of individuals living at times of “great cultural upheaval.” 

In 1984, a then-53-year-old Thomas Bernhard publishes Woodcutters. Already celebrated throughout Europe as a poet, novelist, and dramatic writer, he is known as a master of provocation, as “the man who says no.” Clear-headed and inflexible, filled with a fierce and turbulent joy, he made his life and his love-hate relationship with the history of his country, Austria, the raw material of his fiction. He died in 1989, leaving behind an essential body of work made up of eighteen plays, about twenty texts in prose, five poetry collections, and about a hundred essays, all testament to a lifelong quest to “find the measure of truth within every lie.”