The Morality of Mrs. Dulska: A Play by Gabriela Zapolska

By Teresa Murjas

Gabriela Zapolska (1857-1921) was an actor, journalist and playwright. She was born during the 123 year partition of Poland by Austria, Prussia and Russia and wrote over thirty plays. The Morality of Mrs. Dulska (1906), a 'petty-bourgeois tragic-farce', is probably her best known.  Mrs Dulska is a cross between Patricia Routledge¹s Hyacinth Bucket and Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage. She is the tyrannical and hilarious landlady of a fine stone tenement building – proud, shrewd and highly preoccupied with appearances. Dulska keeps her purse strings tightly drawn and exploits her tenants in a most unforgiving fashion. To the unhappy woman from the first floor apartment who tries to poison herself by swallowing some match heads, she shows no mercy. To her serving maid, who she effectively prostitutes to her son in order to keep his philandering under her own roof and within her control, she shows no compassion. Her daughters struggle through the torments of adolescence with the facts of life skillfully concealed from them, and her husband, worn down over the years by his power-hungry wife, has barely a word to say to his family. It is her son that Mrs Dulska loves – loves with an unhealthy possessiveness. Her fear that he will leave prompts her to fund the servicing of his every desire. Why is it, then, that he resents her so much? Why is it that he feels compelled to seek revenge? Zapolska’s uncompromising look at gender construction and class oppression in fin-de-siecle Poland is witty, entertaining and incisive. This is the first published UK translation of this popular Polish classic. It was prepared by Teresa Murjas, a lecturer in Theatre at the University of Reading. In her introduction, Teresa discusses how the translation and first UK production, which she directed, were developed. She introduces Zapolska's work in its historical contexts, provides the reader with relevant biographical information and considers the play's performance history up to the present day. She draws these strands together into a narrative of deportation, exile and emigration.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books Ltd
• Release date: Nov 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9781841509839

Book preview

The Morality of

Mrs. Dulska

A petty-bourgeois tragic-farce by

Gabriela Zapolska

Translated and introduced by

Teresa Murjas

First Published in the UK in 2007 by

Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK

First Published in the USA in 2007 by

Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2007 Intellect

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Anyone wishing to perform the translated version of the play in this publication should contact Teresa Murjas for permission at the following address:

Teresa Murjas

Department of Film, Theatre & Television

The University of Reading

Bulmershe Court, Woodlands Avenue

Reading, RG6 1HY, UK

ISBN 978-1-84150-166-6 / ISSN 1754-0933 / EISBN 978-184150-983-9

Series: Playtext Series

Series Editor: Roberta Mock

Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons

Copy Editor: Holly Spradling

Typesetting: Planman Technologies

Printed and bound by HSW Print, UK.

To my father

CZES AW MURJAS

(1926–2006)

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction

Act I

Act II

Act III

Acknowledgements

With special thanks to Irena, Jolanta and Ma a Murjas, Lib Taylor, Krystyna Olliffe, Roberta Mock, May Yao, Sam King, Mischa Twitchin, Elwira Grossman, Halina Filipowicz, Aoife Monks, Doug Pye, Pamela Wiggin, Lisa Clark, Chris Bacon, Dave Marron, Jonathan Bignell, Rosemary Allen, John Lynch, the efficient, helpful archivists at ZASP and the Theatre Museum in Warsaw and the many excellent, dedicated student actors, designers and technicians at the University of Reading whose energy and enthusiasm made my research production and this book possible.

Derby, 8th August 2006

Preface

‘Sometimes we saw her out in the street. Zapolska, dressed with some eccentricity, sat carelessly in a carriage. The ostrich feathers adorning her hat were blown by the wind into disarray but she, pensive, far away, failed to notice.’¹

My introduction to Gabriela Zapolska’s 1906 play The Morality of Mrs. Dulska is divided into six sections.

The first two sections are written from a personal perspective, in what I experience as a more emotive ‘voice’. They are intended to provide a conceptual framework within which the latter half of the introduction and the translation itself can be read.

Discussion in Section 1 centres on the play’s translator and its director. Here I explore the contexts in which my translation and theatre production evolved and describe my approach to negotiating the play’s apparent transition from a so-called source, to a target, culture.

In Section 2, I draw attention to a Polish Memorial in Portsmouth with which this translation is closely linked. In doing so, I raise a series of issues concerning my Polish-British identity and the significance of this translation within a narrative of Polish emigration, deportation and exile to Britain since the early nineteenth century.

The remaining sections include material perhaps more conventionally encountered in introductions to translated texts. From many such introductions, the translator’s personal ‘voice’ tends to be abstracted. In writing these sections, I have selected and arranged information which I consider to be important for an understanding of Zapolska’s work.

In Sections 3 and 4, I draw on scholarship largely available in English, in order to enable easy access for the reader, should s/he wish to read more widely. Focusing mainly on the period before The Morality of Mrs. Dulska was written, I indicate a general historical backdrop against which selected biographical information about the playwright can be considered. To obtain the latter, I have drawn on theatre scholarship produced in Polish.

In Section 5, I discuss the cultural significance of Zapolska’s work in Poland and the critical contexts in which scholars and theatre practitioners have located the playwright and read her work.

In Section 6, I draw on archival research conducted in Poland, facilitated by a travel grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This section deals directly with The Morality of Mrs. Dulska and focuses on aspects of its performance history in Poland.

I have re-written the introduction many times. In doing so, I have gradually come to realize that my painful struggle to arrange the material, to somehow weave the different narrative strands together into resolution, is symptomatic of my broader struggle to define what precisely it means – culturally, geographically, historically, linguistically – to be Polish-British. What characterizes my experience as an ‘émigré-once-removed’. Hitherto, its key feature has been an often very productive, though frequently exhausting and frustrating, sense of disjunction and dislocation. For this introduction, I have tried to develop a form that will facilitate coherent expression of the tensions characterizing my cultural status. It is also intended that any reading of the translated text should further function to ‘shape’ the material included in the introduction.

By permission of Oxford University Press

Figure 1: Eastern Europe c. 1880.

From Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland (1984) by Davies, Norman, p. 176.

INTRODUCTION

Mrs. Dulska moves house

SECTION 1: The Translator

Why and how was this translation created?

My first encounter with Gabriela Zapolska’s 1906 play The Morality of Mrs. Dulska came when I was a pupil at our small community Saturday School in Derby, where I was born. There, in the mid to late 1980s, I studied for my Polish ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels and my interest in fin-de-siècle literature and theatre was sparked. I currently work as a lecturer in Theatre at Reading University. I developed this translation of the play by directing a research production.² This was staged early in 2004 at the Centre for Polish Culture (POSK) in Hammersmith, London. The three public performances followed on from a previous run, which had taken place at the Reading Myra McCulloch University Theatre, in autumn 2003. The inter-disciplinary Department of Film, Theatre & Television at Reading has a long-established academic tradition of research into Polish film and nurtures links with ód University in central Poland. During a gap year from my Ph.D. studies at Birmingham University, for which I had chosen to focus on the work of Swedish playwright August Strindberg, Zapolska’s near-contemporary, I too worked in ód as a visiting lecturer. I was subsequently offered my current post, in a department additionally placing strong emphasis on teaching and research through theatre practice.

Research productions at Reading represent examples of what is referred to in the field of Theatre Studies as ‘practice as research’ or ‘research through practice’. This involves the critical exploration of particular research questions or problems through workshops and/or the staging of a production, which may have evolved from a written play text or a process of devising. Accordingly, a formalized, annual nine week slot is available each autumn term for extracurricular, staff-led research projects of a practical nature, in which students also become involved. This opportunity can provide an arguably indispensable experimental forum for the theatre translator and in this instance it facilitated the re-shaping and refinement of my English rendition of the The Morality of Mrs. Dulska, here published. With my cast I worked on staging a production of my new translation. The rehearsal process became a way of developing the translated text, which changed week by week in response to this collaborative process, and has continued to change throughout the three years it has taken to prepare this book. A developmental, rehearsal-based working method of this kind is not dissimilar from that occasionally employed by the playwright herself, who was also an actor, translator, director, teacher, journalist and film scriptwriter.

A theatre translator must try to imagine various potential approaches to the staging, design and casting of a play in her own context as well as taking account of previous productions. She must also try to hear potential multiple nuanced ways in which an actor might deliver a line, discover and develop subtext. She must try to catch and imprison the multiple theatrical possibilities she perceives in the play text, in the target language, whilst imaginatively negotiating her own dramatic and theatrical landscape. This is why often she sits in isolation, anxiously mouthing something to herself, before allowing her text to be read out loud by others. Theatre translation is as much about an impulse towards preservation, a sort of linguistic embalming, as it is about the potential for new embodiments.

In developing a register for this particular translation, a process enabled by the research production, several different factors have been taken into account. I have aimed for formality of address, in order to effect a ‘historicization’ of the action, judging that too contemporary a tone would fail to evoke the late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century milieu and thus defuse the scandal that takes place in the Dulski household and is central to the play’s action. Zapolska wrote the play a century ago and so I have aimed to create a ‘linguistic construction’ of that period in English. The formality of address can be employed variously, especially by the actor playing the main character, Mrs. Dulska, to demonstrate, among other qualities and strategies, class aspiration and/or social sophistication via enabling the expression of varying degrees and methods of politeness and affectation and a constant negotiation between the performed public and private ‘selves’. All these concerns are central to the Polish text, in which the evocation of the Dulski family’s double standards is crucial. In addition to aiming for a formal quality that implies historical distance, I have also attempted to locate a register which fuses, from a UK perspective, implied ‘otherness’ of location³ with patterns and rhythms of speech that conform, where appropriate, to perhaps more contemporary British stereotypes of the middle class, in the hope of Zapolska’s satiric purpose being more readily realized in performance. By allowing me to pursue a more collaborative translation process, within a theatre space, this instance of practice as research has also prompted me to think actively about the transference of the text from Polish to English and perceive more readily the potential of the play in a UK performance, to an English-speaking audience. It has prompted me to ask new questions about my own role as a theatre translator and consider the precise nature of my agency within a process of ‘transposition’.

The company of Reading staff/student performers, designers and technicians involved in the project were subsequently invited by Chiswick teacher Krystyna Olliffe to transfer the production from the University to POSK. As a result, I had the opportunity to consider the broader issues involved in staging the play in a multi-cultural context. Pupils at many of London’s Polish Saturday schools, where Krystyna teaches, had at the time been reading the play, which featured on their exam syllabus. Consequently, the event was billed as part of a broader educational and fund-raising programme; an opportunity for students to see a play they were studying in Polish, performed in English. Thus, the project also came to represent a very particular instance of outreach between two groups of students and two communities. It also represented an instance of the text returning to an aspect of its source culture in the target, rather than the source, language.

As a result of effective collaboration, the generosity of the Polish Educational Board and POSK committee, on one very lively and, for me, unforgettable afternoon the production played, in a theatre packed to the brim, to over three hundred vocal and energetic Saturday school students, aged roughly between six and eighteen, many of whom cheered loudly when the Dulski’s wronged servant girl, Hanka, demanded her one thousand kronen from Mrs. Dulska. Some of them are the children of recent immigrants, whose mother tongue is Polish. Some are the descendants of the post-war diaspora and those who left Poland, in much fewer numbers, during the latter half of the twentieth century. For these latter two groups, and I include myself in the first, Polish language acquisition may be proving increasingly challenging.

Such Saturday schools were established after World War II, predominantly by political refugees, all over the UK and have been maintained with great passion and dedication. Following Poland’s accession to the EU, they are facing the renewed challenge of self-definition. They strive once again to engage in dialogue concerning the philosophical basis for their pedagogical approach and, indeed, their existence. This dialogue must surely respond to the shifting demographic trends now having an enormous impact on the make-up of their staff and student body, for whom concepts of ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ are undergoing new, not unwelcome, forms of de-stabilization. In order to survive, these schools will have to accommodate and develop vastly varying language abilities and attitudes towards cultural heritage. They will be compelled to hear, and respond to, the growing number of voices now contributing towards currently evolving debates concerning identity politics and multiculturalism in the UK.

What is the translator’s background?

Polish is my mother tongue, in the sense that I speak it at home. Both my parents were children when deported from Poland during World War II; one by the Soviets to a kolkhoz in Siberia, as part of Stalin’s ethnic cleansing of nearly two million people from Eastern Poland, the other by the Nazis, to forced labour in the Reich. They arrived in England having traversed the globe, some years after the war had ended. Their survival and that of many Poles of that generation, who settled in the UK, can only be described as extraordinary. Indeed, of enormous significance to this project has been my own, and my parents’, perpetual dialectical negotiation, in never-quite-accurate English, slightly old-fashioned pre-war Polish and sometimes a newfangled and bizarre conflation or perpetual re-translation of the two that only our closest relatives would understand, around the difficult and emotive question of cultural (national?) identity (authenticity?). This question is for some embarrassingly outmoded, facile and anti-progressive, and, for others, constitutes a psycho-physical problem enacted daily. Rationalize though I may, the outcome of my personal deliberations, however Romantic, fearful and ill-fated, is necessarily an attempt to connect with a ‘Polish past’ (dare I say a historical, culturally and ethnically inclusive, master-narrative?) via academic research. Luckily, in the ‘National Psyche’ section, the new Lonely Planet guide to Poland informs me that Poles, though ‘not always realistic… can sometimes be charmingly irrational and romantic.’⁴ So perhaps I should also put this down to my ethnic background. In any case, both my desire and fear are ultimately realized through the process of translation and, finally, via a crucial interaction with my students, as live and present theatre performance offered to audiences in contrasting, symbiotic cultural environments.

As a child, I was raised in what I regarded as two very separate communities. During the week, I went to my local Catholic school, where almost all my friends came from working-class, immigrant backgrounds, including Italian, Irish and Maltese. There I studied what I thought of as a mainstream curriculum that had little to do with matters ‘Polish’. The weekend was spent within a vibrant Polish community; on Saturday I attended Polish school, where I learnt Polish, which I also spoke at home, more formally. I also attended classes in Polish literature, history and geography. I learnt Polish