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118 pages

English

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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.

Sujets

Literary Criticism

Theater

Performing Arts

Theatre

Playwright

Drama

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Publié par	Intellect Books Ltd
Date de parution	01 novembre 2007
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781841509839
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

The Morality of Mrs. Dulska
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, 8 th 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 migr -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-si cle 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 d 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 d 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