stage catalyst

THE WORK OF STELLA BAKER IN THEATRE

GRZEGORZ SADOWSKI

INTRODUCTION

What do Bob Dylan, Spike Milligan, Fay Weldon, Doris Lessing, and Stanislaw Bareia have in common with Roman Polanski, Alfred Hitchcock, Virginia Woolf and Alan Sillitoe? These have all been quoted as influences of someone who is a prominent and influential figure in modern theatre, at least in Britain if not in Europe. Stella Baker is that figure, for her work as a playwright and a stage director. She is best known for her work and prominent influence in Polish theatre during the 1990's and first few years of this century. She is the only Western playwright to 'cross over' and become accepted into Eastern European theatre, winning respect and critical acclaim from critics and others in theatre. Her impact on the performing arts is all the more remarkable when you consider that her 15 or so plays are unpublished, her work has never been staged in first class theatre to larger audiences, and that her work since the end of the last century is rarely if ever staged in theatres.

To date to even try to classify her work in an area of theatre has defeated almost everyone as her work is that different. A Polish journalist writing about her work in 2002 invented a word 'nadwspółcześny' which in English means 'above postmodernist', some consider her work not to be theatre, a few consider her to be the last postmodernist playwright, but many others prefer to wait. Much of her influence can be seen as 'anti-theatre', she is often seen as creating a new concept of theatre outside theatre, and much of her work can be staged at venues outside theatres such as music venues, pubs, clubs and even art galleries. This led her in 2003 to be invited to take part in a performance art festival in the north of Poland.

Her plays are mainly one act plays, both comedy and drama, and deal with themes of social issues, social taboos, and the questioning and ridiculing of common socially accepted stereotypes and values. Her work is characterised by its utter simplicity, prominent use of dialogue, in places strong language, borrowing heavily on influences used in film and television, and naturalism. Her work is rare for it is both naturalist and expressionist, and is usually pared down to what can be termed 'minimalist theatre'. Her work is thus contradictory to that of such people as Jerzy Grotowski and Sarah Kane, the School of Pessimism, Beckett, Pinter and Ionesco and therefore to what many people accept as 'modern theatre'.

LIFE AND BACKGROUND

Very little is known about Stella Baker's life. It is known that she was born in Dewsbury West Yorkshire on 22^nd July 1966, that she spent much of her early childhood in Glasgow and that she is transgendered. She's lived an abnormally difficult life much of which has been transient. Raised as a Scottish Protestant she rejected the church as a teenager and has followed a liberal Buddhist philosophy since the age of 16 and some of these core spiritual values can be found in her work. Baker shuns fame and publicity, she is withdrawn and reclusive and spends time doing charity work for disadvantaged members of society, advocating tolerance and social acceptance. She is free of mental illness and emotional disturbances which affect many artists, although she admits to depression. Thus she remains something of an enigma, a mystery. It is perhaps her life which gives her a certain perspective found in her work.

HER CAREER

It was a visit to Soviet Leningrad in 1990 and her early theatrical experiences in the Polish city of Poznan which were to bring her into theatre, along with a three year period of self-study of post-war playwrights such as Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, Eugene O'Neill and Elmer Rice. In 1994 she worked with movement theatre companies such as Teatr Osmego Dnia and Teatr Biuro Podrozy before deciding to offer something completely different.

She emerged very suddenly into Polish theatre in the spring of 1995 with her second play, which is an earlier draft of a comedy entitled Cabbages. Many regard this play, which has been drafted five times and staged in numerous cities all over the world, as early evidence of her genius and which was to form a pattern for her work in comedy. But it's her whole approach to theatre which differs from everyone else.

In Polish theatre she went completely against the grain, contradicting all the principles of modern theatre put forward by Jerzy Grotowski. “Theatre is not all about the actor,” she was to later be quoted as saying, “It is about ideas and space, and people who can convey those ideas to a live audience. Even when it's within one person theatre remains a collective.”

Throughout she wrote her own plays, staging them with the help of anyone who wanted to be an actor. Indeed she was once nicknamed “The Gateway To Theatre”. She quickly became known for her original way of working, of staging plays in different language versions which not only differed as to the language they were being performed in, but also in cultural references and characters. Her brand of theatre is a reworking of fringe theatre with the literary nature of 'off' theatre. She is also known for her original use of space – any space – for theatre and for bringing theatre to venues commonly associated with music, bands and live gigs.

AS A PLAYWRIGHT

The play which can be seen as being most responsible for her success is a comedy entitled Cabbages. The play is strikingly simple, in fact it is difficult to find a simpler play – set in a shop, it is a play based on dialogue, with dialogues built around a central character, predominantly the shop assistant. The play deals with the issue of money, of currency and what we regard as money. The text suggests replacing money with cabbages and we see how people would react to such changes in the setting of the local shop. This would appear to be the basis of British comedy, but what Baker managed to do in the play – which lasts just 50 minutes – is to transcend all forms of comedy through theatre of the absurd, satire and situation comedy to arrive at the ending which is pure slapstick – the elaborate build up of a five way dialogue and a food fight a la Chaplin.

Some of her work is highly controversial, indeed she spent a couple of years labelled as one of Europe's most controversial playwrights. The first four minutes of One Saturday, a play about domestic violence which starts with a nine minute pause, contains some 157 expletives. Some references are made to sexual perversions in Rejected (about the sexual harrassment of women in employment) where a woman challenges her would be boss and his wife with a pistol, forcing him to confess all at gunpoint to his wife. “This makes for highly visual theatre,” wrote one critic, “because the relationships between the characters change constantly with the dialogue and the audience can never be sure what happens next.” Her most controversial play is Sunday, which challenges the morality of religion. In the play a gay priest leaves his partner, another priest, and admits to seeing a woman behind his partner's back. “I wanted to write a play about someone who walks away from a relationship and loses everything,” explains Baker, “I'll leave it for others to decide who is being controversial here. Is it me for having to write about homosexuals? Or is it the Catholic Church for not acknowledging the equality of men and women?”

Even putting her plays aside Baker is a very powerful, influential writer who not only writes plays but also poetry, articles, essays, blogs, and song parodies of popular hits. Perversely hardly any of her work is published, apart from her articles, and apart from her song parodies found on the Amiright website (www.amiright.com) she often writes anonymously or under a different name.

But she is best known for her writing for theatre – her innovative writing of plays, which are mainly one act and range from 35 minutes to 4 hours in length, and for her style which takes in both drama and comedy. During her years in Polish theatre her plays titled Cabbages, The Visit From Strangers, A Wedding of Characters and notably The Big Exam and The Scottish Patient earned her the reputation as the leading writer of comedy in that country but also for her work in drama. Some can still remember the heavy tension of One Saturday, or the combined horror and beauty found in The Condemned – a play about a love triangle between a Nazi soldier, Jewish woman and Polish female Resistance fighter in the ruins of the liquidated Warsaw Ghetto of 1944 and its subsequent discovery by the Gestapo. Or the beautifully written, universally applicable dialogue found in Death between a woman who has died and Death who has come to claim her soul.

Critic Maciej Mrozek once wrote, “Baker's work brought a new paradigm as to how people perceive the theatre. She combines techniques of both playwriting and screenwriting in her work, which has had a tremendous impact on the role of the actor and consequently, how a play is perceived by the audience. It's hard to even estimate the impact of her work on the performing arts. However she appears to have brought an end to the dark, serious nature of Polish drama, influenced many theatres who have set up outside the theatre, many of who perform also in English, and her work has influenced films such as Man Thing, Day of the Wacko and Vinci.”

AS A DIRECTOR

Despite having far less formal training than many other directors, Baker herself is a very accomplished director. The majority of her most successful productions have been staged with actors with little or no previous stage experience, but she also works with drama students and professional actors. A few have gone on to successful television careers. It has been said frequently that she is to theatre what Bob Dylan is to music. She stages plays to small audiences in untypical venues, she rarely gives interviews and avoids publicity, preferring to make her statements it seems from the stage. She is very good at manipulating public awareness. Her style of directing matches her writing, very minimalist, basic, almost threadbare. Karina Solska, an actress, explains, “Most people in theatre can do amazingly wonderful things, but she [Baker] has the ability of being able to get anyone to do anything at any given time, and few directors actually possess that skill.”

PLAYS

Without Words (1990)

No Place Like Home (1995)

Peanuts (later Cabbages) (1995)

A Wedding of Characters (1996)

The Visit of Strangers (1996)

At The Bus Stop (1998)

One Saturday (1998)

The Scottish Patient (2000)

Cabbages (2000)

The Big Exam (2001)

Rejected (2001)

Sunday 6.46am (2001)

The Condemned (2003)

Pay Day (2005)

Death (2005)

REFERENCES

A. Paługa, English Cabbages (2005)

R. Thomas, A Collection of Western Writers and Artists in Central Europe (2005)

B. Todd, Theatre of Visions (2004)

R. Pawlowski, The Warsaw Fringe, (2002)