National Theater of Kosovo. premiere 20th September 2024
What happens to soldiers when they return from war? Are they the same people they used to be? Written after the Second World War by Polish author Witold Gombrowicz, The Marriage takes place in a landscape of dreams. Presented in Kosovo by Polish director Norbert Rakowski, Gombrowicz’s play is a psycho- social study of post-war transformation and marriage as an institution.
The narrative takes place inside a dream. Henry (Armend Smajli), a young soldier serving in the army, dreams that one day he will return home. In the dream, he transforms into a king and plans to marry his fiancée in a royal wedding.
Gombrowicz’s drama exists in a space between dream and reality and the philosophical questions the play raises still relate to many of the social and political issues of today.
Rakowski’s production opens in a dynamic manner. He carefully builds Henry’s dream-world, bringing a deep psychological dimension to the drama. Maria Jankowska’s scenography evokes World War II, while a thin curtain separates the audience from the cast, a symbolic illustration of the split between the unconscious and the conscious. Images are projected on the curtain, and we hear accompanying sounds of bombings and air-raid sirens. These techniques allow the audience to experience what Henry is feeling; they have the feel not of memory or illusion, but of inalienable reality
The cast deals well with this curtain and with the demands of Gombrowicz’s text, which is not easy. Even though the play takes place in the realm of the unconsciousness, the presence of the actors and actresses are felt. Even when Henry is silent, Smajli allows the audience to see his agony, and as a spectator I could clearly see his effort in this respect. He captured a sense of a man caught between his old and new self, undergoing a kind of transformation.
Henry returns to find a very different situation to before he went to away to fight. He finds that his parents (Mensur Safçiu and Sheqerie Buçaj) now have different approaches to him and his fiancée. Personally, this has always been my curiosity about soldiers. When they return home, are they changed or is it the people they left behind who change? The things that happen in wars can change people forever. The soldier is not what he used to be, but nor are his family members.
The biggest challenge that soldiers face when coming home is the return to their authentic selves, when their bodies bear the marks of trauma. Trauma affects not only those directly exposed to it, but also those around them. These returning soldiers can terrorize their families with emotional deprivation. The wives of men who suffer from PTSD tend to become depressed themselves and their children may grow up insecure and anxious. It requires a tremendous amount of energy to continue to function normally while carrying the memory of terror and shame of weakness and vulnerability.
In Gombrowicz’s play there is no glorification of the figure of the hero, of war and nationalism. It asks the audience to understand that this man, this soldier, is not afraid of death but he suffers because he has nobody to lean on.
The play may be absurdist but there is truth here for anyone willing to face it. Henry’s childhood room and family are nothing like his memories of them. His house had been turned into an inn, run by his father and mother, while his fiancee, Molla’s (Era Balaj), serves drinks to the drunken customers. The drunks create trouble for his father, so he proclaims himself king so that he will be inviolable.
The Marriage, National Theatre of Kosovo
Henry’s marriage is arranged, but when the priest (Adhurim Demi) arrives, Henry, who is an atheist, begins to have doubts. The scene transforms into a court banquet and one of the drunks (Shkelzen Veseli) transforms into the ambassador of a hostile nation. Henry eventually turns into a dictator and to confirm his power, he asks his friend, Xhani (Ylber Bardhi), to sacrifice himself, to take his own life. Xhani agrees and Henry repents, so the marriage is annulled.
The drama is shaped by two forces, that of form and the freedom to break out of the form. As much as Henry tries to challenge and resist the form with his acts of resistance, in order to do so, he must accept his existence.
In the play everyone is trying to reach a consensus about the marriage of Henry with Molla, except for the drunkard, whom in Henry’s dream – and wedding – appears as a malevolent presence. Henry’s parents are under constant stress, both from the marriage and the need to stop the drunkards terrorising their inn. When the marriage is annulled, they seem to be frozen, as if in a tableaux.
Though Era Balaj is mostly static as Molla, she remains the ethical and erotic core of the play. It is thanks to Rakowski’s direction and Balaj’s skill as an actor that the character of Molla is not a misogynist cliché.
Rakowski’s production captures the catharsis of the drama, a confrontation with the darkest aspects of oneself. It evokes the degraded social order which manifests itself in post-war societies and the chilling sense of systems that try to control reality and suppress the human spirit through nationalism.
As a child whose first memories were of war, whose first stories were not fairy tales, but those of war, I had the opportunity to see what I have seen and felt in reality. Between the pain, the sadness of these stories and growing up with the absence of my father, for me there has always been something spiritual beyond war, beyond the suffering – a way to preserve my soul and transform it.
Credits: Witold Gombrowicz//Director: Norbert Rakowski// Scenography: Maria Jankowska
Cast: Armend Smajli, Era Balaj, Adhurim Demi, Shkelzen Veseli, Ylber Bardhi, Mensur Safçiu and Sheqerie Buçaj
Tringë Arifi is a theatre critic based in Prishtina. Currently she is working as a legal researcher at Liaison Office of Greece in Prishtina. She has a Master's in Psychological Forensics.
