The Morality of Mrs. Dulska

A Play by Gabriela Zapolska

Teresa Murjas

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781841509839
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

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.

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

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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

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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’ a...