Director Gintaras Varnas on the play The Card Index

The work of Tadeusz Róźewicz is little known to the Lithuanian public. Some of his poetry has been translated, but he has seldom been staged in the theatre, even though he is indeed one of the most important and greatest playwrights, alongside Sławomir Mrozek and other writers of the post-war modernist generation. His plays are often performed in Poland, especially The Card Index (Kartoteka), which still appears on various stages today.

We live in strange times, as if between two borders drawn by two wars.The Second World War ended more than seventy years ago and inspired the creation of The Card Index. The painful and vivid experience of the play’s protagonist, the trauma of war, is one of the main themes. We are currently living against the backdrop of new wars: Russia’s war against Ukraine, the war in the Middle East, which threatens to escalate into the Third World War. We live in the shadow of that war and in the face of this war. This play is a human journey into oneself, like a rethinking of one’s life made up of individual pages: memories, dreams, visions, like a collection of individual files – the card index. The protagonist reflects on his life and finds himself at a very empty crossroads. At first glance, he seems passive, curled up in his shell, lying in bed. He still experiences the trauma of that war, and every explosion makes him afraid of a potential war. At first, I was disturbed by this inactivity on the part of the hero, but then I realised that this passivity is a deception. His mind is working feverishly. Everything that happens on stage is the fruit of his imagination, his dreams, his fantasies, his memories, and even in his reflective self-consciousness and subconscious he is hyperactive.

The context of the play is also important. Róźewicz and the generation of Polish modernists are the followers of the theatre of the absurd, the disciples of Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. The aesthetic of the absurd itself was also born as a consequence of the Second World War. The Polish avant-garde (Witkacy, Gombrowicz) greatly influenced Róźewicz. There is even a scene in the play in which a character is tortured for not having read Gombrowicz.

The play has a strong theatrical theme: there is an ancient choir, or rather a version of it. The choir is very concerned about what is happening on stage. The play itself actually takes place in a theatre, with the hero’s room being the theatre stage. The polyphony of these two themes: the crossroads of the theatre and his personal life, the collage of accounts, past debts, and betrayals, is what drives the play without plot forward. There are many grotesque, comic, and tragicomic scenes that are observed by the choir, and it ironises how great the times are, but how poor the people are. That this is a poor theatre, which does not correspond to our great times. One of the main conflicts of the play is the discrepancy between the desired theatre and the theatre that is, an irony about the current theatre and the human condition now. Human nature is neither heroic, nor happy, nor optimistic, as it is chaotic, man is lost in reality, lost in history, and his future is hazy. I think that this is how the play resonates with us today. The character himself is not self-righteous, he looks at himself in a self-ironic way, which is why episodes, images, people, and situations from the past sometimes turn into farce, sometimes into lyrics

Two versions of the play were written: The Card Index (1959-1960) and The Card Index Scattered (1992). The second version was born when the theatre gave Róźewicz the opportunity to stage The Card Index himself. Then he began to change and rewrite his text, and many social and societal phenomena and political criticisms were included. This play further denied not only the canons of drama, but also the laws of theatre. There are some very radical ideas in it. For example, he inserted a text about beer that was several pages long and suggested that it should be read until all the people in the audience had left the hall. I think there is a charm to that, a freedom to do whatever you want, an audacious rowdy attitude. The second version was probably never done without him, but we did include some scenes. The whole play is written in such a way that you can change the scenes, you can omit them, or you can just specify the subject to be spoken about, so you can make up the repertoire however you want. He gives you a set of blocks from which you can build your own house, construct your own version. Our version is tragicomic, comic, and sometimes grotesque.

This performance is part of a series of other performances in which I explore modernism. The Card Index reminds me a little of Max Frisch’s Biography: A Game, but there was a Swiss rationality and here we have a Polish irrationality. This play flirts with the line between absurdism and surrealism. It has all sorts of elements, which is what makes it so fascinating. Eastern European modernism, which followed the aesthetic of the absurdists, is no less interesting because Eastern Europeans had a much more terrible war experience than the French. There is not only absurdity, but also poetic lyricism. Róźewicz was first and foremost a poet, so we have included some fragments of his poetry to our The Card Index. I like this combination very much, as it is a sensitive human touch. He has something that Eugène Ionesco does not have: humanism. That’s why this play is not completely dark. The person is at a crossroads, but it ends with an ellipsis. The play can be interpreted in a variety of ways: some will find drama; others, a bouquet of absurdity. The change of scenes in the play is reminiscent of a rebus, and everyone has something to do by creating their own version.

by artistic director of the theatre Edgaras Klivis