The National Theatre in Warsaw has staged "The Book of Jacob". Olga Tokarczuk's novel was adapted by actress Barbara Wysocka and directed by her husband Michał Zadara. The play is generally poorly received. Dislike of it has united the progressive Aneta Kyzioł of 'Polityka" weekly with critics associated with the conservative side. The exception was Witold Mrozek of the daily newspaper "Gazeta Wyborcza", who writes reviews less and less frequently. But his enthusiasm also proved to be perfunctory.

The common conclusion is that "The Books of Jacob" are not particularly amenable to theatrical adaptation. Some critics go further, reproaching the superficiality and illustrative nature of Zadara's previous productions as well.

Do I agree with this? I share the view that it couldn't quite work. But do I owe anything to this show? Well, yes. After several years, I returned to Olga Tokarczuk's once unfinished novel.

Maybe a shaman?

This time it entered my mind much better just after seeing the theatrical story of Jacob Frank, full of strangeness and mystery. Someone compared the first scenes of Zadara's performance to a film style, with short shots, even snapshots presenting a whole lot of characters at once.

A lot of inconsistency, chaos, excessive jitteriness, randomness. And yet somehow it made me curious. And then it helped me get through the more difficult parts of the novel, characterised by over-elaboration, laden with casket constructions crossing hundreds of threads. I discovered that there was a lot of interesting stuff hidden in there, which is not to say that it wasn't controversial.

As a historian, I have, of course, always been aware of the Frankists, the Jews who in the 18th century crossed, rebelling initially against Orthodox Judaism, the magical boundary separating them from Christians. In fact, this was the only more massive experiment of its kind in Polish history. After that, there were only individual stories of conversion.

And the Frankists somehow blended into Polish society. If one of them, the military officer Jan Krysinski, had not attacked the Tsarist-oriented Krasinski family from patriotic though socially radical positions, would one of the three bards Count Sigismund have introduced a collective hero, a 'chorus of outcasts', into his 'Undivine comedy'? It was only a few decades after Frank had undertaken his strange religious work.

An important signal that this is a very interesting topic for me was Adrian Panek's 2011 film 'Daas'. The plot stretched between Poland and Austria and introduced Jacob Frank, the creator of this phenomenon, as one of the protagonists. However, it was not his story.

Frank is shown there in one of the later moments of his life, when he and his daughter briefly became the pupil of Empress Maria Theresa (who believed she would convert all Jews) and her son Joseph II (who is said to have slept with his daughter). In Olgierd Lukaszewicz's evocative, stylish performance, he is someone like a shaman, a player with mysterious political ambitions, perhaps a fraud paving his way among the elite of the time, and yet Panek has also equipped him with paranormal properties. His mystery is not fully solved.

Somehow Tokarczuk hasn't solved it either (unless I've missed something in the complex mega-story). We get quite a lot of detail about him. Jacob Frank (first Jacob Leibovich) is constantly scrolling, he is a point of reference, but he remains enigmatic, impenetrable, even to his followers.

There is a great scene in the novel when Jacob Frank is observed by Moliwda, i.e. Antoni Kossakowski, one of the most interesting characters here, a nobleman adventurer serving Jews - for money, but also partly out of curiosity or sympathy. Nota bene absent from Wysocka and Zadara's adaptation. He sees Frank mumbling some formulae. He wonders whether the man really believes in something. And if so, then what. And we don't seem to get that answer until the very end.

Icarus? Or perhaps a visionary?

Jacob Frank is a bit like the protagonist of Pieter Bruegel's famous painting 'Icarus', which Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz referred to in his short story. Apparently he is the main character, yet at times he is barely visible among the hundreds of people introduced sometimes only for a moment.

It is not just about the Jews themselves. It is no coincidence that Tokarczuk announced "A great journey across seven borders, five languages and three major religions not counting the small ones". So we have a deluge of digressions and digressions to digressions, concerning Catholics, including Poles.

Why does the writer suddenly make us follow the exchange of thoughts between the poet Elżbieta Drużbacka and the priest Benedykt Chmielowski (the one from the "New Athens") about which is more useful for expressing feelings in literature: Latin or Polish? Some of these pieces are downright fascinating. Others give the impression of excessive verbosity, an idle display of erudition. Much of this succession of caskets is contained not even in the normal narrative, but in the numerous letters or diary texts interspersed with the action.

The overload of plots, characters, situations, symbols and words can be approached in many different ways, but for a person with a love of history, there are a lot of gems in there worth sticking around for. Here Moliwda, Frank's Polish companion, spins a vision of a kind of syncretic religion, which will retain all the best of the existing faiths. Was this Frank's idea? We are unlikely to find out.

Similarly, when Thomas von Schoenfeld, the enlightened young convert, goes on tirades about the opportunities afforded to his countrymen by the philosophy of the Enlightenment, we will not know Frank's opinion. After all, at various times in his life he believed himself to be a messiah. Towards the end of his life, he was said to consider himself the incarnation of God.

His foggy nature unfortunately weighs a little on the fate of the show. In the novel, we pay less attention to Frank's enigmatic nature - in the face of a multitude of plots. However, on stage we are meant to be excited primarily by his fate; we experience the impression of a lacklustre character. Henryk Simon is a good young actor but, as we watch him, we are quickly overwhelmed with irritation that we don't know what he wants. This irritation grows. We ask, did he really heal people? But also what did he mean?

Yes, various words come out of his mouth. Yes, before his marriage with Christianity, he establishes a communion where property and wives are shared. He seems to be interested in the exploitation of women, but at the same time acknowledges to them some special mystical significance in his religion. Which draws him towards the Catholic Mother of God. Is this enough to consider him a visionary? It all gets blurred in a gallop of events, scenes we can barely keep up with. And he himself remains too ambivalent, virtually empty.

A boxy tale and a lot of chaos

On the other hand, the attempt to transfer numerous side plots, digressions, on stage, succeeds poorly. Zadara has opted for spectacularity. At times it is appealing, even dazzling. The characters wear period costumes (costumes by Julia Kornacka), and the frosted and clouded scenography by Robert Rumas, mocked by some, makes it a cruel fairy tale at times.

But the casket is chosen rather haphazardly. Some characters, present for a few moments (Gitla, Asher, Reb Mortke) remain perfunctorily presented and barely understood. The affective narrator Jenta, played by Barbara Wysocka herself, who is introduced probably mainly so that we can listen to the original, at times indeed beautiful language of the writer, does not help in this understanding.

Some scenes are unreadable without reading. Why do the Jews bring their book collection to the Catholic priest Chmielowski? Who are the numerous women in the entourage of the now old Frank, transferred to the reality of Vienna in Mozart's time and then to a German castle? What are the sexual allusions dropped there regarding?

The almost transparent religious reformer, previously played by Simon, acquires - yes - a certain clarity towards the end. But in the evocative performance of Jerzy Radziwiłowicz, he becomes a repulsive and grotesque tyrant.

In the finale, the action slows down a little. We experience an indefinable sadness heightened by the Allegretto from Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 performed live by pianist Justyna Skoczek. However, this tussle will remain untangled until the end. We feel that we should worry and sympathise, but we don't quite know what to worry about or who to sympathise with.

Chaos is fostered by Zadara's staging decision. There are dozens of characters here, so despite the large cast, each actor plays multiple roles (apart from Oskar Hamerski - Nachman, after baptising Jakubowski, is otherwise one of the most convincing creations). We have trouble figuring out who is who. Even Simon, after he ceases to be Frank, appears as a new character from his surroundings.

Of course, there are some acting masterpieces, such as Kacper Matula's Thomas von Schoenfeld, grotesque yet somehow dramatic in his confrontation with the old Frank. Ewa, Frank's daughter, played by Marta Wągrocka, is interesting but difficult to decipher plot-wise. She carries a tragic experience, a sense of wrongness, unfortunately unclear.

Most of the actors and characters barely flinch. I was pleased to recall the fine craftsmanship of veteran Miroslaw Konarowski, who appears at the beginning as Bishop Soltyk. He plays a host of other characters including, the second hierarch. It was only after reading the book in peace that I was able to decipher the many doubts about the fate of the individual characters, sometimes even grasping the meaning of the sentences thrown from the stage.

Most critics see the show mainly as a confection. I myself have shaken my ears a few times at various words or situations. But it is hard not to be interested in what Wysocka and Zadara emphasise and what they omit or reduce. And it is difficult to agree with some of their decisions.

Bad Christians? What Jews?

In a theatrical programme, Professor Przemysław Czapliński contrasted 'The Jacob's Books' with Henryk Sienkiewicz's "Trilogy". And he painted a demonic picture of the First Republic, a state owned by the nobility, where all the rest have no rights (and on top of that, it's all patriarchy). In this portrayal, Frank tries to break out of the matrix of being subordinate and unimportant. At the same time, he enslaves women himself.

Of course, a state ruled by the nobility carried with it many injustices, if not cruelty. With extreme decentralisation and weak law enforcement, it was even easier to hurt. But was it all so tar-black, given that Jews had been eagerly settling here for several centuries, moving out of western Europe?

To be sure, the leftist Tokarczuk has an anti-Sienkiewiczian vision of the history of that 'class' Poland. But it is the left-wing Zadara who makes more unambiguous choices than she does. Bishop Sołtyk speaks from the stage with satisfaction about the trial of a group of Jews accused of ritual murder. He is convinced that these practices are true, citing the testimonies of those arrested. We hear the screams of tortured people from behind the stage. In a word, that Poland appears as the apocalypse.

It is in the novel too. But after all, in another novel scene of a feast for a group of magnates who become Frank's patrons, the message is far from clear. - 'A bishop priest would also talk like that after being tortured,' remarks the eccentric, obsequious castellaness Kossakowska. We won't see that here, just as we won't hear the remark that the Pope had already forbidden belief in the myth of ritual murders.

Reduced to a scene and a half in this version, Kossakowska (Anna Lobedan) is supposed to be merely the unsympathetic caretaker of Frank's wife Chai (Paulina Szostak). In the book, the castellan is a deeper character and her motivations are far from clear. This is true of many of the Poles, led by Moliwda-Kossakowski, who is absent here altogether.

True, Frank ultimately falls victim to the machinery of the state policing the righteousness of religion. He falls precisely because he becomes a Christian. After all, imprisoned for several years in the Czestochowa monastery, he is an atypical victim, still having powerful patrons, communicating through the walls with his people.

Even if Jews are weaker in this social set-up, Tokarczuk does not hide the fact that they too guard their orthodoxy brutally. They are sometimes victims, but they are also sometimes persecutors of alleged heresies. They are otherwise a people of the book.

It is in their early ritualistic religious considerations, not yet in Poland ( Frank came from Asia), that one can see the origins of the Franks' movement, which, by the way, leads to a sectarian morality within the sect. In turn, the lack of any freedom of conscience, the feeling that religion is a public matter, guaranteeing social order, so it must be imposed, also unites Christians and Jews.

At the same time, are the final gloomy musings of Frank's supporters to the music of Beethoven about their failure the reality or a reflection of their leader's sick soul, since he has not fulfilled his ambitions? Let me repeat: his people will blend into the Christian world, including the Polish world. The anti-Semitism of the Polish nobility was a sense of superiority, but it was not racist in nature. Tokarczuk even tracks down traces of the various ties that united the two communities despite the strict separation. This is almost absent in Zadara's version. Did it not accommodate?

But I don't think it matched the 'anti-Sienkiewicz' initial thesis either. Zadara tells us about the chagrin of a man trying to free himself from his imprisoning status. In Tokarczuk's work there is much more about the common, universal fear of followers of all religions. At several moments it also appears on the stage of the National Theatre, for example in the form of an ominous comet which is supposed to herald the end of the world. But all these premonitions are lost in the confusion, in the hustle and bustle, in the theatrical tricks.

The answer to all religions?

Ultimately, we await the writer's answer as to why she has taken us on this journey through religions. Is it just for historical tidbits, for social observations? An attempt at such an answer is made towards the end. It is uttered in the novel and on stage by Nachman, then Jakubowski, one of Frank's most fervent followers.     SIGN UP TO OUR PAGE 
"All religions, laws, books and old customs are gone and weathered. He who reads these old books, follows these laws and customs, it is as if he still keeps his head backwards, and has to go forward. Therefore, he will stumble and fall. Because everything that was, came from the side of death. The wise man, on the other hand, will look forward, ahead, through death, which was a muslin veil, and stand on the side of life."

As a measure of doubt and various religious crises, these are interesting keywords. But is this the credo of the author herself? If it were, a postmodern cliché would emerge from the thicket of accurate observations.

At the same time, it is hard not to remember this manifesto of the uselessness of all religions. But in that case, isn't this journey a bit of wasted time? Or do these sentences encourage us to define ourselves in relation to metaphysics? But what if we have flawed, unreliable tools at our disposal?

Wysocka and Zadara have failed spectacularly. From my perspective, however, they have a merit: they encouraged me to look where I might not have wandered on my own. This is, however, a theatre of stories, not a series of banal deconstructions such as abound on contemporary theatres.

The authors probably did not fully reflect the writer's intentions. And it is also possible that they have paid attention to the limitations of the novel itself. In any case, I encourage you to read "The Books of Jacob". It is worth it, even if the response at the very end is to feel unsatisfied.

– Piotr Zaremba

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and journalists

 
– translated by Tomasz Krzyżanowski