Raising the (iron) curtain in Poland…

Lloyd Webber’s musicals seem to be particularly prone to these technical snafu’s: the sets on Whistle Down the Wind and Sunset Boulevard in the West End would frequently grind to a halt, and of course the first night of the current revival of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat famously had a 20-minute break when the Ishmaelites failed to come riding by owing to a break-down of the revolve. But if Poland is going to have these musicals, it is obviously going to have these problems, too. Still, the audience were remarkably stoic and patient, and when the show finally started, they were wonderfully attentive and seemingly appreciative; though I found the deeply rhythmic curtain call applause - like a slow hand clap done in careful unison - slightly unnerving.

It was also slightly odd to find no mention of either Hal Prince or Maria Bjornson, the show’s original director and designer respectively, on the title page of the programme, since the production substantially resembles most of their work. Of course no one has the copyright on the central staircase of the Paris Opera House that provides the centrepiece for “Masquerade”, but elsewhere, iconic moments in the staging, from the Phantom’s canoe ride with Christine through a smoke-filled lake from which candelabra-like objects emerge to the Phantom’s lair itself with its little sinister music box of a monkey playing the cymbals, seems to be a direct copy.

But if one of the functions of globalisation, beyond the corporate branding I’ve already alluded to (and is also maintained for Koty, as Cats was known here), is to ensure that Big Macs taste the same the world over (and there’s now McDonalds everywhere here, but not - yet - Starbucks, though I spotted a Costa Coffee already on the Royal Mile), you also do get some local interventions, and it’s certainly good, after the Vegas version of Phantom that simultaneously both expanded the physical scale of the piece but reduced its actual length considerably, to see it in full again. This was a lavish, Slavic version of the piece that isn’t entirely slavish to its origins.

The younger generation of British playwrights often find the continent a more fertile place for productions of their work than theatres at home; and in Warsaw over the weekend it was both possible to see a production of Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis and also something called Tańcząc Sarę Kane. I saw the latter at Teatr Wytwórnia, a hip fringe space across the river from the city centre, on Saturday evening after seeing Phantom in the afternoon, and it proved to be the ying and yang of a theatrical diet. On the one hand, despite the Polish, Phantom was entirely recognisable to me; whereas the Kane piece, done with hardly any speaking at all (so therefore with less of a language barrier), was almost alien territory. It turned out to be an attempt to re-make scenes and themes in three Kane works - specifically, the director told me afterwards, from Phaedra’s Love, Blasted and Crave — as a physical theatre dance drama.

I’m not sure what any of it meant, either symbolically or literally, or exactly what it had to do with Kane; but then such theatrical deconstructions are a regular feature of Polish theatrical life, and this work-in-progress presentation was just one step along a journey that its creators and cast are taking their show on, as the director also told me: they plan to work on it some more. They have decidedly different ways of working here, as I discovered, too, recently when I interviewed the British-based American director Daniel Kramer, who was supposed to direct a deconstructed version of Hamlet at Teatr Rozmaitości, “the bad boy theatre in Warsaw”, as Kramer called it when I spoke to him for a Stage profile I’m doing to coincide with his new production of Birtwhistle’s opera Punch and Judy that he is staging under the auspices of English National Opera at the Young Vic, opening later this week. But whereas once a show goes into rehearsal in the British theatre it becomes an unstoppable object, for the Poles production dates are a moveable feast, over a period of months or even years: “While I was there,” Kramer told me, “they opened three shows, two of which they had postponed six times in three years.” Of his own version of Hamlet that he was developing for them, he says, “I started with 100 pages; on the day we postponed, I had 50, and now I have a new draft of 16 pages.” It’s true, apparently, to the vision of a theatre where, he says, “everything is deconstructed and modern”.

There seems to be a hunger and interest in British work (and theatre workers) over there; talking to one of the cast after the Kane piece, he asks me what Mark Ravenhill is up to - and who else is hot. But then Warsaw has a curiosity for talent beyond its borders, and it was exciting, too, to go on Friday night to a solo concert by Rufus Wainwright. Though he’s nowadays reached the point in the West where he can fill Carnegie Hall and the London Palladium, for instance, with his Judy Garland tribute show, here he was returning to basics in every way, holding the stage alone as he accompanied himself on piano or guitar, and appearing in a relatively tiny former cinema whose stalls seats had been entirely removed to provide an intimate standing area, with a small circle over it that had seats, like a smaller (but considerably less shabby) version of Shepherd’s Bush Empire. I love Rufus’s work, and though I’ve seen him at first nights of plays in both London and New York, this was the first time I’ve seen him performing his own work (I previously saw the Garland show at the Palladium), so it was a particular treat to see him in such close quarters amongst another highly attentive and appreciative audience - though this one happily resisted the synchronised applause that greeted Phantom but cheered him to the rafters instead.