Cherry Blossom

 

Linguistic and cultural disorientation makes up the core of the latest Traverse production, Cherry Blossom, co-produced with the Teatr Polski of Bydgoszcz. J?zykowa i kulturowa dezorientacja stanowi rdze? najnowszego przedstawienia Teatru Traverse, Kwiat wi?ni, przy wspó?pracy z Teatrem Polskim w Bydgoszczy. Making the language struggle of Polish immigrants in the UK more tangible for the audience, author Catherine Grosvenor and director Lorne Campbell chose to stage the bilingual production of the play, in collaboration with Fifty Nine Productions, the cutting-edge video artists.

Cherry Blossom is an outcome of one year of research and idea exchanges orbiting around the recent Polish immigration into Scotland. Although the British media have talked about it ad nauseam, there has not been much going on in the theatre scene. In this sense, the production opens a space for a more creative dialogue about the intercultural miscommunication and incomprehension.

Campbell’s explosively evocative production combines two stories: a fictional one – about a 43-year-old Grazyna who takes up a factory job in Scotland to support her husband and children back in Poland, and a real one – about Robert Dziekanski who died last year at the Vancouver airport being unable to communicate with the airport staff who struck a newly arrived immigrant with the police taser. Although the script at times verges on the cliché, the production manages to bring out the genuinely stirring and credible ‘immigrant’ experience. The bilingual exchanges between two Polish and two Scottish actors skilfully juggling all the parts are enhanced with dazzling sequences of video images and text projected on the mobile stage set making up either open or claustrophobic spaces. The overall impression is that of disorientation, entrapment in the labyrinth of incomprehensible words one cannot escape from.

Apart from featuring really strong performances, this powerful production is successful for two other reasons: first – it cleverly uses the language barrier both as a subject and a medium of artistic expression, secondly – it effectively combines fiction with reality, where the latter sadly has no happy ending.