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Polish director Lupa picks up €60,000 Europe Theatre Prize

Published Monday 6 April 2009 at 10:55 by Ian Herbert

Polish director and teacher Krystian Lupa has been presented with the 13th Europe Theatre Prize at a ceremony in Wroclaw, Poland.

The prize, worth €60,000, has been won in the past by a series of notable figures including Harold Pinter, Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine and Pina Bausch.

The ceremony was the culmination of a week of events around the prize, including performances of Lupa’s work and that of the five winners who shared the €30,000 11th Europe Prize for New Theatrical Realities, designed to mark innovation from a younger generation of theatremakers.

Lupa is known both for his long career as a director and for the large number of bright young Polish directors who have emerged from his tutelage at the theatre academy in Krakow. Among his productions seen in Wroclaw was an eight-hour dramatisation of the exotic lifestyle of Andy Warhol and his circle, Factory 2. It is a mark of Lupa’s stature that several hundred of the world’s critics and leading theatre industry figures sat through this demanding performance to its very end, many of them joining in a standing ovation.

There was a more divided reaction to the works shown by the winners of the New Realities prize. Argentinian-born Rodrigo Garcia, who works in Spain with a company whose title translates as The Butcher’s Shop, aroused much controversy with productions involving maltreatment of a variety of animals.

Italy’s Pippo del Bono offered two contrasting productions covering either end of a career lasting more than 20 years, but also staged a short piece featuring the actress Marisa Berenson which he had prepared the night before.

Guy Cassiers, from Belgium, was represented by a harrowing solo performance, Sunken Red, played in perfect English by the actor Dirk Roofthooft.

From France, Francois Tanguy brought his Théâtre du Radeau with an abstract collage of prose, verse, music and movement.

The fifth winner, Hungarian director Arpad Schilling, who broke up his world renowned Kretakor company last year, spoke of his new work bringing theatre to disadvantaged communities in France and his native Hungary.

The Europe Prize is also the focus for meetings of its associated bodies, such as the Union of Theatres of Europe, which admitted four new members including the national theatres of Athens, Prague and Sofia. The event was part of Wroclaw’s celebration of Grotowski year, celebrating several anniversaries connected with the groundbreaking Polish director, whose early career was centred on the city.

Another festival follows in June, featuring previous winners of the Europe Prize including Peter Brook and Pina Bausch, as well as the ascetic Russian director Anatoli Vassiliev, the first winner of the New Realities Prize.

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