Pakuła, Mateusz

The main axis of Mateusz Pakuła's chamber play is the meeting of two extraordinary figures of the 20th century: Harry Houdini (illusionist, escape specialist, debunker of spiritualist mediums) and Arthur Conan Doyle (writer, spiritualist, creator of the character Sherlock Holmes). The men meet in New York in 1922. They are accompanied by their wives: Bess Houdini (professionally also Harry's stage assistant) and Jean Conan Doyle (considered a spiritualist medium by Arthur). Their meeting is marked with an unspoken tension at the beginning, and over time by an increasingly open conflict between the rational and the irrational. At first, however, it might seem that it is the creator of the Sherlock Holmes novels who should be the proponent of what can be grasped and proven by human reason. The paradox of both this meeting and Matthew Pakula's play is that it is Harry Houdini, magician and illusionist, chasing away clouds and "disappearing" elephants on request, who is a believer in all things rational.

As the plot develops, the atmosphere between the couples grows thicker and thicker. A kind of climax of the play becomes the moment when Harry Houdini's mother supposedly begins to speak through Jean Conan Doyle... The magician and illusionist, however, is not fooled and cannot understand how educated people can allow themselves to be drawn into such "whirlwinds of nonsense", and his wife Bess ridicules the spiritualist séance with the statement: "I think the culprit is probably Plato, our reality is just a shadow of the true reality of blah blah blah."

Houdini vs Conan Doyle by Mateusz Pakuła is a brilliantly constructed, realistic and wildly comic play for two actors and two actresses. Both the following scenes of the piece and the distinctive characters are built in such a way that the play draws you into its content and does not allow you to tear yourself away for a moment. Here the author poses a question about the function of the irrational in our lives and forces us to reflect on faith in everything that cannot be explained by reason. What human needs, longings and fears does this faith respond to? And is it really worth tracking down and deconstructing all incomprehensible and inexplicable mysteries? What, in fact, is the difference between a predilection for illusionist tricks and belief in spiritualistic séances, and, following this line of thought - belief in God?

It's hard not to get the impression that this reflection in some way also applies to the medium of theater itself and the "illusionary magic" it produces, and thus also to theatrical tools. So the question remains as to what we choose to see. Arthur Conan Doyle's spiritualistic séance or Harry Houdini's "disappearance" of an elephant?

What would result from the meeting of two famous science-fiction writers – Stanisław Lem and Philip K. Dick? What if the Polish visionary-rationalist had joined forces with the mad energy of the American author? Among other things, these are the questions Mateusz Pakuła takes on in this play. Lem vs Dick is not however a straightforward attempt at finding the answers, it is more about exploring the limits of imagination (the famous authors and Pakuła’s own) on the one hand, and testing and pushing the line separating fiction from reality on the other.

In Lem vs Dick there is indeed a clash of worlds and characters, but not so much as a realistically presented confrontation between the two authors, but as a result of a gesture by Pakuła himself, who consciously marks this confrontation with his own imagination. Facts carelessly stand here next to fiction, conjectures right next to the truth, at times mixing together and making it impossible to distinguish between them, at other times appearing clearly separated, openly challenging each other. The piece balances between derision, artistic humour and thoughtful reflection on literature, theatre and reality, which is reflected in the varied, colourful language.
It all begins with the (in this case completely true) story of the conflict surrounding the Polish edition of Philip K. Dick's Ubik in Lem's translation. The Polish author could not pay the American writer his due in any other way than in zlotys, and these, after all, were worthless in the United States... In an absurd and amusing telephone conversation, Lem proposes to Dick to come to Poland, where he will be able to spend the money due to him immediately.

Pakuła's piece is divided into scenes depicting the development of this conflict and side episodes: once Dick tries to borrow money from his Mother to come to Poland, another time he denounces Lem to the FBI, exposing him as the alleged leader of an international conspiracy. The Polish writer, in turn, in one scene talks to a SB (a communist secret police) officer who threatens him, in another complains on the phone to Ursula K. Le Guin about Dick. Whose perspective an episode is presented from remains deliberately unclear, and the subjective nature of the narrative is clearly emphasised.
The relationship between Dick and Lem serves Pakuła to confront a series of opposites or simply radically different worlds: rationalism and madness, the West and reality from behind the Iron Curtain, calculated pragmatism and narcotic malaise. At the same time, the diagnoses posed here are regularly challenged by the author, the images painted in the work being erased with a single stroke of the pen. These gestures culminate when the author himself appears in the play as a brain in a jar functioning in virtual reality. Apparently he is trying to write a play about Dick, but it doesn't work out for him because he keeps thinking about his dying father.
It turns out, then, that it is the play with fiction, the artistic creation itself and its relation to reality, that are the main focus of Pakuła's interest in this piece. The layering and interlocking narratives, which are at an ever-changing distance from reality, are a recipe for a performance that is as demanding as it is absorbing in its structure, in which the author's hand remains constantly visible.

Who remembers when Pluto was stripped of its planetary status in 2006? Who protested loudly against it then, joining the chorus of the ninth planet’s fans? In whom did the excitement resurface when, in 2015, the New Horizons probe delivered the first high-resolution images of Pluto to Earth, and it turned out to be exceptionally beautiful? Certainly in Mateusz Pakuła, who in Pluto p-brane presents the story of the discovery of Planet X.

'Yes. It’s going to be a cosmic story. It’s going to be a story that happened and that at the same time rather didn’t happen. That is, yes, it is based on a biography, it feeds on the so-called true life of a true human being, who really existed, yet at the same time, it allows for plenty of fabrications' 

– Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, announces at the beginning of the play. Before Clyde, however, it was Percival Lowell who was the main proponent of its existence and a fierce explorer of Planet X. You may remember him as the author of the theory of the existence of a Martian civilisation that inspired Wells' War of the Worlds.

Pakuła's 'Cosmic story' presents a number of versions of the improbable meeting between Lowell, who was ridiculed in the scientific community, and Clyde, the actual discoverer of Pluto. However, Pakuła makes no attempt to predict the likely course of such an encounter, instead playing with the very possibility of it in a series of brilliant and amusing scenes that verge on the absurd. Once, Percival destroys the paper model of the Solar System that Clyde brought him as a gift, complaining that this ‘crap made out of celluloid’ has the wrong proportions. At other times, Percival is a jaded, clown-like paranoiac who fiercely pretends to be out of it.

Although one can hardly find seriousness in Pakuła's historical play, it is by no means meaningless. Somewhere between the frivolous jokes, references to pop culture and science, but also letters from Martians or the author's songs mixed with historical facts, a long-lost dream rears its head, the afterimages of which we can see in the story about the discovery of Pluto. A dream of discovery for the sheer joy of discovery, of knowledge without purpose. And perhaps also (at least a little) of blurring the boundaries between art and science. We have lost the ability to marvel at the universe, Pakuła seems to be saying. However, he himself has certainly not lost it, as evidenced by Clyde's final monologue, in which the story of black holes, trillions of galaxies and trillions of stars, instead of becoming a boring lesson, is transformed into a rousing appeal – more stories! Because only they can make sense of the immensity of the cosmos.