Marta Górnica’s Magnificat is a beguiling mix. It is theatre with no discernable plot or narrative, characters or relationships. Yet, equally, these are totally present in the minds of the audience watching. It a piece that you hear and feel, more than see and harks back to the role of the Athenian chorus in the amphitheatres of Ancient Greece. However to say that again is to do it a disservice, it is strikingly contemporary and modern.
To call the performers, Chór Kobiet, a choir is again to underestimate them. With just a rake and white backcloth, they become set, sound design, action, and their regimented movement - strict and upright becomes as present and rigid as the constraints on their role as female that they rail against. This ensemble, drawn from women of various ages and occupations in Górnica’s native Poland, are alive with their ambivalence of this position - the equality they are due in today's egalitarian age and the hold of the Catholic Church in their home country.
What they perform is a collage of cultural texts: fragments from the Bible, self-help manuals, Nigella recipes, quotes from contemporary authors and the classics, their local newspaper. Here too comes the modern duality of Madonna: both the Holy Virgin Mary and the other 'Like a Virgin' 80s pop princess.
The performance stirs up great feelings about the place of woman in this church apparatus, but so often through layers of irony and sarcastic delivery. The whole 45 minute duration sways from clarion call to falsetto public service announcement, but without a recognisable narrative story. As Górnicka says in her programme notes: "The women’s choir will shout, whisper and sing. It will handle words like music. It will turn language into voice."
They raise questions about the perception of women in today’s society that uses the choir's political predecessor, the Greek tragic chorus - think Aristophanes' The Frogs - that is distilled through their personal experience of the church's laid-out role for them. Their noises - singing, whispering, shouting, squeaking - and the huge presence of these 30 women is an incredibly powerful sight.
Górnicka as the director is more conductor, standing amid the audience and leading her vocal orchestra through their score. Her presence too feels emancipatory, helping in the realisation of what is occurring. There are sections which become slightly lost in translation - the whole performance, save for Nigella, is in Polish with surtitles. The staccato breaking down of words into syllables would make clearer sense if the audience understood the sung language but save for that there is barely a foot put wrong. It is a strange, uplifting, powerful experience which cannot be wholly described as a theatre show, rather a series of moments spent looking at what is, what can and what could be but, again in the words of the director, 'exploded from within'. Magnificat was simply that, magnificent.
Magnificat was performed at the Nottingham Playhouse as part of the NEAT14 Festival.
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