Post-Communist Specters: Polish Theatre in the Twenty-First Century

In 2014, twenty-five years after the fall of Communism in Poland, a new anthology of theatre texts has appeared in print. All of the plays included in this thick volume have already been staged in Poland; together they represent the work of the youngest generation of Polish playwrights. I mention the fall of Communism because the main themes running through all eleven texts of (A)pollonia: Twenty-First-Century Polish Drama and Texts for the Stage in one way or another relate to that event. Clearly, for all authors in this volume, most of them coming of age after 1989, that groundbreaking event must be still a decisive point of reference in their personal experience as it is for those approaching Polish or Eastern European culture today.

In the introduction, Krystyna Duniec and Joanna Krakowska list these main themes as the legacies of World War II, national mythologies, Polish-Jewish relations, and issues relating to liberal capitalism and consumerism. Closely tied to them are questions dealing with gender and identity, sacrifice and violence, personal responsibility, displacement, loss, and memory. Thus, the eleven texts of the volume present a full spectrum of the current social and political discourses in Poland. But apart from being politically resonant, their language reveals a new face of Polish sensibility.

The title (A)pollonia comes from the famous 2009 production by the same name, directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski, in Nowy Teatr in Warsaw. This text (by Warlikowski, Jacek Poniedziałek, and Piotr Gruszczyński) encapsulates not only all the main themes permeating the anthology, but somehow, in a very distinct and pointed way, through its structure, dynamics, tone, and atmosphere, announces the language, tenor, dimension, and feel of the other pieces. The attached DVD with performance excerpts includes a characteristic, disquieting scene from (A)pollonia, a celebration of bestowing a medal of Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem Judge (played by Andrzej Chyra) to the family of Apolonia Machczyńska. The scene, which resembles an intense interrogation rather than a noble ceremony, confronts us with a judge looking like a showman, his lips smeared with red lipstick, sneering, laughing, and asking distressing, piercing questions to Ryfka, the saved person who dispassionately unfolds her family’s and Apolonia’s grim story. The atmosphere emanating from the stage is toxic and creepy, almost sacrilegious, full of dissonances and rifts making the viewer uneasy as a witness to the scene. (The ethos of witnessing or being a bystander has recently become central to Holocaust Studies in Poland.) Such a disjunctive tone is characteristic of many other pieces in the volume alluding to the body of “Polonia” (Latin for Poland), with its memories, tragedies, guilt, and pain; its past and its present.

The editors invite us to approach the texts collected in the anthology through four thematic clusters: Polin, focusing on specifically Polish-Jewish themes (“Polin” means Poland in Hebrew and Yiddish or “stay-here”—as Krakowska and Dunin explain); Transpolonia—exploring Polish-German tensions; Postpolonia—referring to post-Communist transformations; and the Lack-of-Polonia—signaling the present state of consumerist attitudes obliterating all former nationalistic sentiments and attachments.

When thinking about the texts collected in the (A)pollonia anthology, I cannot help feeling that I am encountering a new chapter in Polish theatre. Earlier, for me, that theatre’s experimental, avant-garde character was related to the linguistic and formal practices of such authors as Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz and Witold Gombrowicz, to the non-textual experiments of Tadeusz Kantor and Jerzy Grotowski, or to the visionary—“inscenizacja” type—performances of Konrad Świniarski or Kristian Lupa. The present anthology proves that the text is coming back to Polish theatre. And these are very rich, polyphonic texts using all possible types of expressive language. We see pieces of archival materials—as in The Mayor by Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk, which quotes the former mayor of the infamous Jedwabne—or in the...