Theatre's Lean Years in Free Poland

On 4 June 1989, Poles were accompanied on their road to the ballot box by a poster showing Gary Cooper and the Solidarity logo. Solidarity was to step in like the sheriff in High Noon—just one example of the theatricalization of public life—to restore law and order in the country. If that had been accomplished, the legendary people’s representative Lech Walesa would be in office at the Presidential Palace today, instead of the communist-bred Aleksander Kwasniewski. The results of the last, wholly democratic elections do not prove people’s love of the old order, but rather their great disappointment with the new. Economic transformations have brought visible benefits to only a small group, while the majority are poorer and feel insecure.

Democracy has set culture free from a number of obligations, but diminished its role as well. Artists, who are in the avant-garde of change both because of the message carried by their works and because of the stance they take, do not conceal today that they are disillusioned about culture’s condition. Many outstanding artists found their way into the inner circle of the new government or into the parliament in order to change reality, but this turned out to be much harder than expected. Free market policies were welcomed with open arms, but without full awareness of how destructive they are for culture, and for theatre in particular—especially in a poor country without a strong middle class prepared to assist culture voluntarily, and subjected to a form of capitalism more akin to the predatory nineteenth-century kind than to the civilized capitalism of the late twentieth century. Today, theatre luminaries speak loudly of theatre’s downfall, the deterioration of workmanship and reduced artistic ambitions, and the necessity of maintaining state support for culture—something they were willing to abolish completely just a few years ago in exchange for the free market’s invisible hand.

Fortunately, not all the concepts of a liberal economy could be applied to culture in Poland, so no theatre has actually been shut down. There are still sixty-four repertory companies with permanent acting ensembles and technical staff, not to mention twenty puppet theatres and the same number of opera and music theatres. Their situation, however, is rather dramatic: only a dozen or so considered particularly important for national culture are financed from the federal budget. The majority have been transferred to various local government administrations, which provide them too much funding to die but too little to live. The managers of such theatres now plan only weeks in advance, two months at most. Will the ensemble survive and will there be enough money for the upcoming premiere? Since money is constantly lacking, successive projects have to be given up or a sponsor found, which verges on the miraculous. Thus, instead of solving artistic problems and planning a repertory that best uses their actors’ capabilities—as was the case under communism—theatre managers spend their time raising money. Some rent hallway space to currency exchange offices, others to shops with Taiwanese clothes, others still rent theatre premises to local business people for conferences and banquets. Such a vast shortage of cash and the necessity to find it is undoubtedly something artists had never been prepared for. On the contrary, the more desperate organize strikes, as if they didn’t want to comprehend that under capitalism not every educated person has to have a job, especially in art.

The poor financial condition of theatres is augmented by an audience crisis. Statistics are merciless, showing in graphic form what is visible to the naked eye: audiences are shying away from the theatre. The point that marks a number close to six million in 1988 (for repertory companies alone) also begins a steeply downward line for later years, a line that stops at just over three million in the 1993–94 season. This means that in the first years of freedom nearly half the audience has deserted; only one-tenth of the population of forty million chooses to attend live theatre. In 1995–96...