Contexts for Vatzlav: Mrożek and the Eighteenth Century

Contexts for Vatzlav: Mrozek and the Eighteenth Century DANIEL GEROULD During the twenty-five years that Slawomir Mrozek has been writing for the theatre, two distinguishing marks of his work have been a preference for parable forms and an obsession with dialectical polarities of nature and culture, instinct and reason, primitivism and civilization, experience and theory. Now these are characteristics typical of many French writers in the Age of Enlightenment, but Mrozek's affinity for eighteenth-century thought and literature might pass unnoticed if it were not for Vatzlav, a play that is the dramatic equivalent of a conte philQsophique, such as Candide, and that was given an eighteenth-century staging in its only Polish production. At pains to show the playwright's avant-garde credentials, critics have tended to focus their attention on Mrozek's relationship to the theatre of the absurd, the impact of Beckett and Ionesco, and the influence of his Polish predecessors Witkiewicz and Gombrowicz. I Yet Vatzlav reveals another side of Mrozek's art that has antecedents in the eighteenth century. As a modem philosophe, satirist, and moralist in the tradition of Voltaire and Diderot, the Polish playwright shares their concerns with what Lester Crocker calls the problems of "our existence, the nature of man, the organization of society and the integration of the individual within it. ..."2 Even Mrozek's nihilistic black humor may be closer to "the philosophy of the absurd that was one child ofthe Enlightenment"3 than it is to that of Beckett and Ionesco, and his critique of extreme rationalism has its roots in the eighteenth century. Mrozek is a masterful assimilator and parodist who has been able to adapt for his own purpos~s a wide variety of literary styles and genres,4 but in the case of his eighteenth-century personation, I believe that the author of Vatzlav goes beyond mockery, mimicry, and pastiche. Mrozek, a disabused rationalist, finds congenial the oblique techniques and social themes of the philosophical tale in the Age of Enlightenment; for the playwright to treat ironically a form that is itself deeply ironic is simply to continue its traditions. 22 DANIEL GEROULD As is often the case with Polish drama, which is fatally entangled in national history, everything about Vatzlav is complicated and unclear. The play exists in a critical limbo, its nature and position anomalous and undefined. And yet this enigmatic work is in some crucial wayan important transitional work, about a hero in transit, by an author in transit. I propose to explore Vatzlav's place in Mrozek's play-writing and Mrozek's place in Vatzlav by discovering contexts for the play - above all, in the eighteenth century. Written in the summer of 1968 - and probably not finished until after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in late August - Vatzlav is the first of Mrozek's plays not to be published in Poland, and for this and otherreasons that I shall look at shortly, it has been almost completely ignored in criticism of Mrozek in Polish.5 Vatzlav received its world premiere in ZUrich at the Theater am Neumarkt on II February 1970 and was first published in German translation that same year. Ralph Manheim's translation, presumably made from the German, also appeared in 1970, and the English-language premiere took place in August at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario. It was not until nine years later that the Polish premiere could be given, on 2 I April 1979 at the Teatr Nowy in L6di, directed by Kazimierz Dejmek, one of Poland's greatest theatre artists. Unlike Mrozek's other plays, which are widely performed at many different theatres throughout the country, so far Vatzlav has received only this one production, which, although invariably referred to as brilliant, was not reviewed in Poland.6 The play was in effect partially banned by being confined to this one staging. After he became managerofthe Teatr Polski in Warsaw, Dejmek revived the production in April 1982, with a different cast but the same stage design.? Vatzlav was published in Polish for the first time in 1982, along with Mrozek's recent play The Ambassador, in a single volume issued by the Parisian...