The article concerns the following theatrical plays: Powder Keg (pol. Beczka prochu), Family Stories (pol. Sytuacje rodzinne) and Snake Skin (pol. Skóra węża) directed by Grażyna Kania, Piotr Łazarkiewicz and Piotr Cieplak, who represent the youngest and the middle generation of polish theatrical directors and in the same time opt for different theatrical poetics varying from a specific kind of brutalism to poetics achieved by a theatrical metaphor of the highest quality. It seems to me, that such a choice will allow me to multiaspectually analyze the theme of Yugoslavian war, which was put under discussion by the Polish theatre with a sense of responsibility and an appropriate timing, taking part in the European discussion about the war.
In 1995, when Aleksander Bardini was mourned, he was remembered and eulogised mostly as a pedagogue and actor, and not so much as a director. The authors of younger generation perceived his productions as legendary; this was especially the case with his Dziady (Forefathers' Eve), which had been the first Warsaw production of the drama by Mickiewicz after the Second World War. Since he last worked as dramatic theatre director twenty years before his death, at which time he directed Barbarians by Gorky, his accomplishments in this field were in time overshadowed by his acting and teaching. Barbara Osterloff in her study recalls the most important productions which Bardini directed at dramatic theatres from 1941 to 1975, as well as his Television Theatre spectacles. The author makes ample use of priceless, and previously unknown to theatre researchers, documents from Bardini's home archive, such as his director copies. Osterloff sketches the full silhouette of the director who throughout his life remained faithful to a theatre that was 'literature-centred', and who, while working 'on the text level', treated his actors as indispensible co-creators and partners.
This article discusses the volume Było, minęło... Wspomnienia [Gone is gone... Memoirs] (Warsaw 2020), comprising twelve texts by Bohdan Korzeniewski, with a foreword by Anna Kuligowska-Korzeniewska and an afterword by Andrzej Kruczyński. Open to the generic diversity of autobiographical writing, the book arranges individual texts according to the chronology of the events they recount. Its great meta-theme is the genealogy of Polish intelligentsia: the image of a generation for whom World War I, the revolution, and Poland’s regaining of independence were formative experiences, one that entered adulthood in independent Poland and was raised with a sense of mission. Bohdan Korzeniewski (1905–1992) describes his younger years in the interwar period, his experiences during the war and occupation (in the outstanding “Auschwitz diptych”), and the post-war years. Although it brings together known texts, written in the second half of the last century, the volume shows that they are worth re-reading, especially for their literary value. Korzeniewski’s memoirs read like a fascinating autobiography (and self-creation) of a Polish intellectual, an eyewitness to the history of the 20th century, who gives us an account of his struggles with the world and with himself that together form a record of human existence.
Różewicz’s literary work, staged rather sporadically, constitutes nevertheless an important point of reference for artistic explorations of quite a large number of Polish theatre artists of the middle and younger generations. Playwrights born in the 1970s, e.g. Michał Walczak, make references to Różewicz while directors of the same age put on Różewicz’s dramas. The author of this essay, thus, asks the following questions: Who Tadeusz Różewicz is for today’s directors? Inwhat ways do they engage in discourse with the theatre project contained in his plays, with the “impossible theatre” that fuses realism with poetry by replacing a rigid dramatic form with a “collection of fragments” and rejecting “the unfolding of events” in favour of “internal acts”? An overview of selected productions of Różewicz’s plays from recent years leads the author to the conclusion that it would be difficult to find a production fully complying with the playwright’s theatrical vision.