A History of Polish Theatre

Every time I teach a Polish theatre course, I ask myself a question “Why Polish theatre?” What can be inspiring in it for the audiences from other cultures? I think that the recently published A History of Polish Theatre, consisting of essays written by a considerable number of authors from Poland and the anglophone world, gives a very good answer to this question and elucidates many other significant questions relating to Polish theatre traditions.In the introduction, the editors—Katarzyna Fazan, Michal Kobialka, and Bryce Lease—signal the necessity to adopt new approaches to the history of Polish theatre incorporating new temporalities and perspectives, including ones that open Polish culture to such phenomena as racism, neoliberalism, nationalism, and other previously suppressed issues such as feminism, LGBTQ+ issues, and postcolonialism. In order to capture the polyvalent nature of these thematic strands the editors decided to organize the specific sets of issues as constellations. Thus, they create a narrative about Polish theatre avoiding a linear structure and periodization in favor of thematic clusters. The essays collected in the volume show how specific themes (such as the political sphere, ritual, acting, audience, stage organization, and many other formal elements) underwent multiple transformations, and how they were reshaped and often transgressed, reappearing in different forms in different times. In other words, the essays try to capture the continuities of many theatrical traditions in their discontinuous and often reconstructed and deconstructed forms.Even though the editors try to avoid periodization, the early chapters devoted to Old Poland/Staropolska, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism build a strong historical background that resonates in the following chapters. Thus, the whole text becomes more reader-friendly, especially for the reader who is not very familiar with Polish history. (And most American readers are not.) For instance, in the chapter devoted to Old Polish theatre (teatr staropolski) the authors (Agnieszka Marszałek and Mirosław Kocur) highlight the nonhomogeneous character of the Polish lands and stress the rich performative traditions of the plebeian theatre (teatr sowizdrzalski) already enunciated in the written chronicles by Gallus Anonymous, Wincenty Kadłubek, and Jan Długosz. These traditions, as the authors imply, can be traced in different forms up to this day and mentioning them enriches the scope of the essays’ discussions.Since the book is addressed to English-speaking readers usually not fully familiar with Polish history, it is really beneficial that the contributors devote a lot of attention to explaining the difficult and twisted history of Poland. Without that background it would be difficult even for the academic reader to follow some intricate meanderings of Polish history. I hope that theatrical circles (even though the strong theoretical bent of the introductory chapter may discourage some members of this community) will benefit from this rich and inspiring source of information about Polish theatre and culture. The collection of essays contained in this book presents such a broad spectrum of various aspects of Polish theatre and culture that every reader will be able to satisfy his or her interests. However, to make this volume more friendly for the readers researching data relating to specific theatre events or stagings, it would be beneficial if it had lists of performances and a fuller index listing all varieties of discussed theatre forms (as in case of teatr sowizdrzalski) not only the names and the main entries, but also terms in Polish such as teatr robotniczy, or teatr ogródkowy. Sometimes theatre names are missing, for instance Chór Kobiet, even though the index lists Marta Górnicka, this group's director and creator and their photograph is on the volume's cover. In general, the index could better mirror the richness of the text itself.The discussions in the chapters devoted to the Enlightenment and the beginnings of institutionalized Polish theatre (Teatr Narodowy), by Dobrochna Ratajczakowa and Piotr Olkusz, and Romantic theatre and drama, by Włodzimierz Szturc and Zbigniew Majchrowski, not only present a seminal historical background, but also invite us to rethink our perceptions about these fundamental periods. Instead of solely foregrounding traditional references to the colonization of Poland known as the partitions, they suggest highlighting the functioning of the public/private sphere in the late eighteenth century. The chapter on Romanticism not only shows the richness of Adam Mickiewicz's, Juliusz Słowacki's, Zygmunt Krasiński's, and Cyprian Kamil Norwid's ideas, but more importantly proposes a shift from the “Polonocentric” reading privileging national ethos, significance of suffering, loss of sovereignty, and messianic ideas to a more universal approach so that everyday people, “a child, a village shepherd, a peasant woman, or a madman,” are not appropriated to the national cause (p. 118).After presenting these rich foundations of Polish theatre in the initial chapters, the book evolves into the plethora of constellations announced in the introduction. Following the main gist of the project, the editors included not only the main theatrical areas, but also incorporated the, so to speak, loose ends not usually part of grand historical narratives. The chapters titled “Mapping Theatre (I) and (II)” focus on a variety of such theatrical phenomena. For instance, they list the history of Shakespearian performances in Poland from the seventeenth to the late twentieth centuries, and the presence of Jewish, mostly Yiddish, theatre during the centuries of the Jewish presence in Poland; they also discuss Lithuanian theatre and even travelling German troupes.Some chapters tend to focus specifically on individual theatre creators like the chapter titled “Modernist Theatre” by Katarzyna Fazan and Dorota Jarząbek-Wasyl, mostly focusing on the accomplishments of Stanisław Wyspiański. Yet, as in the previous chapters, both critics do not lose a broader view combining diachrony with a synchrony. They situate their discussion of Wyspiański's revolutionary modernist practices within the turn-of-the-century theatrical confluences including Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz's linguistic experiments and Gabriela Zapolska's social critique. At the same time, they connect Wyspiański's modernist practices with the previously discussed (Romantic) themes and also signal the future reverberations of the poet's ideas in the work of Witkacy and Tadeusz Kantor.In a similar way, the chapter on “Avant-Gardes” disperses into a variety of constellations not only including iconic avant-garde representatives such as Kantor, Józef Szajna, Jerzy Grotowski, or the Reduta Theatre, but also including recent groups such as Wojciech Krukowski's Akademia Ruchu and contemporary feminist performers (such as Katarzyna Kozyra, Joanna Rajkowska, or Ewa Partum).It is important to note that the lack of linearity in the book's construction endows thematic clusters with a spatial and temporal malleability so that the reader has a chance to confront the past as well as very contemporary theatrical phenomena. This spatial quality is enhanced by the “dialogic” (to use this Bakhtinian term) approach, since every chapter representing a specific theme consists of two essays that complement and talk to each other. Thus, Agnieszka Jelewska's essay presenting different forms of the Polish theatrical avant-garde is combined and enriched by Anna Róża Burzyńska's discussion about sound poetry, radio theatre, and other acoustic forms of theatre such as Górnicka's Chór Kobiet. This way every thematic cluster acquires a very broad range of potential discoveries and perspectives—every essay works like an archeological dig bringing to light often marginalized or discarded artifacts.I agree with the publishers that many aspects of this volume make it groundbreaking. Yet it is not the first comprehensive history of the Polish theatre—there were others by Kazimierz Braun, Roman Szydłowski, and Witold Filler.2 But it is definitely the first history of Polish theatre expressing the twenty-first century's worldview and concerns giving voice to previously neglected areas or groups (such as women or queer circles) proposing to revisit the previously strongly established topoi. For instance, one of the most comprehensive histories previously published, A Concise History of Polish Theater from the Eleventh to the Twentieth Centuries by Braun, as well as its continuation A History of Polish Theater, 1939–1989: Spheres of Captivity and Freedom,3 foreground the context of nationhood, the loss of sovereignty, and the fight for freedom in which Polish theatre played a major role, but it programmatically omits the questions of women's participation in the theatre, queer issues, the presence of not strictly Polish troupes in the Polish theatrical landscape and many other smaller “paths” that build the grand theatrical narrative.Fazan, Kobiałka, and Lease decided to include all these non-mainstream elements of the Polish theatrical landscape. Therefore, the richness of the material contained in this ambitious project not only elucidates the marginalized and often forgotten performative forms such as puppet theatre, or szopka, but invites still deeper research undermining stereotypical ideas such as returning to the Romantic tradition without a patriotic twist. As I have already pointed out, a revisionist energy characterizes one aspect of this book; the other manifests itself in bringing in contemporary perspectives. It is not surprising therefore that toward the end of the volume the essays concentrate on the twentieth- and twenty-first-century performative practices, women playwrights and directors, queer performers, acting methods, and theatre audiences.The last two essays by Krystyna Duniec and Agata Adamiecka-Sitek close the book with a strong feminist and queer perspective and the statement about the inevitability of repetition. Grounding her approach in Fernand Braudel's idea of the interconnectedness between past and the present occurrences, Duniec analyzes theatre trends in the interwar period and after the fall of communism, tracing sometimes surprising affinities in both epochs. This last chapter in some ways frames the whole book suggesting that “no matter how hard we tried,”4 we are always in the realm of repetition and interconnecting with the past, and being with the past, as the editors stress in the introduction, can produce innovative and fruitful results such as the present volume of A History of Polish Theatre.