Historical/Political Theatre
The Attack on the National Stary Theatre. The Birth of a Nation.
In this production, Jakub (Kuba) Skrzywanek, arguably the most influential theatremaker in Krakow, explores theatre as a tool for transforming social and political thinking.
In his epic and personal play, Skrzywanek and his team play with fiction and reality: real historical figures and invented ones move in multiple timelines. In part, this project is based on a new interpretation of the iconic Polish play Liberation. But this is not about presenting a new take. Poland is a country of ghosts, as Kuba says. The intention, by confronting grief, is to shake the audience out of its martyrological malaise; social, political, and ideological victimhood. Kuba takes a buzz saw to historical traumas that define Polish history.
It’s most appropriate that a play about theatre and decades of Polish history takes place in the National Stary Theatre. It begins with impressive pageantry, as the theatre itself becomes the central character. Historical figures make themselves heard and seen with a full-bodied sonic event slamming doors and windows, and with banners paraded on long poles representing major tragedies and disasters in Polish history. After a crowded ceremonial memorial reading of Polish names in the lobby during intermission, we witness a manufactured, darkly humorous, smarmy, contemporary memorial service. Finally, well into the third hour, there’s an extended, unrelenting sequence where a director directs actors over and over in a scene confronting guilt and complicity. From national trauma to personal trauma. No more grief, enough martyrdom.
As with many of the festival’s productions, audiences must live and breathe in real time along with the action, often uncomfortably so, in repetitive ritualized experience. There’s no escape into mere observation.
Maybe the story here is about Kuba, Jakub Skrzywanek, the theatre’s artistic director and creative force. Young, brash, intelligent, and charming, his work is a generational response to Polish national mythology—evolution, not revolution. Move past, move on, go forward. His theatre has no bounds and restrictions, like the restrictions often imposed by trustees, board members, or even artistic directors of regional theatres in the United States, out of concern for potential negative audience responses. As Kuba told us, he answers only to the minister of culture which gives him immense freedom from scrutiny, criticism, and censorship.
As with many of the festival’s productions, audiences must live and breathe in real time along with the action, often uncomfortably so, in repetitive ritualized experience. There’s no escape into mere observation.
At almost four hours, the experience escalates to a brilliant monologue vacillating between hope and despair—never didactic, never telling us what to think or believe; while a gigantic bright orange sun slowly lowers, retreats, and lowers again, as the back wall opens to a mirror revealing the audience as if on stage: a collective public on trial.
The Trial of Eligiusz Niewiadomski
The text is based on the court document “The Trial of Eligiusz Niewiadomski for the Assassination Attempt on the Life of the President of the Republic of Poland, Gabryel Narutowicz, on December 16, 1922.”
Bartosz Szydłowski, director of the Divine Comedy Festival, created a satirical look at patriotism and nationalism in a reproduction of the trial with some of Poland’s most renowned actors as part of the cast. The audience, in the cavernous Kaznia Nowa Theater, watch by way of live feed on a gigantic screen as the courtroom drama plays out by the actors in real time in an adjacent space.
The trial of Gabryel Narutowicz’s killer is a trial of specific political doctrine and ideological zeal which results in violence. The political murder was not random violence, but the result of hatred and fear of foreignness deliberately stoked by the far right. In his final words before the court, Eligiusz Niewiadomski stated that the murder of the first president of independent Poland was his duty. The radicalization of the right and its growing popularity in society, leaves no doubt that violence will escalate.
The historical event is a mirror of today’s complex social and political issues. The theatre raises questions about the dangerous fantasies which continue to stir national emotions. Poland’s issues are our issues.
Watching the trial on a screen achieves a kind of separation from history, a layering of awareness, a sense of the immediacy of radical ideas by using contemporary filmic technology. After the death sentence was passed, the actors enter the theatre one by one to celebrate the assassin’s political legacy creating an immersive, disturbing, escalating event—part mourning ritual, part protest.
