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No 4 (55) 2018

The Early Polish Theatre Productions of Beckett’s Works

The Early Polish Theatre Productions of Beckett’s Works

Ewa Brzeska (University of Warsaw)

The full version of this article is available  in Polish  in the printed version of Tekstualia and in the on-line subscription.

The article shows that Beckett’s works were initially linked by the critics with the contemporary social and political background. His plays were interpreted through the lens of the drabness and absurdity of daily life in communist Poland. Sometimes Beckett’s works would be set side by side with the romantic canon, whereas in other cases they were discredited as expressing trivial existential pain through a philosophical circus. Stefan Treugutt went so far as to predict that „Godot will not open new roads for drama”, although his opinion on Beckett evolved with time. Wisława Szymborska and Andrzej Kijowski saw truth in Beckett, as did Czesław Miłosz, who appreciated his humility and honesty in talking about the fall of Western European culture from the perspective of its inhabitant, and not of someone who points it out with a sense of superiority. With time, as the recognition of the Irishman’s work in Poland grew, the Polish discussion of his works began to focus on an important issue dividing the critics and the thespians, that is how to approach the spreading practice of departing from the play’s text and stage directions? Should it be treated as a reprehensible transgression against the will of the author, or rather as Beckett-inspired artists’ autonomy of expression? Over the recent decades we have witnessed that the phenomenon of experimenting with his plays, combining his works with those of other writers, or modernizing them, has intensifi ed. Beckett’s directions for stage productions have never been treated in Poland as having paramount signifi cance, and Beckett’s presence in Polish theatres now confi rms this.

The sample of Polish version of this article is available here: https://tekstualia.pl/pl/numery/beckettwpolsce 

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