Grzegorz Niziołek

Jan Błoński had the opportunity to co-operate with Konrad Swinarski by working as a literary director of the Old Theatre in the 1960s and 70s. He repeatedly expressed his fascination with the artist, but he did not dedicate him any separate text. However, he spoke about it many times, both in interviews and in various commemorative texts. The author of the text analyses the various strategies of these statements: first of all love discourse within which Swinarski-artist in the process of creating functions as an object of fascination described in hot emotional tone. He shows how emotions allow Błoński avoid or even obscure the political theatre of Swinarski. He also puts the thesis that the reading of Błoński’s comments being full of doubt, misleading clues and vivid emotions allow you to re-start a discussion about Konrad Swinarski’s theatre.

 

Theatrical fact
The article is an analysis of Tadeusz Różewicz’s Birth Rate (“the biography of a play”) as an “unhappy” performative act that cannot establish a new paradigm of textual performance (as in Ryszard Nycz’s reading of Różewicz’s text) or epitomize the postmodern breakthrough in the theatre (as in Halina Filipowicz’s interpretation). In this case “unhapinness” refers to the singularity of the catastrophe (inability to write and complete a particular play in a particular moment of history for a particular institutional form of theatre) and to the relationship between the poet and the theatre conditioned by the experience of ressentiment. Such an interpretation requires as a context not the “wholeness” of Różewicz’s literary output but historical and cultural occurrences accompanying the fact of publishing Birth Rate. Różewicz undermines the institution of Polish theatre in the late 60s as a vehicle of collective mourning that enabled the audience to oversee the facts which were uneasy for collective memory and hard to work through.