Ancient Plays on Stage in Communist Poland
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4312/keria.20.3.41-74 Elżbieta Olechowska Ancient Plays on Stage in Communist Poland We reached this shameful impasse, when the entire world drama, from Aeschylus to Shakespeare, to Brecht and Io- nesco, became a body of allusions to People’s Poland. (…) I dream of a form of socialist life that will abolish the un- bearable and destructive state of affairs, where the authori- ties see cultural creations and their reception as a constant threat requiring the use of force. Leszek Kołakowski1 Using ancient drama as a vehicle for propaganda or as a weapon in the ideo- logical struggle is neither simple nor predictably successful. The Greek and Roman plays have been established in European culture for millennia, their ideas, conflicts, characters remain part of human psyche “for all seasons”; whether interpreted from the point of view of the past, present, or future, they have been used “for and even against” conflicting ideologies, as per Lech Wałęsa’s famous bon mot.2 Intuitively, we would be inclined to lay such at- tempts at politicising antiquity at the door of the anti-communist intellectual opposition, who knew their classics almost as well as they knew their Pol- ish Romantic bards, rather than blame “working class” politicians for such 1 Leszek Kołakowski (1927–2009) was Polish philosopher and historian of ideas. This is his state- ment at the meeting of the Union of Polish Writers held on 29 February 1968, devoted to the banning of Adam Mickiewicz’s Dziady [The Forefathers] directed by Kazimierz Dejmek at the National Theatre [Teatr Narodowy] in Warsaw; quoted according to Marta Fik, Kultura polska po Jałcie: Kronika lat 1944–1981, Vol.
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