Sławomir Mrożek

• Born: June 26, 1930
• Birthplace: Borzęcin, Poland
• Died: August 15, 2013
• Place of death: Nice, France

Other Literary Forms

Sławomir Mrożek began his career as a writer of sketches and short stories, some of which are collected in Słoń (1957; The Elephant, 1962). More stories by Mrożek have been collected and translated into English as The Ugupu Bird (1968). His published fiction in Polish includes Półpancerze praktyczne (1953), Wesele in Atomice (1959), Postępowiec (1960), Deszcz (1962), and Opowiadania (1964). He also has published a book of satiric drawings, Polska w obrazach (1957). Although Mrożek writes drama primarily for the stage, he has adapted for television Dom na granicy (1967; The Home on the Border, 1967), from his short story of the same title, and he has written a monologue for radio titled Woda (1967). His radio play Rzeźnia was produced onstage in Warsaw in 1975. Adaptations of Mrożek’s work include “Siesta,” adapted by Martin Esslin, from the short story of the same name for the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1963; a comic opera adapted by Henryk Czyz from Mrożek’s play Kynolog w rozterce; and Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of Nicholas Bethell’s translation of Tango for the Royal Shakespeare Company production in 1966. Mrożek also contributed regularly to the Polish avant-garde magazine Dialog from 1959 to 1967.

Achievements

While Sławomir Mrożek was awarded both the literary prize in 1957 by the Warsaw magazine Przegląd Kulturalny and the Millennium Award of the Jurzy-kowski Foundation in New York in 1964, his achievements are perhaps greater in the contributions he has afforded Polish theater. Mrożek is generally regarded as the first Polish dramatist in the Theater of the Absurd, although as his work becomes more accessible to audiences outside Poland, he is emerging as one of the leaders of international postabsurdist drama. Mrożek’s career can be divided into two phases. The first phase, which culminated with his important work Tango, is characterized by what the dramatist himself describes as a concern with exploring metaphors and ideas. His plays since Tango are marked by a less experimental and more direct political and social style.

Another of Mrożek’s great achievements is his use of allusions recognizable in both East and West. His early stories parody works by Samuel Beckett, Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde. Tango has been described as a Hamlet play, and Vatzlav encompasses both the structure of Everyman and the techniques of Bertolt Brecht. Mrożek’s plays are also characterized by an audacious theatricality. In Striptease, a huge hand enters through a door to make demands of the two men imprisoned there, whereas in Rzeźnia (the slaughterhouse) a horde of barnyard animals invades a music-hall concert.

Mrożek has benefited from Western interest in Eastern European literature brought about, in part, by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the Solidarity movement in Poland during the early 1980’s. The political content of his early plays, cleverly conveyed through irony and metaphor, proved attractive to audiences on both sides of the Iron Curtain. His later works, such as The Emigrés and Alpha, tend to be didactic and realistic, rather than suggestive and fantastic. Nevertheless, he retains his sense of absurdity, his satiric bite, and his concern with form.

Biography

The son of a village postmaster, Sławomir Mrożek was born on June 26, 1930, in Borzęcin, near Krakow, Poland. In 1939, the Soviet army moved into Poland to meet the Nazis, and independent Poland’s twenty-one-year life came to an end. Mrożek spent the remainder of his boyhood near Krakow in a country under foreign domination. Although he never completed a university degree, the playwright studied architecture and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow; he also studied oriental art and philosophy for a time. His interest in structure and artifice, as evidenced in the areas he chose to study, seems to have carried over into his fiction and his dramatic works.

In the postwar years, the normally active Polish theater suffered from a strict adherence to its Soviet satellite government’s policy of socialist realism; Mrożek saw his first play after the war, but he was not initially attracted to the stage. Rather, he began by drawing cartoons and writing humorous sketches for the Krakow newspapers in 1955. The so-called thaw of 1956 removed some restrictions on the creative expression of Polish artists. One year later, the appearance of Mrożek’s illustrated collection of stories and sketches called The Elephant helped establish him as a satirist and a writer of fantasies, which were very often thinly disguised, humorous attacks on the bumbling Polish bureaucracy. By 1958, Mrożek was editing a weekly, Postępowiec, to which he contributed more satiric pieces. Meanwhile, he became involved with an improvisational theater group called Bim-Bom, for which he wrote a short play called The Professor as part of a presentation called “Joy in Earnest” in 1956.

Mrożek, as evidenced by his story “Escape Southward,” in The Elephant, rejected the avant-garde as a supportive environment for creative effort relatively early in his career. In the story, an apeman and three village boys happen on a competition at the headquarters of the Association for Polish Writers in which the participants spit, belch, and recite original works on dandruff and sweat glands. The apeman manages to win first prize with a series of inarticulate grunts leading to the word “cauliflower,” and at the climax of his delivery he throws a dead rat at the audience. Mrożek remained independent of mob art—avant-garde or otherwise—and began to contribute plays to Dialog, which was edited by Adam Tarn. Most of his plays, beginning with The Police in 1958, were first published there. He supplemented his income as a playwright through journalism, illustrations, theater criticism, and through translations of English poetry into Polish.

Produced at Warsaw’s Teatr Dramatyczny in June of 1958, The Police examines in cartoon style what happens when the only remaining revolutionary in a totalitarian state swears allegiance to the government. As represented in this play, Mrożek’s vision, both frightening and hilarious, became increasingly popular on Polish stages; eight more of his plays were produced in the next six years. He soon became Poland’s best-known playwright outside Poland as well; in 1961, Mrożek had his American premiere in New York City, where the Phoenix Theater presented The Police.

Having been awarded both the literary prize in 1957 by the Warsaw magazine Przegląd Kulturalny and the Millennium Award of the Jurzykowski Foundation in New York in 1964, Mrożek left his native country for Genoa, Italy, in 1964. His intensely Polish play, Tango, in which, as Adam Tarn has noted, he both satirizes the Polish character and falls under its spell, premiered in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, on April 21, 1965, and some six weeks later was produced in Poland.

The success of Tango, coupled with Mrożek’s outspoken criticism of the Soviets, contributed to a growing international reputation. In 1968, while living in Paris, he publicly denounced the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia; consequently, his passport was revoked, and he was declared persona non grata by the Polish government. His work was banned in Poland from 1968 until 1974, and, although he continued to write during that time, his plays became more overtly political. Freed from the constraints imposed by the Communist government, but also cut off from the theatrical traditions that he had reshaped in his plays, Mrożek lost some of the ingenuity and evasiveness that contributed to the power of his earlier work. The Emigrés, which has had many successful productions around the world since its premier in Paris in 1974, treats the cyclic movement of history that has created in Poland under totalitarian rule a contemporary phenomenon of émigré literature, of which Mrożek is a part, to rival the tradition of Polish émigré art—the work of Adam Mickiewicz and of Juliusz Słowacki, for example—which was vital to the cultural life of Poland in the years of foreign domination in the nineteenth century. Mrożek’s response to Solidarity can be found in Alpha, which concerns a charismatic revolutionary, modeled on Polish labor leader Lech Walesa, kept under house arrest in an unnamed European country. During Alpha’s English-language premiere in New York City in 1984, Mrożek himself was exploring yet another facet of the theater by directing a production of his play Ambasador in West Germany.

Analysis

Through the plays of Sławomir Mrożek, observed Kott, the Poland that meant nowhere to Alfred Jarry in Ubu roi (wr. 1888, pr., pb. 1896; English translation, 1951) is now everywhere indeed. Both Mrożek’s short fiction and his plays, although influenced by an Absurdist tradition of which Jarry is a part, translate the experience of modern Poland into a striking vision that depends on the tension between the surreal and the real. Whereas Jarry used a fantastical Poland as a metaphor for a destructive banality that allows human cruelty to thrive, Mrożek renders his actual experience in Poland as an ironic nightmare in which the reality of daily life is shaped by a regimen of absurdity and bureaucratic banality. The world he captures has survived the grotesque experience of World War II only to be forced to accept the inevitable prospect of endless Soviet domination. Mrożek captures the absurd workings of this society in a concise, usually unelaborate style marked by an ironic sensibility cultivated as a response to illogical happenings and to absurdity as inextricable parts of existence.

Theater critics outside Poland have often found themselves at a loss in discussing the peculiarities of Mrożek’s work as well as the traditions of the Polish theater to which his plays are indebted. Martin Esslin has called him an absurdist who creates political theater; Daniel Gerould has dubbed Mrożek, along with his countryman Tadeusz Różewicz, heir to a legacy of Polish avant-garde drama; and Tango has been described as both an Aesopian satire and a Shavian play of ideas. Mrożek’s plays, however, exceed the limits of any one school or movement. His development as a dramatist is a chronicle of formal innovation and experimentation in response to theater history and to the culture and history of Poland. Yet, as Jan Kott, the Polish critic, has noted, in Mrożek’s plays the references go beyond Poland to encompass all Europe.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Mrożek’s attempts to redefine the theater in the wake of the triumph of the absurdists, an endeavor analogous to the work of such dramatists as Edward Bond, Václav Havel, Arthur Kopit, and Stoppard. As one of his Polish precursors, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), intended to do, Mrożek redefines the drama through a revolution in form, and his plays spring from a dramatic consciousness that shares Witkacy’s belief that the playwright must shake off old habits and stop repeating the past. All of Mrożek’s work during the first part of his career generically addresses itself to the problem of form in postabsurdist art, and Tango deals specifically with the questions of form as a necessary component of social, political, and cultural history. The opening of Tango in Poland in 1965 is considered the most explosive night in Polish theater since the premiere of Stanisław Wyspiański’s Wesele (pr., pb. 1901; The Wedding, 1933), and the numerous productions of Tango throughout the world have focused attention on both Mrożek and Polish drama. His plays have been produced in Canada, France, Great Britain, Norway, the Soviet Union, the United States, and West Germany.

Czesław Miłosz has observed that Mrożek often employs a sly parody of styles in his work, and both his fiction and his plays have been described as parables. The absurd, grotesque, totalitarian environment that had conditioned Mrożek’s thinking deprives him of bestowing on his works the customary happy ending or simple moral associated with such tales. His short fiction is populated with children, talking animals, elves, and snowmen who migrate to the mountains when spring threatens to melt them into puddles. Yet, side by side with the fantastical are everyday quarreling comrades, petty bureaucrats, unsuccessful suitors, aging relatives, foolish soldiers, and dishonest zookeepers. The result is a highly stylized universe that allows Mrożek, like Franz Kafka before him, to balance the grotesque with the whimsical imagination.

Thus, Mrożek blends the fantastical and the real, and the result, like the superimposition of one drawing on another, is striking in its visual effect. In “On a Journey,” a traveler in a horse-drawn chaise riding through an utterly believable country landscape notices that men in postal uniforms are standing at measured intervals along the road. The coachman informs the traveler that the men constitute the region’s wireless telegraph: One yells to the next, and he yells to the next, and so on. During The Martyrdom of Peter Ohey, in which a tiger is supposedly discovered in a middle-class family’s bathroom, an entire circus is set up in the family’s apartment without moving a single piece of furniture.

In response to totalitarian doublespeak, Mrożek often subverts language through substituting an unlikely vocabulary for an expected one. Mrożek describes an idyllic, rural wedding celebration in “A Wedding in Atom-town” but imposes on this conventional setting the trappings of nuclear jargon in place of colloquial speech. In preparation for the wedding, the bride is given electrolysis and put in a compression chamber, and, when a fight erupts during the wedding celebration, the guests deploy short-range rockets and cuff one another with atomic knuckledusters. Arguments for cannibalism in Out at Sea are presented by each character in speeches that use the rhetorical devices of political oratory, and two of the speakers stage a brief rally, where they wave a banner that reads, “We Want Food.” The two men forced into a room by a huge hand in Striptease attempt to deal with the inexplicable appendage in logical, philosophical language that scarcely masks their fear and helplessness. Implausible, but appropriate, such language choices function in Mrożek’s work beyond mere satire to substantiate the intrinsic imaginative validity of each particular story and play.

Mrożek’s targets are by no means limited to the manifestations of the repressive political and social climate in Poland. Pressure to conform, and thus surrender the imagination, comes not only from the state, but also from the established artistic community. His portraits of the artist can be scathing; he attacks both aesthete and social realist in his short stories. Mrożek, however, was never strongly aligned with an active, subversive avant-garde in his country, as his satire of the Polish avant-garde in “Escape Southward” demonstrates. Moreover, the same story presents Mrożek at his most amusing and his most forceful in that it makes a travesty of the international avant-garde masterpiece, Beckett’s En attendant Godot (pb. 1952, pr. 1953 Waiting for Godot, 1954). His portraits of the foolish Eleanor and the ineffectual Stomil in Tango provide further evidence of his disparagement of the avant-garde, yet, paradoxically, his own drama is indebted to two of his Polish avant-garde precursors, Witold Gombrowicz and Witkacy. For Mrożek, the imagination, which cannot be subjected to state law or the pressure of artistic peers, seems even more alluring, more triumphant, when cast against a background of ideological indoctrination and rigid artistic conventions.

His conception of the artist and of art itself lies squarely in the Romantic tradition that has evolved from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Percy Bysshe Shelley down through the existentialists. In Tango, artists are construed as historically gifted people who, unlike other men, are united with the spirit of women and children, and Mrożek’s experiences under tyranny have led him to see that Shelley’s proud boast that poets are indeed the unacknowledged legislators of the world is taken seriously by men in power. They fear that the poet’s effect might loosen their hold, and consequently they suppress a force they understand too well as a threat to their own security. As the brutish Eddie tells Stomil near the end of act 3 of Tango, “Nothing to worry about so long as you keep quiet and do what I say.” The artist in Mrożek’s work embodies many Romantic qualities: He is a solitary figure, he rebels against artistic convention, he struggles for the triumph of the imagination, and he is a political progressive.

This artistic stance is particularly apt in the Polish theater, which is often used as a forum for the presentation of ideas for cultural and political debate. Despite the particular dramatic technique at work in sophisticated Polish theater, the major Polish plays of the past one hundred years inevitably involve the clash of ideas. Wyspiański’s plays, for example, decidedly romantic and full of spectacle, ultimately deal with political and social issues. The same audience that applauded Wyspiański also cultivated a taste for the unelaborate intellectual play of ideas. In addition, the oddity of Polish nationalism, grounded in cultural heritage and Roman Catholicism rather than in geographical reality, has resulted in a number of paradoxes that have helped shape the themes and techniques of modern Polish theater; Mrożek’s work continues this tradition.

Soviet repression did not alter this, although it forced Mrożek, while living in Poland, to develop an oblique dramaturgy that, while receiving government approval, served to reinforce, in its allusions and idioms, Polish national feeling. Mrożek’s introduction to The Police, in which he carefully explains that “this play does not contain anything except what it contains,” is an example of ingenious equivocation that invites the audience to look for everything he says is not there. Most of Mrożek’s early plays contain direct, if often subtle, allusions to the political situation of contemporary Poland; this state of affairs, which helped shape the vision of Mrożek’s fiction, is concisely rendered in one exchange in the third act of Tango. Stomil asks if he can still have his own opinion. “Of course,” replies Eugene. “As long as it agrees with ours.”

The Police

The Police, Mrożek’s first play to receive considerable attention, puts onstage a world in which this kind of totalitarian attitude has triumphed. The last remaining prisoner in a police state disavows all of his former revolutionary beliefs and swears allegiance to the heads of state, the Infant King, and his Uncle the Regent, thus effectively rendering the police obsolete. The Chief of Police, disturbed by the prospect of an entire bureaucratic system deprived of purpose, persuades the loyal Sergeant, in the name of saving the police, to shout out a window that the Regent, uncle to the Infant King, is a “dirty swine.” This accomplished, the Chief arrests the Sergeant, and the police again have a raison d’être. The play’s action degenerates into an absurd series of arrests and counterarrests by characters with cartoonlike aspects that help push their world closer to fantasy. The connection between the fantasy of the play and the absurd reality of life in a police state, apparent to Mrożek’s audience from the onset, is clearly stated in the Sergeant’s final, futile yell in act 3: “Long live freedom!”

The Martyrdom of Peter Ohey

The initial premise of The Martyrdom of Peter Ohey is more absurd than that which sets the plot of The Police in action. The structure of the play, hinted at by the pseudo-epic subtitles that Mrożek gives to each scene, is episodic, piling one absurdity on another and leading to Ohey’s death by gunshot. Of all Mrożek’s plays, The Martyrdom of Peter Ohey is closest to the Theater of the Absurd, especially to the work of Eugène Ionesco. Like Ionesco’s Berenger in Rhinocéros (pr., pb. 1959; Rhinoceros, 1959), Mrożek’s Ohey confronts the impossible and is left to find the refuge of self insufficient. Ohey’s son insists that he has been bitten by the tiger, but he shows no markings; his daughter is carrying on with the Scientist in her bedroom, which is ostensibly a temporary tiger-observation center; and his wife, an Ionesco-like creation who admonishes the children to brush their teeth before meals or risk poisoning the soup, confesses to her husband in a satire of Jungian jargon how the tiger has stolen her heart away. Deserted by his family and tyrannized by the forces of society gathered in his house, Ohey agrees to sacrifice himself to the unseen and unreal tiger by playing decoy for a Maharaja’s hunt. In the final moments of the play, Mrożek makes the allegorical functions of his characters explicit, and like Ionesco and Edward Albee, uses the form of the absurd as a vehicle for social comment. Confronted by a Foreign Office Man, a Circus Manager, and a Scientist, Ohey declares in act 3, “My house is a milling ground for politics, science, art, and authority.” Ohey goes to his death in the third act to escape these contemporary furies with words that foreshadow Arthur’s sentiments in Tango: “This age does not please me and I have no wish to seek slavishly for its approval.”

Everything is possible in the play—a circus, a jungle safari through Ohey’s dining room, two murders offstage while characters comment like newscasters—because Mrożek’s absurdist technique depends on implausibility. As a result of the focus that Peter Ohey procures through the overwhelming and absurd events thrust on him in the play, he emerges from this fantastic world as more than a mere two-dimensional figure. Peter Ohey is one of Mrożek’s few characters to have an actual name. He suffers, has fears, changes in the course of the action, and serves as Mrożek’s spokesman by the play’s end.

Out at Sea and Charlie

This emphasis on character is not developed in either Out at Sea or Charlie, one-act plays that were published and produced in 1961. Murder figures prominently in both plays, as it does in The Martyrdom of Peter Ohey, but the action of these plays, abrupt and effective, stresses situation over character. In Out at Sea, Fat, Medium, and Thin, three survivors of a shipwreck, dressed in tuxedos, sit on chairs on a raft and debate, because they are hungry, which of their party they will eat to survive. The political metaphor of cannibalism is presented in a stylized way through such details as a tablecloth, china, cutlery, silverware, and a vase of flowers. The grotesque flourishes of Out at Sea seem to evolve logically from the preposterous premise of the play. For this technique, Mrożek is indebted to the plays of Gombrowicz, whose theater relies primarily on developing terrifying situations. This influence is also apparent in Charlie, in which an Oculist saves his own life by convincing a murderous Grandpa in need of glasses that one of his regular eye patients is the Grandpa’s traditional—and, like the tiger in The Martyrdom of Peter Ohey, imaginary—enemy.

Striptease

Striptease, originally produced in Sopot on the same program with Charlie, is a much richer, more complex piece that demonstrates Mrożek’s mastery of theater idiom as well as political metaphor. Two identically dressed bureaucrats carrying briefcases, Mr. I and Mr. II, are forced into a room. A huge hand appears and demands that the men take off their clothing. They comply, but not without bickering between themselves, until a second hand wearing a red glove appears and beckons them to follow. The first hand puts dunce caps over their heads while they, clad in their underwear and clinging to their briefcases, stumble out after the second hand. Certainly, Striptease can be read as a political allegory in which two men, representing opposite concepts of freedom, are subjected to a tyrant who treats them both in the same way.

Striptease bears some resemblance to Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter (pr. 1959 in German, pr. 1960 in English) and to Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (pr. 1966) in its delineation of a force that controls the existence of two men and capriciously makes them victims, and it is no less overtly theatrical than either play. The doors that open and close by themselves and the huge hand entering and exiting call attention to the artifice of the stage. The play makes no pretense at being anything but pure theater, and the logical answer to the men’s queries about how they arrived in the room is, for the audience, from the wings. Mr. I and Mr. II are a variation of the music-hall duo, and Mrożek utilizes, as did Beckett in Fin de partie: Suivi de Acte sans paroles (pr., pb. 1957; Endgame: A Play in One Act, Followed by Act Without Words: A Mime for One Player, 1958), the rubric of vaudeville sketches in which performers are controlled and defeated by objects and props.

The Party

Whereas Striptease relies on an essential theatricality for its effect, The Party investigates the ritualistic aspects of theater. Three farmers in search of a party they cannot find create one of their own; they engage in praying, singing, dancing, playacting, fighting, and hanging. They seek meaning in an empty room through trying to shape a party out of the fragments of rituals that they recall. Finally, they open up an old cupboard that contains masks, costumes, shoes, and props. One of them, designated as B, exclaims, “There’s a whole theater here!” They proceed to try on the dresses, slip on high-heeled shoes, and wear the larger-than-life masks that represent the King, the Virgin, and Death. Mrożek’s farmers momentarily reenact the primitive essentials of the drama—the formless energy of Dionysus ritualized into the Apollonian formality of drama. The actors pretend to be farmers who pretend to be actors, and the cycle of the theater ritual is complete.

Enchanted Night

Enchanted Night explores not so much ritual as the dimensions of reality discerned by the mind. Through a progression from the reality of a hotel room that two traveling officials share into a dream that they experience simultaneously, Mrożek offers a sophisticated parody of the mechanics of expressionism. The beginning of the play carefully establishes the objects in the hotel room and the feelings of the two men that will be integral to the dream that evolves from them—their discussion about women, the noise of the railroad nearby, the painting of the Venus de Milo, the smell of lilac soap. The play’s movement from reality to dream and back again, a structuring device often used in the poetry of the Romantics, criticizes human inability to reach the ideal. Despite the insight that Old Man and Old Boy gain about themselves in their dream of the ideal, when they awake they do not remember a thing. The use of dreams in Enchanted Night also demonstrates Mrożek’s relationship to the twentieth century Polish theater techniques of Julius Osterwa, who attempted through psychological chamber theater to explore the entire interior aspect of character and concentrate on mood and atmosphere.

Tango

No play by Mrożek, however, makes use of dramatic modes, both Polish and non-Polish, in the way Tango does. It is an outgrowth of and advance over all of his earlier work, and, as noted above, it signals the conclusion of the first phase of his playwriting career. Tango is the artistic expression of a reality more dramatic than drama, a world whose power, as Stomil says in act 2, “erodes all forms and that goes for tragedy too.” Tango stands as Mrożek’s answer to Stomil’s question in the play’s second act: “What can we do? Tragedy impossible, farce a bore—what’s left but experiments?”

Tango, set in the mid-1960’s, takes place in the cluttered, disorganized home of a family that encompasses three and one-half generations. Eugenia and her brother, Uncle Eugene, remnants of the late nineteenth century, live with Eugenia’s daughter Eleanor and her avant-garde artist husband, Stomil, both of whom belong to the generation of André Breton and Tristan Tzara. On hand is a fat and boorish butler, Eddie (or Edek), who plays cards with the family, sleeps with Eleanor, and attempts to exploit the decadence of the household for his own advantage. This morass of confusion proves intolerable for Arthur, the twenty-five-year-old son of Eleanor and Stomil, who attempts to force the household to reorganize itself through the imposition of old rituals and customs on its members, an endeavor to which the play’s ironic subtitle “The Need for Order and Harmony,” alludes. Part of Arthur’s scheme involves marriage to his eighteen-year-old cousin, Ala, a half-generation younger than he is chronologically but years ahead of him emotionally. With the help of Uncle Eugene, Arthur stages a coup d’état and forces the family, at gunpoint, to revert to the old ways that embodied meaning before the major upheavals of the twentieth century.

Just before his marriage to Ala, however, Arthur gets drunk and despairs of his method of returning to old customs. He decides instead to exercise absolute power over life and death to create meaning. In a moment of weakness brought on by Ala’s disclosure that she has been unfaithful to him with Eddie, a lie she invents to distract Arthur from ordering Uncle Eugene’s death, Arthur humanizes himself in a fit of jealous rage. Eddie, who has Arthur’s gun, stages a brief counterrevolution; attracted by the idea of pure force, he uses his physical prowess to end Arthur’s brief exercise with power by killing him with two swift blows to the back of the neck. Eddie assumes control over the household, and, as the play ends, dances a tango with Uncle Eugene over the corpse of the misguided, although idealistic and romantic, Arthur.

The world to which Tango alludes is real, but it is at the same time deliberately nonrealistic, a poetic construct of reality. Mrożek intends to portray in the guise of a three-act chronicle of one household a parable of life in the twentieth century. Eugenia represents the old generation, once shocked by people such as Eleanor and Stomil, but now bored and cynical, frittering away existence in useless poker games. Uncle Eugene, with his memoirs and his nostalgia for the order of the past, stands for the aristocracy displaced by the cultural and political events of the twentieth century. Eleanor and Stomil, married in 1928, are the aging, now ineffectual artists who once achieved their goal of destroying all artistic tradition and, consequently, all form. They also represent an entire generation that could not wrestle with the necessity of form as a political reality and thus sacrificed Poland’s brief independence as a nation to Germany and the Soviet Union. Whereas Arthur embodies the spirit of the romantic visionary desperate to have the world conform to an impossible ideal, Ala functions as a representative of the apolitical, personal liberation movement that began to spread through most social strata in the 1960’s. Eddie, with his gross habits and small, square moustache, represents the ignorant but powerful mob that resorts to Hitlers and Stalins to assert itself. Mrożek, a socialist-humanist, cannot reconcile himself to tyranny in any form. The triumph of Eddie in Tango, on a political level, alludes to the subjugation of humanistic social ideals by inhuman force—the revisionist Marxism of the Soviet Union—which is a way of life for the victimized Poles.

Like Shaw’s Heartbreak House (wr. 1913-1919, pb. 1919) and its Chekhovian antecedents, Tango uses an extended family to chart the passing of a way of life. It once took courage for Stomil and Eleanor to dance the tango in public; when Eddie and Uncle Eugene dance the tango at the play’s end, it becomes a pas de deux of force and submission. Art and politics are partners in history, and Tango is addressed to an era of the triumphal dance of tyranny on the corpse of visions and ideals.

The Prophets and Repeat Performance

The Prophets and Repeat Performance, which was not produced in Poland until eleven years after its publication, explore in different ways some of Mrożek’s concerns in Tango. The Prophets mixes historical figures such as the Magi with caricatures of political types in a grotesque, futuristic fantasy about two identical men who both claim to be the one, true prophet for mankind. Whereas this play ends with a cataclysmic spectacle of revolution that asserts, through a series of absurd and Surrealistic devices, a Marxist view of the inevitable dialectic of history, Repeat Performance insists on an inescapable need for rebellion in each generation. The Ghost, an allegorical figure who represents the spirit of rebellion, once courted Daddy through fascism but now woos Daddy’s son, Little Fellow, simply by being anti-Daddy.

Vatzlav

Vatzlav, which had its English-language premiere at Canada’s Stratford Festival in 1971, follows the adventures of a shipwreck survivor through a world that is composed of Mrożek’s arbitrary reconstruction of history. Comprising seventy-seven scenes, Vatzlav is nearly cinematic in its movement, a development that can be linked to Mrożek’s debt to silent-film comedy in some of the pre-Tango plays. Vatzlav contrasts the destruction represented by the bloodsucking capitalist Mr. Bat with Vatzlav’s various rebirths and transformations. The play ends with a hopeful image. Cradling in his arms a baby who is the child of Justice, Vatzlav prepares to cross the border of the play into the world. “You wait here,” he says to the audience in scene 77. “If I don’t come back, you’ll know I’ve made it. Then you can follow.”

The Emigrés

This guarded optimism is not reflected in The Emigrés, a gritty, naturalistic play in which two Eastern European men square off against one another in a basement apartment that they share in a Western European city. Mrożek seems to have inverted the theatrical techniques of Striptease and The Party in The Emigrés to examine the relationship between two expatriates of opposing views who, trapped together, try without success to celebrate New Year’s Eve. They are singularly obsessed with the country they have left, however, and their freedom, ironically, forces them to confront their own inadequacies in the new life they lead.

Later Works

Certain other works that Mrożek has written since Tango explore relatively new territory for the playwright, although most retain his sense of irony and his ability to convey the grotesque. The Home on the Border, adapted for television from his short story of the same name, concerns the inhabitants of a cabin who have an international border running directly through their home. Rzeźnia, originally written for radio, demonstrates the inability of art to withstand intrusions by life. His one-act plays Serenada, Polowanie na lisa, Lis filozof, and Lis aspirint employ the methods of beast fables to comment on decaying civilization, and Alpha, which premiered at New York City’s La Mama ETC in October, 1984, uses direct contemporary allusion to the celebrity status of Lech Walesa to examine ironically the nature of revolutionary leadership in a media-saturated world.

Bibliography

Czerwinski, E. J. Contemporary Polish Theater and Drama (1965-1984). New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Provides history and criticism of Polish theater in the mid-to late twentieth century. Bibliography and index.

Gerould, Daniel, ed. Twentieth Century Polish Avant-Garde Drama: Plays, Scenarios, Critical Documents. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977. Explores Poland’s experimental theater and provides translations of major plays and documents.

Kott, Jan. Theatre Notebook: 1947-1967. Translated by B. Taborski. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968. Provides translated analysis of Polish theater.

Miłosz, Czesław. The History of Polish Literature. 1969. 2d ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Provides history and criticism of Polish literature. Bibliography and index.

O’Neill, Michael C. “A Collage of History in the Form of Mrożek’s Tango.” The Polish Review 28, no. 2 (1983). Explores historical references in Tango.

Stephan, Halina. Transcending the Absurd: Drama and Prose of Sławomir Mrożek. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997. The first monographic study devoted to Mrożek, this work centers on his development as a playwright and provides criticism and interpretation of Mrożek’s life and works. Bibliography and index.