The Police by Slawomir Mrozek

First published:Policja, 1958 (English translation, 1959)

First produced: 1958, at the Teatr Dramatyczny, Warsaw, Poland

Type of plot: Absurdist

Time of work: The mid-twentieth century

Locale: Unspecified

Principal Characters:

• The Chief of Police
• The General
• The Prisoner, a former revolutionary, later the General’s aide-de-camp
• The Police Sergeant, an agent-provocateur
• The Wife of the Sergeant-Provocateur

The Play

Act 1 of The Police opens in the office of the Chief of Police in an unspecified monarchy. Much to the consternation of the Chief of Police, the Prisoner declares that after ten years in prison he has had a change of heart and will sign an oath of loyalty to the government. Ten years ago he had attempted to assassinate the General by throwing a bomb at him, but the bomb failed to explode. For ten years he has been interrogated and urged to renounce his antagonism toward the Infant King and the Regent. He has steadfastly refused, but now he has suddenly seen the light and will give in to the government’s demands. He is tired of being the last prisoner in the country and eager to join the rest of the population in devoting all of his strength to the support of “the best political system in the world.”ek)}awomir Mro{zdot}ek{/I}[Police]}ek)}

The Chief of Police is less than exhilarated by his last prisoner’s sudden change of heart. He tries his best to trap the Prisoner into revealing that his newly discovered love for the government and the authorities is only a ruse to gain his freedom, but the former revolutionary is steadfast. He has observed the country and the populace from the window of his cell and admires their loyalty and the progress that has been made during the years of his imprisonment. More than that, he has begun to be weary of his adolescent rejection of law and order, which has left him free but aimless. He has become nostalgic for a sense of belonging, for “a joyful and calm conformity, an eager hope in the future, and the peace which flows from full submission to authority.” He no longer wants to be the only remaining dark spot despoiling the otherwise perfect society which the Infant King and the Regent have created. Once he is reformed and released, prisons will no longer be necessary and can be turned into schools.

At this point, the Sergeant, in civilian clothes, enters the office, battered and limping. He has been making the rounds among the population, trying to provoke somebody into making disloyal remarks about the government to allow him to make an arrest, but has been treated roughly by an enthusiastically loyal populace. This is the last straw for the Prisoner: He demands to sign the oath of loyalty and to be released. The Chief of Police and the Sergeant are left to ponder a future without prisoners and prisons.

Act 2 takes place in the home of the Sergeant. The Chief of Police, in civilian disguise, comes to visit his subordinate but finds him gone, trying to provoke disloyalty even on his day off. The Wife of the Sergeant tells the Chief of Police how unhappy her husband is, not only because of his lack of success as agent-provocateur but also because he cannot wear his uniform in his line of duty. She herself is trying to assist him by spying on friends and neighbors, so far without success. Finally the Sergeant returns home and immediately changes into his uniform. He discovers that the Chief of Police has come to entrust him with a desperate mission, one that tests his loyalty to the utmost. After the Sergeant tells him of a recurrent dream in which he, in uniform, arrests his alter ego in civilian clothes, the Chief of Police assures him that his dreams will come true if he is willing to sacrifice himself for the future of the police force. Since there is no hope to provoke the people, who “have become wildly, cruelly, bestially loyal,” into unpatriotic action or speech, the Sergeant himself will have to serve as a substitute revolutionary. Reluctantly he agrees to this unnatural proposition, shouts an invective against the Infant King and his uncle the Regent from his window, and is promptly arrested.

In act 3 the results of the Sergeant’s devotion to duty are manifest. The police force has been granted funds for rebuilding the prison and for recruiting new personnel. The General himself has become interested in the Sergeant’s case and will personally conduct the interrogation. Meanwhile, the policeman-turned-revolutionary is becoming increasingly confused about his identity. He has observed his country and his fellow citizens from the same cell window that was the vantage point of the former Prisoner, but he has arrived at different conclusions: The population looks sullen and dissatisfied to him, the railway system is atrocious, and the Infant King and the Regent are morons.

When the General arrives, he is accompanied by the former Prisoner, now his special assistant serving as an expert on subversive activity. The Prisoner/Aide devises a plan to goad the Sergeant into throwing the very bomb at the General which he himself had used ten years before; since the bomb failed to explode then, there is no danger for the general, but the act of throwing the bomb would convict the Sergeant of terrorism. The Sergeant needs little persuasion to throw the bomb; this time it does explode, but it fails to kill the General, who has taken cover in the toilet. While the General, the Prisoner/Aide, and the Chief of Police place one another under mutual arrest for failing in their respective duties, thus providing exciting investigative prospects for the police, the Sergeant, now completely turned revolutionary, shouts, “LONG LIVE FREEDOM!” at the top of his voice as the play comes to an end.

Dramatic Devices

The Police uses the techniques of the Theater of the Absurd. The play employs cartoonlike characters—Mrożek began his literary career as a newspaper cartoonist—and the cliché-ridden dialogue typical of the plays of Eugène Ionesco. Like many of Mrożek’s early plays, The Police also exhibits the influence of Alfred Jarry, whose play Ubu roi (pr., pb. 1896; Ubu the King, 1951), set in Poland, is considered the prototype of the contemporary anti-illusionist theater. Mrożek works in this anti-illusionist vein by creating an unidentified country composed of grotesquely distorted real features of Polish society. In his production note he warns that “this play does not contain anything except what it actually contains. This means that it is not an allusion to anything, it is not a metaphor, and it should not be read as such.” This caveat, while affording Mrożek a modicum of protection, is clearly duplicitous, for by his very prohibition Mrożek ensures that audiences will understand the parallels to life in Poland during the Cold War.

Thus the country is not named; indeed, it is ruled by an Infant King and his uncle, the Regent, who appear only as pictures in state offices. The characters do not have any personal names that might associate them with Poland but are identified only by their dramatic functions or their professions. The police officials have mustaches and wear jackboots, swords, and high, stiff collars. The Prisoner has a “pointed beard like those of nineteenth-century progressives.” The result is a Kafkaesque no-man’s land, at once nightmarish and ridiculous, run by a grotesque, menacing bureaucracy. Like many absurdist plays, The Police employs comic devices but is not ultimately a comedy: No harmony is created or restored at the end.

Critical Context

The Police served to establish Mrożek’s reputation as a playwright in Poland and the rest of Europe. Based on this play and other, mostly shorter dramatic pieces of the 1950’s and early 1960’s, Mrożek became known as the leading exponent of the Polish Theater of the Absurd, though his subsequent exile in Paris helped to cement his stature as one of the international masters of the contemporary stage. His early plays, such as The Police, Na pełnym mrozu (pr., pb. 1961; Out at Sea, 1961), and Strip-Tease (pr., pb. 1961; Striptease, 1963), are thinly disguised metaphors for the playwright’s nightmarish vision of his homeland.

In addition to their links with Alfred Jarry and the European absurdists, Mrożek’s plays are firmly rooted in the Polish tradition of playwrights such as Stanisław Wyspiański, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, and Andrzej Trzebiński. The nostalgic longing for the past, expressed by the Prisoner in act 1 of The Police, is a continuation of the theme of trying to overcome the depressing reality of the present by a flight into an imaginary past, foreshadowed in Mrożek’s very first dramatic attempt, a vignette titled Profesor (pr. 1956, pb. 1968; The Professor, 1977), and culminating in Arthur’s attempt to reestablish the order of the past in Tango (pb. 1964, pr. 1965; Tango, 1968). The plays after Tango are less enigmatic and more directly political in nature, but they still concern themselves with the function of power and unproductive nostalgia for the past.

Sources for Further Study

Gerould, Daniel, ed. Twentieth-Century Polish Avant-Garde Drama: Plays, Scenarios, Critical Documents. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977.

Kloscowicz, Jan. Mrożek. Translated by Christine Cankalski. Warsaw: Authors Agency and Czytelnik, 1980.

Kott, Jan. Theatre Notebook, 1947-1967. Translated by Bodesław Taborski. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968.

Miłosz, Czesław. The History of Polish Literature. New York: Macmillan, 1969.