Tango by Slawomir Mrozek

First published: 1964 (English translation, 1966)

First produced: 1965, at the Jugoslovensko Dramsko Pozorište, Belgrade, Yugoslavia

Type of plot: Problem play

Time of work: The mid-twentieth century

Locale: Unspecified

Principal Characters:

• Arthur, a young man
• Stomil, his father
• Eleanor, his mother
• Eugenia, his grandmother
• Eugene, his grandfather
• Ala, his fiancé
• Eddie, a servant

The Play

Tango is set in the living room of the Stomil family. The room is in great disarray: There are piles of drapery everywhere; one of them is used as a bed by Ala. The stage is littered with remnants of the past, such as a faded wedding dress, a baby carriage, and objects dating back to different eras. There is even a coffin in an alcove.ek)}awomir Mro{zdot}ek{/I}}ek)}

As the play begins, Eugene, Eugenia, and Eddie are interrupted in a furtive game of cards by the arrival of Arthur. The young man, dressed neatly in contrast to the slovenly appearance of the others, upbraids his grandmother for disobeying his ban on card playing and makes her lie down on top of the coffin in the alcove. Arthur is a student who has returned home only to find that his mother is having an affair with Eddie and that the whole family has deteriorated into complete dissolution and inertia. He has made it his task to reform the family and to reinstitute order and moral standards in the Stomil household. Stomil, an avant-garde writer, and his wife, Eleanor, resist Arthur’s efforts, pointing out that it was their generation which overthrew all artistic and moral conventions and created a life of freedom for Arthur and his generation.

This very freedom, however, disturbs Arthur: He longs for “an orderly world,” a respectable professional career as a doctor, and a conventional marriage. He claims that his parents’ nonconformism has deprived him of the right of every young person to rebel against the norms of previous generations. He complains that this nonconformism into which his parents are pushing him “is only a new kind of conformism.” Therefore, in order to reassert his right to nonconformism, he will have to reestablish a set of rules and force his family to conform to them.

In act 2, Arthur enlists the help of Eugene for his plan and persuades Ala, his fiancé, that they should have an old-fashioned wedding as an outward sign of the new system of values he wants to create. That would put an end to the promiscuity that followed the abandonment of all rules of moral behavior and shock his family into an acceptance of his intended reestablishment of social and moral conventions. Ala is bored by his philosophizing but is attracted by the idea of a traditional wedding in white. Arthur next attempts to force Stomil, his father, into an act of violence against Eddie, whose affair with Eleanor is known to the whole family, including Stomil. When Arthur’s father fails to see what killing Eddie would achieve, Arthur explains to him that it would be an “irrevocable, masterful, classical” act, similar to the actions of great tragedy. Stomil retorts that in the modern world tragedy is no longer possible, only farce. He rejects the revolver Arthur offers him, except to make empty theatrical gestures with it; it is Eugene, the grandfather, claiming to have long waited for this chance, who comes to Arthur’s aid and helps him organize the family for the wedding at gunpoint.

The last act presents a changed Stomil family. The room has been tidied and the family members appear in formal dress. Eddie has been promoted to the role of butler. When Ala enters in her white dress and veil, Arthur’s plan appears to have succeeded: He has coerced his family to act according to his new forms and can now attempt to instill these formalities with new meaning. Just as the wedding is to begin, however, Arthur returns drunk from his bachelor party, another traditional rite. The liquor has opened his eyes to the fact that there is “no going back, no present, no future.” Gloomily he confesses that he has gone about his reforms in a backward manner: “Conventions always spring from an idea,” not the other way around. The idea which he will make the basis for his new form of order is absolute power, and he intends to wield this power with the help of Eddie. Eugenia, his grandmother, does not want to be a part of this violent new era; she voluntarily climbs on the coffin and dies. Arthur himself, as it turns out, is not destined to rule: After Ala confesses that she has been unfaithful to him with Eddie on the very morning of their wedding, Arthur, trying to assert his authority, is killed by Eddie, and as the play closes the whole family meekly submits to Eddie’s taking command. Eugene dances the tango with the new master of the house; they all will now dance to Eddie’s tune.

Dramatic Devices

Tango was Mrożek’s first full-length, three-act play. Unlike the shorter dramatic pieces of his earlier career, Tango makes little use of the formal devices of the Theater of the Absurd. Indeed, the play conforms fully to the conventions of the well-made play by adhering strictly to the unities of time, place, and action and by using a traditional structure of introduction, complication, and resolution. Another conventional dramatic device, absent from Mrożek’s early plays, is the use of proper names for his characters; indeed, the name Stomil allows the audience direct associations to Poland. In spite of the specific names, Tango is not a psychological play in which the dramatic interest concentrates on the motivations of individual characters. The Stomils and the other denizens of their household are representative characters, quasi-allegorical figures that mirror contemporary European types. In this sense, Tango can be viewed as a modern morality play. Beyond the political allegory, there is the existential level: Arthur is a modern Everyman trying to come to grips with an essentially godless world.

Although Tango is Mrożek’s most conventional play, elements of the modern anti-illusionist drama do appear. Most prominent of them is the coffin on which Arthur forces Eugenia to lie as a punishment for her violation of his house rules. It exemplifies Arthur’s attempt to bury the past, but even when Eugenia voluntarily climbs on the coffin and dies in the end, nothing is achieved. There is no rebirth after the burial. An additional device of the Theater of the Absurd is the experimental play which Stomil puts on at the end of act 2. To a degree it parallels the play-within-the-play from Hamlet, but it also demonstrates that, like the tearing down of all social and moral conventions by Stomil’s generation, the discarding of all theatrical conventions by the dramatists of the Theater of the Absurd has left a void.

Critical Context

Tango was an instant success, both in Poland and abroad, and is perhaps the best-known contemporary Polish play. Its obvious allusions to the political situation in Poland contributed to the playwright’s exile from his homeland in 1968, as well as to a rediscovery of Polish drama in the Western world. As noted above, Tango is one of a large number of Polish plays drawing on William Shakespeare’s Hamlet; another of these is Stanisław Wyspiański’s Wyzwolenie (1903; the deliverance, untranslated), which attacks the Polish people (and Polish drama in particular) for an indulgence in lofty rhetoric and a corresponding lack of genuine action. The motif of the tango is taken from Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s last play, Szewcy (pr. 1957; The Shoemakers, 1968), in which a folk character, instead of doing the traditional Mulch dance in peasant clothes, appears in a tuxedo and does the tango.

As a result of the peculiar political situation of Poland during the latter half of the twentieth century, many contemporary Polish plays reflected on this particular history. Mrożek does not see Poland as a completely singular case but as an extreme example of the consequence of common Western spiritual and political trends. It is this universal appeal that has made Tango such a popular play on European stages, allowing audiences all over the world to see themselves reflected in the Stomil family.

Sources for Further Study

Gerould, Daniel. “Mrożek Resisted.” In Slavic Drama: The Question of Innocence. Proceedings, edited by Andrew Donslov and Richard Sokoluski. Ottawa, Canada: Department of Modern Languages and Literature, 1991.

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

Kalera, Jozef. “A Concise Guide to Mrożek.” Theatre in Poland 3 (1990): 8-11.

Kloscowicz, Jan. Mrożek. Translated by Christine Cankalski. Warsaw, Poland: 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.