Wielopole/Wielopole by Tadeusz Kantor

First published:Wielopole, Wielopole, 1984 (English translation, 1990)

First produced: 1980, at the Teatro Regional Toscano, Florence, Italy

Type of plot: Psychological

Time of work: Post-World War II

Locale: Poland

Principal Characters:

• Uncle Józef (the Priest, )
• Grandma Katarzyna
• Helka, the author’s mother
• Marian (Recruit I), the author’s father
• Auntie Maóka
• You know who
• The Little Rabbi
• Auntie Józka
• Uncle Karol
• Uncle Olek
• Uncle Staś, a deportee
• Adaś (Recruit II)
• Widow of the Town Photographer
• Recruit III
• Recruit IV
• Recruit V
• Recruit VI
• Recruit VII
• Recruit VIII

The Play

At the beginning of Wielopole, Wielopole, the audience finds itself in what Tadeusz Kantor has described as the “poor room of my childhood” which forms the mise en scène of the majority of his original works. The playwright himself, although never appearing in his works as an actor, sits on the stage—as himself—and lends direction to the action.

Act 1 of the play is titled “The Wedding.” The ceremony with which the play opens, however, is rather funereal: The Priest—Kantor’s great-uncle—is lying on his deathbed. The family gathers itself around the dying man for a group portrait. The widow-photographer, however, turns her daguerreotype machine on a group of soldiers standing in the corner. As she begins to take their picture—with a demented laugh—her camera turns itself into a machine gun, and she proceeds to “shoot” at the platoon. The soldiers, who had before this moved around somewhat, freeze completely.

With the exit of the widow-photographer, the Priest rises from his deathbed to perform a marriage ceremony in which Kantor’s father—also in uniform—and mother are wed. In his notes, Kantor calls this a “posthumous” wedding, and indeed, the actors are wooden, lifeless in repeating their vows.

Act 2, “Degradation,” begins with a spooling action in which the family repeatedly move in and out of the “room.” It seems as if they have not been in this locale for some time, as the twins Uncle Karol and Uncle Olek (once the “moving in and out” has been completed) quibble over the arrangement of furniture and people in the room, desirous of setting everything up “as it was then.”

Mannequins as well as actors populate the stage in act 2. People are “doubled” just as the action of the play repeats itself: The playwright’s father, Marian, whose wedding has just been reenacted in act 1, returns from the war front, to the general amazement of the family. Another long-lost relative who “returns” at this juncture is Uncle Staś, an officer in the Austrian army taken captive by the Russians and released in 1921. An artist, he returns now with a violin-box on his shoulder, which, when cranked, plays a Christmas carol from a scherzo by Frédéric Chopin.

The family turns on Marian, whom they accuse of abandoning and insulting Helka, the playwright’s mother. Then, in a curious reversal, the family decides that since Marian has insulted Helka, they should follow suit. Thus takes shape the curious “degradation” scene which parodies the Palm Sunday litany. “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” jeer the family, as Helka is degraded beneath a cross on wheels. The dead soldiers get into the act as well, tossing the mannequin-double of Helka high in the air and finally leaving it sprawled on the floor. The widow-photographer makes an appearance here in the person of Pilate, washing her hands with a dirty rag over the limp dummy. The act closes with the repeated wedding of Helka and Marian.

Act 3, “Crucifixion,” begins in an almost clownish atmosphere, in which the twin uncles perform an absurd ritual of dressing and undressing themselves; while one dresses, the other undresses, and so on. The atmosphere changes shortly into one of impending doom as “possessed” Auntie Mańka begins to spit out fragments of Scripture. Through the doors, which open and close thrice in this act, the audience sees “Child-Soldiers” at an unusual game: They are busy nailing the effigy of the Priest to the wheeled cross. Meanwhile, uncles Olek and Karol set up three empty chairs in the middle of the room for no apparent purpose. Auntie Mańka now returns in a military uniform. After a short slapstick routine carried out by the uncles (in which they fail to achieve the desired result), Karol, Olek, and Mańka decide to arrange a “field tribunal” in which the Priest—and his mannequin—will appear as the accused. The crime they are accused of is “repetition.”

The “real” priest, when discovered, will be the one to bear the weight of punishment, as it is he who is guilty of having a copy made of an “original” fashioned by God. The cross is brought in, and the Priest is made to carry it until he falls beneath its weight. Then it is raised on Helka’s shoulders, and she carries it until she falls. Finally, little Adaś is made to bear the cross—in the end, he climbs up upon it. The family leaves the room sounding the wooden clappers—the “Wooden Bells of Death”—which in the Roman Catholic Church replace bells during Holy Week. The Priest carefully takes Adaś down from the cross, lays him upon the ground, and smoothes out his clothes. Adaś awakes and hurriedly exits, looking behind him. The Priest goes to sit at the foot of the cross, sorrowful; Kantor takes him by the hand and leads him offstage.

In act 4, “Adaś Goes to the Front,” news reaches the family that the boy has been called to the colors. Each has his own opinion of the matter, some judging it good, some bad. In the next scenes, the audience discerns that time “has slipped foward”: Adaś has fallen in battle, and the Priest carries in his gun and satchel—all that remains of him. Then the slanted, wheeled cross makes another appearance: The Priest wheels it about like a bicycle, with Adaś strapped to one side of it. The back wall opens to reveal a large number of recruits in a train heading east. The Priest carefully removes Adaś from the cross and flings his body into the boxcar. A quick handful of dirt tossed his way and an abbreviated requiem bring the act to a close.

Act 5, “The Last Supper,” begins with the Priest laid out on his deathbed once again. The bed has two sides; with a crank, it can be turned over to reveal the Priest’s mannequin. This is done over and over, the divided family fighting over which of the priests was their dearly beloved relative. Finally the Priest is given burial when the soldiers enter again, dragging the cross. The largest of them raises the cross on his shoulder (upon the cross is nailed the Priest-mannequin) and leads the rest in a circular march around the stage; the real Priest hurries after his double. Then the Little Rabbi enters and performs a “tingle-tangle” song of mourning, for which he is shot by the soldiers (again an event occurring out of temporal sequence—a “negative from later times”).

The play ends with a rushed-together representation of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper. Psalms, a loud march, and the mechanical strains from Uncle Staś’s music box mix and rise over the scene. The actors slowly leave the stage; there remains only the Priest lying on the floor. The Little Rabbi comes in and leads him off. Kantor carefully folds the white tablecloth which has lain on The Last Supper’s long table, puts it beneath his arm, and leaves.

Dramatic Devices

The first obvious dramatic device in Wielopole, Wielopole is the role of the playwright himself. Kantor’s presence onstage—as himself, not as an actor—sympathizing with and to a certain extent directing his characters, suggests that the audience is somehow able to gaze into his mind as he sits engrossed in thought and “see what is going on in his head” in a very real sense.

The camera is a very important instrument, as far as Kantor is concerned. In taking a picture, one is freezing time. Freezing time is death. Thus, the primitive camera of the widow-photographer becomes a machine gun, an instrument of death which will people the world of memory with its negatives and prints. Indeed, Kantor elsewhere speaks of memory as a file of photographic negatives. Totally unrelated memories, distant from one another in space and time, mix themselves up in the mind (and on Kantor’s stage) like photographic negatives placed one on top of the other. In Wielopole, Wielopole this accounts for the drastic shifts of time, such as Adaś’s death and that of the Little Rabbi, which have apparently little to do with the train of thought going on presently, yet are summoned forth by the mysterious workings of mental association.

The Christian imagery in the play is obvious. Most striking in this connection is the final scene of the drama, when Kantor “strips the altar” as does the priest on Holy Thursday. However, whereas the Passion Week ends in triumph for Christ, in this play there is no Resurrection—or, if there is, it is a very dubious one indeed.

Critical Context

Tadeusz Kantor first gained recognition as an innovative director and radical theorist of drama. Like his compatriot Jerzy Grotowski, Kantor sought to infuse the modern theater with the primitive power of drama’s origins. Kantor theorized that drama began when “someone stepped out of the circle of communal customs and religious ritual, communal ceremonies and ludic celebrations and made the hazardous decision to Break Away from the cult community.” Modern drama, Kantor asserted, “must recapture the Original Force of the Trauma caused by the moment when Man (the viewer) was faced for the first time by Man (the Actor).” It is of the essence of drama as Kantor conceived of it to be heretical, subversive, indecent.

In part at least, such attitudes reflect the influence of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. In fact, until his first production of an original work, The Dead Class, Kantor was best known in Poland as a renowned producer of “Witkacy’s” own brand of absurdist theater. However, Kantor’s preoccupation with self-study was foreign to the earlier dramatist, and his unsettling approach to the supernatural (which, in the modern age, perhaps unfortunately, has come to be equated with the unconscious) placed him in the tradition of Polish “Monumental Theater,” which stretches from Adam Mickiewicz to Stanisław Wyspiański and Leon Schiller. Still, Kantor was such a unique personage—a theatrical legend in his own time—that it is easier to use him as the critical context for modern Polish theater than it is to find the context which can encompass such an extraordinary talent as his.

Sources for Further Study

Gerould, Daniel. “Tadeusz Kantor (1915-): A Visual Artist Works Magic on the Polish Stage.” Performing Arts Journal 4, no. 3 (1979): 28-38.

Jenkins, R. “Ring Master in a Circus of Dreams.” American Theatre 2 (March, 1986): 4-11.

Kantor, Tadeusz. A Journey Through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos, 1944-1990. Edited and translated by Michael Kobiałka. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Kłossowicz, Jon. “Tadeusz Kantor’s Journey.” Drama Review 30 (Fall, 1986): 98-114.

Kobiałka, Michal. “Kantor—Candor: An Interview with Tadeusz Kantor.” Stages 6, no. 6 (1986): 6-37.

Kott, Jan. “The Theatre of Essence: Kantor and Brook.” Theatre 3 (Summer/Fall, 1983): 55-58.

Mikłaszewski, Krzysztof. Encounters with Tadeusz Kantor. Edited and translated by George Hyde. London: Routledge, 2002.