Contexts for Vatzlav: Mrozek and the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

During the twenty-five years that Slawomir Mrozek has been writing for the theatre, two distinguishing marks of his work have been a preference for parable forms and an obsession with dialectical polarities of nature and culture, instinct and reason, primitivism and civilization, experience and theory. Now these are characteristics typical of many French writers in the Age of Enlightenment, but Mrozek's affinity for eighteenth-century thought and literature might pass unnoticed if it were not for Vatzlav, a play that is the dramatic equivalent of a conte philosophique, such as Candide, and that was given an eighteenth-century staging in its only Polish production.