Demythologizing Polish Theatre

Abstract

Five years ago, in June 1989, Solidarity won a spectacular victory in a parliamentary election. The Polish Communist Party was forced to give up its monopoly on power. Poles embarked on an arduous, often haphazard process of transformation from a party-state and central planning to a democratic polity and capitalism. What does this transformation mean for Polish theatre? In the new Polish experience, which opens dizzying possibilities to some people and fills others with a frightening vision of an unstable and chaotic world, what is the place of theatre? What role does theatre play in the public life of capitalist Poland? Does it continue to disrupt the ideology and the discursive practices of mainstream culture the way it did in the past? In short, does theatre make any difference? My essay will be an explicitly critical one. It is, of course, an authoritarian and manipulative gesture to present one's own perspective as a universal claim. I can speak only for myself, as a feminist scholar who writes about the cultural production of a country where it is men who dominate all public life. They control the state, the church, the arts, as well as social and cultural constructions of gender. In Polish culture, the gender system is still hierarchical, and the constructions of sexual difference are synonymous with sexual discrimination. The restoration of capitalism and political pluralism in Poland has brought a renewed resistance to women's empowerment. The reasons are economic as well as ideological (see Verdery 1994). At the same time, newcomers to the political scene-former dissidents and Solidarity activists-have been eager to pay back the Catholic Church for its earlier support of the anti-Communist opposition (see Filipowicz I990 and I993). Consequently, the gender politics of the Polish transformation continues to be hostile to feminist issues. The stringent antiabortion law of 1993 is the most characteristic manifestation of the increasing curtailment of women's rights.1 These circumstances are part of the context in which Polish theatre communicates with its audiences. To ignore this context would be to imagine, as no one can, that the process of communication between ac-