Jerzy Grotowski

Abstract

Of all the directors under discussion in the book, none has enraged and engaged the imaginations of theatre practitioners and audiences over the past 20 years as profoundly as Jerzy Grotowski. Starting out as a director quite content to treat his actors as his raw material, he has changed and developed to the point where he now sees his role as simply that of a catalyst of others’ creativity. The major performances by his Laboratory Theatre — Akropolis, The Constant Prince, Apocalypsis cum Figuris — served as slaps in the face of the largely unfocused and complacent experimental theatre that mushroomed worldwide in the 1960s. The rigorous exigencies of his ethic have had extensive repercussions for the members of his group, carrying them beyond the domain of theatre, determining a way of life. However, despite the mass of material produced around the ‘Grotowski phenomenon’, much remains misunderstood or shrouded in the obscurantist mysticism that appears to characterise Grotowski’s own gnomic utterances (the fruit of a peculiarly Polish blend of Catholicism and existentialism).