"Mathias and the Tempest": A Proposal for a Theater of Emancipation

Abstract

The idea for and the was born from our encounter with Janusz Korczak's novel, King Mathias the First. Korczak, a Polish pediatrician and writer was the founder of one of the first children's republics during the 1920's. His struggle and work for children's rights ended in 1940 in the concentration camp at Treblinka where he died with his children. Maurice Yendt and the production staff of the Thedtre des Jeunes Annees devoted almost two years to a consideration of Korczak's work, and from this union an unpublished text and the project for a play were born. and the resembles neither an adaptation, nor a dramatic transcription of Janusz Korczak's work, King Mathias the First. The book seems today too filled with ambiguities and gaps to serve as a model for a dramatic considerationPerhaps the first, who knows?-on the autonomy of children and their political emancipation. and the is therefore the free rumination of an author and a production staff intrigued by the character of Mathias the First, and by the personality of Janusz Korczak, to the point of giving him a new incarnation, a new life 1976 style, full of immediate questions on the rights of children, and those of an author and a troop of adults who chose to speak to children, the most oppressed minority in our society. A dynamic and joyous fiction, a humorous narrative, full of fantasy and poetry, and the tries to converse with its young spectators from the basis of this hypothesis: -if one day, somewhere, children had all the powers. . . . As the play opens, there is a large red book, and a boy named Mathias. In this book there is the story of a young king also named Mathias. Mathias has such a desire to know the end of the story that, going beyond the threshold of sleep, he leaves for the most disconcerting of trips. One night, he goes without sleep so as to reach the very end of the tale, a story where, in an enigmatic way, the character-images of the big red book, and the people in daily life mingle. In this fashion, carried even farther in desire to resolve the enigma, Mathias himself enters into the story, pierced with large fantastic and oneiric images. Having become Child-King, that is to say submissive, spoiled, manipulated, then Child-President, Mathias imagines more, invents farther, and finally tackles the fabulous boundaries of the terrain of adventure, from whence will arise the Tempest