Slawomir Mrozek: Two Forms of the Absurd

Abstract

In 1957 the inmates of San Quentin penitentiary watched a performance of Beckett's Waiting for Godot in their darkened dining hall. One of the prison teachers commented afterwards on the response of the audience, who were obviously shaken and watched the play in dead silence: They know what is meant by waiting . . . and they knew if Godot finally came, he would only be a disappointment.' The veiled message in concrete pictures, the language of signs, had a magic strength of appeal. Produced in Poland a year earlier, the same play was immediately understood by the audience as a comment on the frustrations of life in a society which dismisses the shortcomings of the present with promises of a happier future. Waiting under a barren tree with a pinching shoe and the agonizing needs of nature in one's bowels seemed a fitting comment on the life of the average man in the collective machinery of a socialist state. This twofold quality of the theater of the absurd is particularly striking in the case of Slawomir Mrozek, who on the one hand works in Poland's own tradition of the absurd and on the other has been