The Dead Class: Scene By Scene

Abstract

The Dead Class — A Dramatic Seance is a composition made up of both Tadeusz Kantor’s own texts and those of three leading Polish avant garde writers of the 1930’s: Stanislaw I. Witkiewicz, Witold Gombrowicz and Bruno Schulz. A few of the characters, snatches of dialogue, the structure of some scenes and some monologues are taken from Witkiewicz’s play Tumour Brainard. As for Gombrowicz, Kantor has drawn on his work for the symbolic treatment of objects and parts of the human body, growing huge and alienating themselves from it (“heel”, “finger”, “backside”, the making of faces), as well as for the atmosphere of schoolboyish jokes and antics. Finally, Bruno Schulz’s short story The Pensioner, whose hero returns in his last days to his old school room, suggested the overall idea of the piece. Another thing that Kantor takes from Schulz’s writings is the setting and distinctive local colour of a small town in southeastern Poland as it was in those days, with a sizable Jewish population and with memories and traditions of the pre-1918 Austrian occupation still fresh. Schulz, who illustrated his own works, also inspired the visual style of the play; its combination of naturalism and expressionism and the deformed figures populating the school room owe much to Schulz’s drawings.