Wyspianski's Wesele: Poised on the Border

Abstract

Just over one hundred years after its premiere at Stary Teatr in Krakow, 16 March 1901, Stanislaw Wyspianski's classic drama Wesele (The Wedding) finds itself poised on the border of Poland, awaiting entry into the canon of world theatre. A key work in the Polish theatrical tradition, Wesele transformed Wyspianski from a moderately successful visual and verbal artist associated with the "Young Poland" movement 1 into a national dramatist-visionary whose significance in Poland is comparable to Yeats's in Ireland, O'Neill's in America, or Maeterlinck's in Belgium. As distinct from these towering figures of the Western canon, however, Wyspianski's fame remains largely confined to his home culture, his work bound by perceptions of incomprehensibility and provincial hermeticism. Poland's entry into NATO and pending inclusion in the European Union have encouraged attempts in recent years to explode such myths and reconsider the place of Polish culture in the broader European context. A series of productions of Wesele in the 1990s outside of Poland 2 demonstrates the possibilities as well as the perils inherent in attempts to accord this Polish play the attention it deserves elsewhere in the world.