He has treated classic texts to vandalism, mocked the established order, and ridiculed the myths and heroes of previous generations of artists. Antagonistic, critical, and unapologetically political, his writing has given voice to the values of the left, values that have been largely sidelined in the wake of Poland’s transformation to capitalism.
Paweł Demirski was born in 1979 in the city of Gdańsk, Poland’s largest port city on the Baltic Sea, and the birthplace of it’s Solidarity revolution. He studied architecture at the Polytechnic University in Gdańsk and later Journalism at the University of Wrocław. In 2003 he won a grant to study at the Royal Court Theatre in London where he spent a year observing rehearsals and seeing contemporary British theatre - especially documentary theatre. He made his debut in the theatre with the play Unconsciously in 2002, a piece based on the true story of a woman who asked a protestant minister to help her commit suicide. He changed the minister into a Catholic priest in his interpretation setting it squarely in the Polish context. Following the success of this piece, he was invited to became the literary director of the Wybrzeże Theatre in Gdańsk where he remained until 2006. It was during this period that he began collaborating with his partner, the director Monika Strzępka, and became active with a group of young new left activists in the organization Krytyka Polityczna /Political Critique. Two important plays from this time are From Poland with Love, a piece about emigration and Polish identity and Wałęsa, A Merry and Therefore a Very Lugubrious History a critical retelling and demythologizing of the Solidarity movement.
During his tenure at the Wybrzeże Theatre, he also curated and produced a series of one-act plays inspired by the documentary theatre movement that focused on difficult Polish social issues including abortion, poverty and neo-fascism. This project is considered an important moment in the development of Polish documentary theatre.
In 2006, he wrote the play When They Come to Burn Down Your House, Don’t Be Surprised based on the true story of a worker killed in an industrial accident. In the play the worker’s widow fights the company to expose the truth of her husband’s death, while the lawyer defending the company is revealed to have lost her own father during Martial Law in the 1980’s in a crime that was never investigated.
In 2007, he set his sights on Poland’s national poet and bard Adam Mickiewicz, in a radical deconstruction of The Forefathers’ Eve, his most famous dramatic work. The play, titled The Forefathers’ Eve. Exhumation, confronted Polish Romanticism and the myths that Adam Mickiewicz worked so carefully to create. It caused a scandal when it premiered. This was followed by Once, there was a Pole, a Pole, a Pole and the Devil, a smashup of personalities from Polish history and contemporary life that calls into question the underpinnings of Polish identity. The play is peopled by women prisoners from Auschwitz, a criminal, the last leader of the Polish communist party, a German tourist, and a defrocked priest.
Demirski does not accept anything on faith: neither the authority of the classics, nor of widely accepted dogmas that frame our thinking about the world. By creating other, alternative versions of well-known literary and film histories, he tracks, reveals and mocks, one after the other, the mechanisms governing collective imagination and the consciousness of Poles. He reaches into well-guarded areas, reveals all the places where critical vigilance is losing ground to inertia, where thinking and self-reflection are pressured and imposed by top-down ways of interpreting reality, which somehow people recognize as their own autonomous ideas. - Igor Stokfiszewski, from the introduction to Parafrazy.
In 2008 he made Tykocin, a play about Polish and Jewish relations, with the director Michal Zadara and a team of Israeli actors in Tel Aviv. The play is about two journalists and a student who arrive in the town of Tykocin to investigate a woman who is being awarded for saving Jews during World War II. In the course of the play it appears that the woman in fact saved a Jew, but she was probably also involved in the murder of other Jews. The play has three different endings leaving the truth of the matter ambiguous.
He worked again with Michal Zadara in 2008 at the Stary Theatre in Kraków on an adaptation of Racine’s Iphigenia, called Ifigenia, a New Tragedy. Staged with minimal design, and a score made from sound and noise, it retells the Iphigenia myth in a contemporary military unit stranded by a hurricane.
Later in October of 2008 he returned to work with Monika Strzępka in Opole on an adaptation of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera called an Economic Opera for Pretty Women and Wealthy Gentlemen, a musical satire of neoliberalism, market crises, and the financial elite.
Demirski’s artistic strategy consists in placing the issues encrusted with the post-political magma of public life and confronted with the limitations of our mental, emotional and world view on a collision course with prejudice and well-being. In this way the artistic gesture becomes both a political gesture, forcing the resignation of feigned impartiality, insincere conciliatory rhetoric, and above all from noble universalization. - Joanna Krakowska, Afterword in Parafrazy
In 2009 he wrote Diamonds Are Coal That Got Down to Business, a deconstruction and adaptation of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya set in a contemporary neoliberal purgatory. The piece had its premiere in Wałbrzych and was later translated into English and published in the anthology (A)pollonia in 2015. This would be the beginning of an important series of pieces in collaboration with the theatre in Wałbrzych.