Theatre director, essayist and pedagogue. One of the most significant figures of post-war theatre in Poland. Born on the 1st of January 1917 in Vienna, died on the 5th of August 2012.
Erwin Axer, as one of the star pupils of the great stage manager Leon Schiller, often proved to be at odds with his mentor, as Marta Fik suggests in her article Thirty-Five Seasons (Trzydzieści Pięć Sezonów), WAiF, 1981. This rebellion, however, was never ideological or political. Axer opposed the vision that saw theatre as being something monumental, deeply rooted in romanticism, and very close to Schiller.
Axer principally staged contemporary Western European and American plays, including Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw (1947), The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams (1947), The Respectful Prostitute, the first postwar staging of one of Jean-Paul Sartre’s plays. ‘His Lódź plays are much indebted to Italian neorealist cinema’, wrote critic Rafal Węgrzyniak.
After spending his childhood and youth in Lviv, he went on to graduate in 1939 from the Directing School at the State Theatre Academy in Warsaw. His directorial debut was the one-act play by Eugene O’Neill Moon of the Caribbean at the National Theatre in Warsaw. Before the war, at that same theatre, he directed the opera Nędza Uszczęśliwiona by Maciej Kamieński (1938) and L’Annonce faite a Marie (1912, Tidings Brought to Mary) by Paul Claudel in 1938, and, in March 1939, Miss Julie by August Strindberg. The first two years after the war, he worked as a director and actor at the Polski Teatr Dramatyczny in Lviv. It was there that he directed Panna Maliczewska / Miss Maliczewska, by Gabriela Zapolska, in 1941, in which he also played episodic roles.
In late 1942, he left for Warsaw after his father, a well-known lawyer, was arrested. He took part in the Warsaw Uprising, after which he was in a German POW camp. From there, he was taken to the Harz mountains, where he worked in a quarry. After he returned to Poland, he and Michal Melina became directors of the Teatr Kameralny Domu Zolnierza (Studio Theatre of the Soldier’s Home) in Łódź, which was renamed Teatr Wspolczesny (Contemporary Theatre) when it moved to Warsaw in 1949. He was the theatre’s director until 1981. From 1954-1957, he was the director of the united stages of the Contemporary and National Theatres.
After 1949, when socialist realism was the required artistic norm in Poland, Axer primarily directed plays that had propagandistic overtones propaganda, such as Niemcy / The Germans by Leon Kruczkowski (1949), Zwykła Sprawa / Nothing Unusual by Adam Tarn (1950), and Domek z kart / House of Cards, by Emil Zegadłowicz (1953). Asked many years later about the limits of compromise with the authorities during that period, he said: