25 x XXI | 25 Years of Iconic Polish Performances: Danuta W. | Article

25 x XXI | 25 Years of Iconic Polish Performances: Danuta W.

danuta_w._fot._karolina_wolf_2.jpg, default, Krystyna Janda in 'Danuta W.' at Polonia Theatre, 2012, photo: Karolina Wolf / Polonia Theatre

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In this one-woman show, Krystyna Janda restores dignity to a universal female experience. The invisible labour of women is made visible on stage – a small narrative of everyday heroism pulled out of the shadow of grand history.

Krystyna Janda steps onto the stage of Warsaw’s Polonia Theatre, the theatre she founded, and begins: ‘Her name is Danuta Mirosława Wałęsa’. Then she provides the dates: of birth, of marriage, the names and birthdays of child. It’s as if she were presenting a court file, introducing a defendant – or a victim. This is how one might interpret the use of the initial instead of a surname in the production’s title — Danuta W. However, it quickly becomes clear that Janda is not interested in pronouncing verdicts but rather in drawing the wife out of her husband’s shadow and showcasing her overlooked perspective. The focus is on Danuta, not Wałęsa: the wife of the Solidarity leader, a mother, the First Lady. Who is she really?

Janda soon slips into the first person, but it’s difficult to say that she ‘becomes’ Danuta Wałęsa. Critics have noted this: Janda does not attempt to transform into the protagonist. Instead, she lends her body and voice to present Danuta’s case – and, in a sense, simultaneously, her own. It’s a method familiar from her celebrated monologues: Maria Callas: Master Class (Powszechny Theatre, Warsaw, 1997) or the later Notes from Exile (Polonia Theatre, 2018), based on Sabina Baral’s memoir. Janda chooses only a few tools from her arsenal, creating the character with delicate strokes. Of course, she brings her own sensitivity, elements of her temperament and wit – but this is not the transformative acting we know from Hollywood biopics. Fidelity to the 'original' is not the main point of the performance.

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Krystyna Janda in 'Danuta W.' at Polonia Theatre, 2012, photo: Karolina Wolf / Polonia Theatre

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Janda occupies a singular place in Polish culture: she is a globally recognised actress and director, a diva, awarded all over the world, best known from Andrzej Wajda’s films. She moves with ease between comedy and drama, sings, and regularly speaks out on public matters. Her reputation, the sum of her roles and experience, is something she carries onto the stage. Therefore, the audience is not meant to compare Janda to the real protagonist, but rather to listen to what the stage persona says, and how she says it. And Janda-Wałęsa has a great deal to say, with remarkable candour.

Danuta W. is based on Wałęsa’s bestselling autobiography Dreams and Secrets (co-written with Piotr Adamowicz). Published in 2011, it became both a publishing sensation and a text of great social importance. Not only did it fit into the trend of publishing memoirs, autobiographies and diaries (which became extremely popular in Poland after 1989). It was the The sensational claim that also appeared in Teatr Polonia’s description of the production — ‘Danuta Wałęsa breaks her silence’ — was not an exaggeration: until then, Lech Wałęsa’s wife had rarely spoken publicly. As First Lady she was nowhere near as active and visible as, for example, her successor — Jolanta Kwaśniewska. The widespread respect she enjoyed stemmed precisely from the fact that she was the model of a patriarchal wife: faithful, loyal, silent, and dignified, even when her husband was disgracing himself. The autobiography showed the price Danuta Wałęsa had to pay for supporting her husband. It was a story of loneliness — and of the fact that while Lech was jumping over the famous Gdańsk Shipyard fence, and joining the strikers or signing the August Accords with his giant pen, his wife was at home, running a household with a crowd of children.

Adapting the book, Janda focused on the relationship between Danuta and Lech, selecting moments from the over five hundred pages that presented the ‘behind the scenes’ of the revolution, through the eyes of its leader’s wife left standing in the kitchen. This ‘kitchen’ metaphor becomes literal on stage: as she delivers her monologue, Janda peels apples and prepares an apple pie, which she bakes and hands out to the audience in the finale. The gesture may be simple, but it carries a multitude of meanings. It emphasises the protagonist’s resourcefulness, hospitality, and the stereotypically understood femininity. The kitchen tasks set the rhythm of the monologue, which Janda at key moments. When something truly difficult or significant is said, she stops peeling apples or kneading dough (a signal to the audience to listen more closely). Behind her, on a semi-transparent screen, flicker snippets of newsreels and contemporary images of the places Danuta recalls. They complement the narrative without distracting the audience from the spoken words.

Janda speaks in a slightly heightened register,tinged with the hurt and resentment Danuta feels towards herself and her husband. Lech rarely consulted her on major decisions. He never brought flowers, unless he had been given some himself, which he then gave to her. She was always half a pace behind him, acknowledging his superiority and submitting to him. She did not assert her presence more strongly, and that is what she regrets the most, even though she insists she would change nothing. Her priority was always the family. She says plainly that, as a woman, she fulfilled her function by bringing children into the world. For a long time, she was unaware of the significance of the events centering around her politically preoccupied husband. The loneliness of the marriage only deepened after the presidency. Currently Wałęsa prefers the company of a computer to that of his wife. Yet there is, too, a kind of amused astonishment at herself and her fate: how did an ordinary girl from a small rural village end up here? Danuta recounts the moments that were important to her, the struggles and turning points, always stressing her determination to stay grounded, calm, even when it seemed impossible.

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The power of the performance stems from the fact that the creators (both Janda and director Janusz Zaorski) confer dignity on a universal female experience that has long been invisible or taken for granted. Women’s invisible labour is made manifest, a small narrative of daily heroism steps out of the shadows of history. The very fact that Danuta W. speaks is a feminist act — here is a woman telling her own story. Yet the creators do not turn her into a victim; on the contrary, they emphasize that she chose this particular model of life herself, and that she had certain priorities. They also don’t ascribe to her achievements she never . Danuta was not an active member of Solidarity, especially compared with figures like Alina Pieńkowska, Henryka Krzywonos, Ewa Ossowska or Joanna Duda-Gwiazda, or other women that Polish theatre is not particularly interested in — with the commendable exception of Agnieszka Przepiórska’s monologue Nazywam się Anna Walentynowicz (My Name is Anna Walentynowicz), Łaźnia Nowa, 2022. As a rule, when such women appear in films or plays, it is usually as supporting characters. This is also the case in the musical 1989 (which premiered after Danuta W.), directed by Katarzyna Szyngiera. In it, the production’s creators crafted a fantasy scene in which Danuta delivers her own emancipatory speech while accepting the Nobel Prize. Meanwhile, Janda stays faithful to Danuta’s own narrative. She creates a production that is ‘gently feminist’, as critics Joanna Krakowska and Krystyna Duniec described it. There is no ambition here to change the world order; rather a need to tell a life story in which many families might recognise themselves, and feel that their experience is not isolated: even a president’s wife feels lonely, exhausted, and neglected.

Late in the performance, Danuta says that ‘everything in life comes at a price’ – and the performance is precisely about that reckoning: the cost of knowledge and experience. The final video displayed onscreen, showing the real Danuta Wałęsa picking apples in her garden, invites — perhaps too boldly — a symbolic, even biblical reading. In the fruit plucked from the tree of knowledge, the sweetness of experience mingles with its bitterness.

Thirteen years on from the premiere of Danuta W., yet the story of Solidarity women remains largely untold in Polish theatre — despite the abundance of available material: academic works, memoirs, interviews, and documentaries such as Marta Dzido’s Solidarity According to Women. Meanwhile, at Polonia Theatre, Janda has continued to create and stage productions probing Poland’s post-war history, such as Notes from Exile and Leave No Traces, based on Cezary Łazarewicz’s book about the murder of Grzegorz Przemyk (2018).

Has Danuta W. shifted the discourse concerning the political transition and the beginnings of the Third Polish Republic? Lech Wałęsa remains one of the most controversial and fascinating figures in Polish politics. Danuta Wałęsa’s moral authority, meanwhile, has remained intact — despite, or perhaps precisely because of, the emancipation portrayed by her book and Janda’s performance.

^{Written by Stanisław Godlewski}

Polonia Theatre, Warsaw
Danuta W.
Based on Dreams and Secrets by Danuta Wałęsa and Piotr Adamowicz
Adaptation and design by Krystyna Janda
Directed by Janusz Zaorski
Lighting by Andrzej Wolf
Premiere: 11^th October 2012

Language English

polish theatre

polish theatre directors

polish performance art