25 x XXI | 25 Years of Iconic Polish Performances: Forefathers' Eve
In Michał Zadara's fourteen-hour 'Forefathers' Eve', theatre is meant to serve as a research instrument – one capable of illuminating the mysteries of one of the most enigmatic works in Polish culture. The organisational and financial effort required to produce the performance was so immense that it had to be staged in phases.
There is no dramatic work in Polish literature that poses a challenge as formidable for the theatre as Forefathers' Eve. The action of Adam Mickiewicz's drama encompasses all spheres of existence. Historical reality intermingles with mystical visions; earthly life coexists with the realm of the dead; and human fate is determined by the struggle between angels and the forces of darkness. Written over many years during the Romantic era, Mickiewicz's drama – much like Goethe's Faust – evolved and transformed alongside its author. It never existed as a unified whole. It remained a 'work in progress' – unfinished, generically diverse, and devoid of compositional cohesion. From the outset of its stage history, it was assumed that the theatre could not shoulder the weight of the text, and so it was habitually performed in an abridged form.
The uniqueness of Zadara’s staging at the Polski Theatre in Wrocław lay not only in presenting the complete text – along with the title, stage directions, epigraphs, and footnotes – but also in the attempt to prove that something like the “whole” of Forefathers’ Eve actually exists. Because the production demanded enormous organisational and financial resources, it was realised in stages: in 2014, Parts I, II, and IV were shown; a year later, Part III; and in 2016, the entire work. The complete fourteen-hour marathon could be performed only a few times.
Traditionally staged according to the chronology of its writing (I + II + IV + III), the drama was presented here for the first time in numerical order: I + the poem The Phantom + II + III + Digression + IV. When Zadara embarked on the project, he could not predict what shape might emerge from this configuration. The production, like the work itself, was created as a work-in-progress, without any preconceived hypothesis of totality. By subjecting the drama to the test of the stage, the director sought to set it in motion, trusting that the text, ‘read word for word’, would unleash its performative power and operate like a machine for producing meanings. Theatre was to serve as a research tool capable of illuminating the secrets of one of the most enigmatic texts in Polish culture.
Zadara had employed this method many times in his stagings of the classics. In Forefathers’ Eve, the entire stage machinery and a wide array of conventions were mobilised to ‘study’ the text. These included a horror sequence filmed with night-vision cameras, a stylised nineteenth-century theatre complete with painted backdrops, footlights imitating gas illumination, and period costumes, as well as elements of puppetry.
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Forefathers’ Eve, part III, photo: Natalia Kabanow
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Forefathers’ Eve, part III, photo: Natalia Kabanow
Here, the theatre functioned as pure potentiality – a space capable of becoming anything, without referring to any external reality beyond the text itself. Zadara’s production collapsed temporal and spatial distances, blending locations that seemed to permeate one another, apparently without a single organising principle. It bore many traits of a heterotopia–fragmented, discontinuous, lacking a fixed centre, and operating simultaneously in multiple temporal layers, with no clear borders between ‘yesterday’ and ‘today’, ‘here’ and ‘there’. Such a space cannot be grasped at a glance; it must be discovered in motion.
The relationship between word and stage reached its fullest expression in Digression, a cycle of six poems about a journey to Russia, which was transformed into a multimedia performance. Filmed from overhead and projected onto a screen, the actors’ hands assembled shifting collages of photographs, miniature figures, scraps of text, and white powder spread across the surface like a layer of snow. These actions did not try to compete with the poetic imagery; instead, they demonstrated how images are constructed from the material of language itself. Theatre deliberately reduced its representational power to flat, naïve visualisations, yielding space to the creative force of the word.
The role of the narrator became especially important here – a guide through the performance’s hypertext. Anna Ilczuk, who performed the part, spoke the stage directions and footnotes, activating new narrative layers, much like in the Explanations to Part III, where the author’s comments ‘rewound’ the action to moments referenced in the notes.
Mickiewicz's drama has no integral protagonist, which heightens its hybrid quality. Its subject-function is taken over by a metonymic chain of characters, often seen as dispersed links in a single biography – the embodiment of the Polish fate. This chain includes the unhappy lover Gustaw, retracing the steps of his lost love, and Konrad, the poet condemned to exile for involvement in an anti-Tsarist conspiracy.
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Forefathers’ Eve, part III, photo: Natalia Kabanow
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Forefathers’ Eve, part III, photo: Natalia Kabanow
In Zadara's staging, Konrad framed Gustaw's fate like a clasp, bringing to the fore the individualistic dimension of the role. Bartosz Porczyk delivered a spectacular demythologisation of the character. Rejecting the heroic image sanctioned by the acting tradition, he created instead an egocentric artist–singer and performer–exploring the world through the momentum of his own artistry. Gustaw's alienation–so evident in Part I–was overcome in the prison cell, where Konrad 'killed off' the youthful individualist within himself in order to claim spiritual leadership over the nation. His symbolic merging with the collective took place during the Great Improvisation–a monologue that is both a hymn of rebellion and an indictment of the Creator for the injustice of the world, as well as a political-aesthetic utopia aimed at submitting Poles to the poet's authority. Porczyk's Improvisation fused the energy of a rock concert with the fury of poetic rapture. His Konrad challenged God while simultaneously trying to seduce Him with the beauty of his phrasing. In narcissistic ecstasy, he imagined himself as a demiurge, whose song sets planets spinning and plays on them as if on the glass bowls of a harmonica. This virtuoso display of musica mundana culminated in the poet's possession by demons, who seized control of his ecstatic flight–under the calm gaze of a grey-haired, neatly dressed God seated on a chair like a tidy pensioner.
The melancholic, ironic, kitsch-tinged depiction of metaphysical forces projected a spiritual world drained of vitality, where traces of routinised religiosity intertwined with pop-cultural imagery. Such was the shape of the All Souls’ ritual in Part II, presided over by the spirit of a Halloween-esque ghost-party. Participants armed with night-vision goggles resembled a group of urban thrill-seekers gathering in an abandoned building for a Blair Witch-style survival night. Their Guślarz (Sorcerer) looked like a charlatan staging a bargain-basement horror show. No surprise, then, that the spirits he summoned smacked of carnival trickery, and the clandestine ritual provoked laughter instead of chills.
In Part III, the supernatural realm – dominated by infernal envoys – revealed its theatrical origins. Zadara exposed the central paradox of this section of the drama: the greater the concentration of evil, the more unreal the world becomes. In the production, this unreality–filled with supernatural interventions–was heightened by the artificiality of an aesthetic borrowed from nineteenth-century theatre: a painted backdrop ultimately knocked down by a stage thunderbolt.
The meticulous 'word-for-word' reading underscored the drama's ritual character. Above the characters’ heads, a cosmic war raged continuously: armies of angels and devils keeping each other in check, outbidding one another with miracles, illuminations, and promises. Their ostentatious theatricality deepened the tragicomic effect of humans confronted with obscure visions and subjected to trials they could not comprehend. This mystified metaphysics also exposed the illusory nature of community, held together by prophetic myths.
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The protagonist, too, struggled to understand his own fate. The futility of this effort resonated most strongly in Part IV, where–after failing to transform poetry into an act of liberation and after being exiled to Russia–Gustaw returned home to reclaim lost time and perform a mourning rite over his youthful love. Porczyk's Gustaw ostentatiously enacted his 'inner theatre', savouring self-exhibitionist gestures to the point of near self-parody. His performance charted every stage of romantic madness: the sanctification and profanation of the beloved’s image; the reliving of moments of bliss; and the solemn celebration of loss. Gustaw's bravura self-exposure ultimately morphed into a passionate indictment of the priest – his youthful mentor – whose teachings had proved useless. After a long journey – rejecting the knowledge and worldview that had shaped him – the young man returned to the point of departure.
Gustaw's story ended near the daybed where the Maiden–yearning for her mystical other half–spent sleepless nights. The meeting of these two people, tormented by incompleteness and unanswerable questions, shifted the production’s perspective. The monumental drama–stretching between earth and cosmos, matter and the supernatural, history, the present, and eternity–now became an intimate tale of painful individuation, unfulfilled rebellion, and solitude.
The multi-hour Forefathers' Eve marathon was a test of the performers' physical endurance in their struggle with the material of the text. As the performance neared its end, the actors' exhaustion–strain in the voice, breath, and body–became increasingly visible. Speaking thousands of lines was an exertion requiring emotional and muscular commitment. To sustain themselves and 'carry' the word to the finish, the ensemble needed the audience's encouragement. By the finale, the spectators' openly manifested support – applause, words of encouragement – played a role no less crucial than what unfolded onstage.
This communal dimension was one of the core strengths of Zadara’s project. In the atmosphere of collective ‘vigil’, the poetic word underwent a process of revitalisation. The Wrocław production suspended all accumulated interpretations of the work and rewound the reading to a zero point, returning it to viewers – not as a national relic, but as something to think about.
Written by Jolanta Kowalska
Teatr Polski in Wrocław Forefathers’ Eve by Adam Mickiewicz
Directed by Michał Zadara
Script by Daniel Przastek
Set design by Robert Rumas
Costumes by Julia Kornacka, Arek Ślesiński
Lighting & video by Artur Sienicki
Music by Maja Kleszcz, Wojciech Krzak
Premiere of Parts I, II, IV & the poem The Phantom: 15th February 2014
Premiere of Part III: 10th April 2015
Premiere of the complete work: 20th February 2016