25 x XXI | 25 Years of Iconic Polish Performances: Once Upon a Time There Was an Andrzej, an Andrzej, an Andrzej, and an Andrzej…
Despite gestures some deemed vulgar, Strzępka and Demirski’s production was, at its core, an intellectual work – a reckoning undertaken by a burned-out intelligentsia, confronting its own failure to fulfil the intellectual responsibility of producing culture capable of diagnosing its own community.
It was a genuine scandal. Once Upon a Time There Was an Andrzej, an Andrzej, an Andrzej, and an Andrzej… – the eighth of some thirty collaborations between director Monika Strzępka and playwright Paweł Demirski – provoked an enormous reaction. In its first half, the production imagined, in brutally blunt style, the funeral and wake held after the death of Andrzej Wajda. The problem: at the time of the premiere, Wajda was still very much alive. The press seized on the story – even before opening night the performance had already been lifted beyond the confines of the theatre.
On the intimate stage of the Wałbrzych Theatre, caricatured figures of leading Polish cultural icons confronted those left behind by success. Among the ranks of defeated were a frustrated young film director (Sebastian Stankiewicz) and a pair of retirees from the so-called ‘province’. Everything began with an equally disordered and forceful metatheatrical monologue delivered by the actor Mirosława Żak, whose character in the text is labelled ‘The Enthusiast’. Burnout, financial strain, and the wearying refrain that artists are funded ‘from our taxes’ were punctuated, again and again, by a cry once hurled at dance-theatre legend Pina Bausch: ‘MS BAUSCH, YOU ARE NOT WORTH A SINGLE MARK WE SPEND ON YOU.’
Why did Demirski choose to kill off Wajda, known here as 'the architect of imagination'? Not only because of Wajda’s oeuvre but because of his stature among Poland’s post-1989 elites. Wajda was not only a canonical filmmaker, but also a senator for the Democratic Union, the emblematic party of Poland’s liberal intelligentsia in the era of transformation. He co-founded Agora, the publisher of the daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, perceived at the turn of the millennium as the centre of liberal hegemony. Even the company’s founding agreement had been signed in Wajda’s Żoliborz home.
Exactly halfway through the play, it turns out that the pâté served at the wake had gone bad. The poisoned mourners were dying. The performance shifts into the afterlife. Cuban dissident Guillermo Fariñas, known for repeated hunger strikes against the Castro regime, greets the deceased in hell. He, too, was prematurely killed off by Demirski; like Wajda, he was alive at the premiere – and remains alive as I write these words. In the play, Fariñas (Daniel Chryc) dies and, at the moment of his death, experiences a brutal revelation: ‘In the last moment just before dying / I understood that if the dictatorship in Cuba ever falls / it will fall only / to let in / your own variety of lumpen capitalism’.
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'Once Upon a Time There Was an Andrzej, an Andrzej, an Andrzej, and an Andrzej…', written by Paweł Demirski, directed by Monika Strzępka, Szaniawski Theatre, Wałbrzych, 2010, photo: Bartek Sowa / Szaniawski Theatre
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The deceased Wajda was then instructed by the Cuban to make a new film in hell – a sequel to Man of Iron. Michał Korchowiec’s set design – rows of theatre seats arranged onstage – recalled Wajda’s segment in the 2005 documentary Solidarity, Solidarity…, created for the 25th anniversary of the August Agreements. There, Wajda sits with Krystyna Janda, Jerzy Radziwiłowicz and Lech Wałęsa, watching Man of Iron and – not unlike in Demirski’s play – explaining why he never made a sequel. ‘They sent me three scripts’, he says in the documentary. ‘But each one showed “Solidarity” fractured and broken. “Solidarity” that may have won but ushered in a situation nobody expected. Could I have made such a film?”
There was no single parody of Andrzej Wajda in Demirski’s text. Instead, there were characters uncannily close to acor Krystyna Janda (played by Agnieszka Kwietniewska), director Kazimierz Kutz (Włodzimierz Dyła), and finally the economist Leszek Balcerowicz (Rafał Kosowski), whose policies shaped Poland’s economic transition. Still at the wake, Balcerowicz thanked Polish creative minds for their post-transformation statements being ‘so wonderfully irrelevant’ and ‘so delightfully uninteresting’ that ‘society recognised them for what they were’ – and no one wanted to finance culture anymore, so cultural institutions could be closed down.
‘The health service could learn from you’, said the visibly moved minister to the cultural luminaries. The luminaries adored him nonetheless — Dyła’s Kutz even licked his shoes. That is probably the most memorable image from Once Upon a Time There Was an Andrzej, an Andrzej, an Andrzej, and an Andrzej…. As has the scene in which Kwietniewska — like Janda in Man of Iron — sang the anti-communist ballad Janek Wiśniewski Fell. Intended as a parody of the self-celebrating veterans of “Solidarity,” it was nonetheless piercingly delivered — despite the fact that the actor wore a plush teddy-bear costume, suggesting that in post-transformation Poland, artists are merely mascots of the ruling establishment.
Wajda’s persona in Strzępka and Demirski’s production was dispersed, shattered into multiple voices – nearly every character spoke partly on his behalf. He was, after all, the architect of collective imagination. The figures onstage clamoured over one another to speak in the master’s name. This crescendo culminated in the looping final scene: the film Człowiek z pluszowej rewolucji (Man of the Plush Revolution), supposedly shot in the afterlife. The scene depicted the visit of Kwietniewska’s director figure (a nod to Agnieszka in Man of Marble) to the home of wealthy success-story characters boasting about their achievements – in the manner of breakfast television or the soap operas depicting Poland’s emerging business elite. Their grotesque self-celebration morphed into scarcely concealed mockery of those who aspired to such a world but would never enter it – represented by the son’s fiancée, played by Małgorzata Białek. When the character, humiliated, tried to scream, it turned out she had no voice, no language – only soundlessly moving lips. The scene restarted, faster, then again. The loop had no end, until spectators were told they could not continue, lacking the required attire: the harmless, adorable plush-toy costumes.
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'Once Upon a Time There Was an Andrzej, an Andrzej, an Andrzej, and an Andrzej…', written by Paweł Demirski, directed by Monika Strzępka, Szaniawski Theatre, Wałbrzych, 2010, photo: Bartek Sowa / Szaniawski Theatre
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The production struck a raw collective nerve: the frustrations of a society that still remembered the poverty of the 1990s and the unemployment of the early 2000s, bombarded by the disciplining rhetoric of necessary transformation costs on one side and premature success propaganda on the other. ‘I remember the overwhelming emotions while watching Once Upon a Time There Was an Andrzej’, actor Sara Celler-Jezierska recalled years later. ‘I was shocked that something like this could be done in a theatre’.” Celler-Jezierska was a twenty-three-year-old acting student at the time of the premiere and later a member of the Wałbrzych ensemble.
Fifteen years after its premiere, Poland looks entirely different. Strzępka and Demirski’s diagnoses no longer register as ‘radical leftism’. They have become mainstream, as has the exhaustion with the old elites. As early as 2016, before the premiere of his play about March 1968 at the Jewish Theatre (March ’68: Live Well – It Is the Best Revenge), Demirski said in an interview with Gazeta Wyborcza that mocking those persecuted in 1968 – the founding fathers of the Third Republic and its liberal elites – would be ‘too easy’ in the current political climate. Those elites had by then already been defeated by right-wing populism.
Viewed today, Once Upon a Time There Was an Andrzej also highlights how essential Strzępka’s direction was to the duo’s work. Precise in her handling of text, she was also shamelessly excessive in her wide, often (ob)scene gestures – shoe-licking, tooth-picking, screaming.
Despite such gestures, often deemed anti-intellectual or vulgar, the Wałbrzych Once Upon a Time There Was an Andrzej was a profoundly intellectual performance – a reckoning with how the burned-out intellectual class failed to fulfil their intellectual duty to create a culture capable of diagnosing its own society. As a noted and acclaimed production, even amid scandal, it was also an act of self-positioning for Strzępka and Demirski – a declaration that they were the left-wing counter-elite of the Polish stage. A few months later, this was affirmed with the Polityka Passport award, bestowed by one of the most archetypally intellectual Polish weeklies.
Echoes of the performance appear years later in the 2024 publication of Notes, Andrzej Wajda’s diary. He recalls being asked why he did not sue Strzępka and Demirski. ‘That is exactly what they are waiting for’, he replied. ‘They think that if they manage to bury me, they will take my place. I never envied Fellini – I admired him for everything I could not do. That is why I sit in his chair at the French Academy’. The tone of self-satisfaction was not far from the parody of the director in Demirski’s play.
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'Once Upon a Time There Was an Andrzej, an Andrzej, an Andrzej, and an Andrzej…', written by Paweł Demirski, directed by Monika Strzępka, Szaniawski Theatre, Wałbrzych, 2010, photo: Bartek Sowa / Szaniawski Theatre
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And yet, there is a grain of truth in Wajda’s observation. It was indeed a generational struggle for space and attention. Strzępka and Demirski made no effort to deny this – they ironised their own ambitions openly in the play: ‘I know them very well / and even if they will not say it out loud / they are waiting / to be in the place of those they criticise / to be in the mainstream and be able to say: / when we toppled neoliberalism in Poland / it was exceptionally hard for us / of course they will never say that’.
In the years that followed, the duo occupied ever more of Poland’s ‘architecture of imagination’. Fifteen years after Once Upon a Time There Was an Andrzej, Andrzej, Andrzej, and Andrzej… Strzępka has done numerous productions at Kraków’s Stary Theatre and Warsaw’s Polski Theatre under Andrzej Seweryn, a series for national Polish television (TVP), and after her split with Demirski – a promising at first, and ultimately disastrous tenure as director of Warsaw’s Dramatyczny Theatre. Demirski, meanwhile, began developing series for Netflix – the emblem of globalised cultural industry.
And neoliberalism? It has not been toppled; in Poland, it is in reasonably good health. But the language used to critique social reality has changed entirely.
Written by Witold Mrozek
Jerzy Szaniawski Dramatyczny Theatre in Wałbrzych
Once Upon a Time There Was an Andrzej, Andrzej, Andrzej, and Andrzej…
Directed by Monika Strzępka & Paweł Demirski
Set design by Michał Korchowiec
Music by Jan Suświłło
Premiere: 22nd May 2010