25 x XXI | 25 Years of Iconic Polish Performances: The Tempest | Article

25 x XXI | 25 Years of Iconic Polish Performances: The Tempest

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Krzysztof Warlikowski’s ‘The Tempest’ became a crucial intervention in the public debate – just beginning to surface in Polish culture at the time – about how to work through traumatic experiences. His Prospero emerged as a figure demanding redress for his exile, someone insisting on justice and actively working to make it happen. Ultimately, he appeared as a kind of avenger.

The Tempest marked a turning point in Krzysztof Warlikowski’s career, a clear boundary between its early and mature phases. One year before, on the same stage of Warsaw’s Rozmaitości Theatre, he had directed Cleansed written by Sarah Kane – a production that already established him as the wunderkind of modern Polish theatre, although still treating him somewhat condescendingly in the mainstream discourse. Critics focussed above all on his boundary-breaking approach to corporeality and taboo. Cleansed was read primarily through his tendency to reveal bodies in crisis – disabled bodies, or bodies deliberately distant from conventional ideals of beauty – and through his fascination with extreme experiences. From his Hamlet (Rozmaitości Theatre, 1999), what stuck was the image of the protagonist (Jacek Poniedziałek) performing a scene naked, and the director’s oedipal reading of Hamlet’s relationship with his mother (Stanisława Celińska).

To put it bluntly: Warlikowski was fashionable, but not yet fully embraced by the mainstream. The precision with which he curated his repertoire and sought out his own thematic territory was largely missed or misunderstood. Yet he was remarkably consistent. He avoided Polish literary classics (he staged Gombrowicz only once, despite his apparent affinity; later he occasionally turned to texts by Hanna Krall, but never touched the canonical Polish repertoire, whether Romantic or modern). Instead, he astutely identified major developments in world drama (Kane, Koltès, Bovell) and cultivated a deep interest in antiquity (between Hamlet and Cleansed he directed a superb, though critically overlooked, Bacchae in Warsaw). For many years Shakespeare remained central to this world. Warlikowski came back to him repeatedly – at home and abroad – developing increasingly more sophisticated interpretations. The relatively early Taming of the Shrew (Dramatyczny Theatre, 1998) was significant as an attempt to expose misogynistic violence within a popular comedy, but its line was still drawn with a heavy hand. The Tempest, by contrast, was intimate and focused – a culmination of a progressively more attentive reading of the Shakespearean canon. Tellingly, Warlikowski returned to Shakespeare in Poland only once afterwards, in the ultimately disappointing African Tales (Nowy Teatr, 2011), essentially a reworking of earlier ideas.

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"The Tempest", dir. Krzysztof Warlikowski, Nowy Teatr in Warsaw, 2003, photo: Nowy Teatr

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Małgorzata Szczęśniak’s set design was restrained, far removed from the glamorous opulence of many earlier and later productions. A simple table was placed at audience level on a mirrored forestage – this was where the central scenes unfolded. The depth of the stage revealed itself gradually; part of the action took place on a raised platform enclosed by a semi-circular structure that suggested a palace wall or a chapel apse. Unlike Shakespeare’s original, the performance did not open with a storm but with an intimate conversation between Prospero (Adam Ferency) and Miranda (Małgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik). The casting choice immediately stood out: Miranda was not a girl, but a mature woman. In the opening sequences the audience could not see her face, hidden beneath long, curly hair – a subtle hint at her lack of a fully formed identity. Prospero, recounting her past, was literally constructing her before our very eyes. His power did not stem from magic (his “cloak” was an old sweater) but from command over discourse – the creative power of speech. He created Miranda first, then Ariel (Magdalena Cielecka) and Caliban (Renate Jett, who received the Aleksander Zelwerowicz Award for the role). The production emphasised the politics of voice: who gets to speak, and how. Caliban, played by a German actress speaking Polish with effort and a pronounced accent, was someone still struggling to master both language and destiny. In the final scene Antonio (Andrzej Chyra) loses his voice – an unmistakable sign of his defeat.

With minute, precise directorial gestures, Warlikowski crafted a narrative in which every human relationship was ultimately a relationship of violence. The romance between Miranda and Ferdinand (Redbad Klynstra) lacked any semblance of youthful love: he was a suave society flirt; she – an embittered, sexually frustrated woman blindly seeking closeness. Prospero staged their union as part of his own power play. Warlikowski ensured that we recognised in Ferdinand a younger version of Prospero – a man dreaming of dominance. When Ferency and Klynstra sit side by side, the resemblance was striking. Their marriage became a contract between two men – one transferring control over a woman to the other.

Ariel was drawn even more intriguingly. Cielecka’s androgynous figure blossomed like a butterfly, transforming from a boy in a cheap tracksuit into a sex symbol before our eyes. Like almost everyone in the production, Ariel both submits to Prospero’s authority and loves him. They demand freedom, yet secretly long for erotic subjugation. In their first dialogue Prospero twists Ariel’s arms before nearly kissing them; when the kiss fails to materialise, Ariel reacts with disappointment. Warlikowski left no doubt: every form of intimacy in The Tempest was saturated with violence. And true freedom did not exist: when Prospero finally freed Ariel, the spirit died instantly.

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"The Tempest", dir. Krzysztof Warlikowski, Nowy Teatr in Warsaw, 2003, photo: Nowy Teatr

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At the same time, the production became a significant contribution to emerging debates within Polish culture about confronting collective trauma. Prospero was presented as someone seeking redress for exile – actively pursuing justice, even vengeance. Was his response legitimate? Fair? Constructive? Warlikowski offered no definitive answers. What he did signal was his growing interest in collective memory and its latent traumas. A crucial contextual frame was the national debate stirred by Jan T. Gross’s Neighbours and Maria Janion’s To Europe – Yes, But Together with Our Dead, both published in 2000. The Tempest marked an important step in the director’s exploration of Holocaust-related themes – even though the play never referenced the Shoah directly, it anticipated later works such as The Dybbuk (Rozmaitości Theatre, 2003) and (A)pollonia (Nowy Teatr, 2009), where unprocessed post-Holocaust memory – particularly Polish mechanisms of forgetting – appeared as a source of societal illness.

Immediately after the premiere, the most hotly debated element was the wedding scene between Miranda and Ferdinand. Warlikowski chose to rupture theatrical illusion by bringing a group of ‘Łowiczanki’ on stage – older women in traditional folk costumes – who recited wedding verses in plain, untheatrical voices, bringing in a jarring effect of reality. The gesture was powerful and has since been echoed in other productions (most recently in Spartacus, directed by Jakub Skrzywanek). But what did it mean? Was the director exposing traditional rituals as instruments of oppression? Or, conversely, affirming tradition as a shared space without which social life descends into chaos? Were the Łowiczanki attendants of Prospero-the-oppressor, or Janion’s ‘Our Dead’?

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"The Tempest", dir. Krzysztof Warlikowski, Nowy Teatr in Warsaw, 2003, photo: Nowy Teatr

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In later works Warlikowski rarely embraced such radical ambiguity. His theatre developed along two parallel tracks. On one side were sleek, contemporary narratives such as Krum (Rozmaitości Theatre, 2005) and Angels in America (Rozmaitości Theatre, 2007) – polished, brilliantly acted, yet ultimately tailored as high-quality entertainment for the middle class. On the other were demanding, multi-hour adaptations or text-collages reflecting a growing interest in postdramatic strategies and grappling with the ‘big issues’ of contemporary society (The End, 2010; The French, 2015, both at Nowy Teatr). The dramaturgical precision distinctive of The Tempest, the ability to construct radically ambivalent situations while maintaining an impeccably clear structural whole – these features would not return. Warlikowski grew less invested in the theme that once animated his early theatre: the specific entanglement of power and eroticism. On the rare occasions when he revisited it – such as in parts of Elizabeth Costello (2024) – his theatre regained its vitality and charge. This was a potent reminder of the force and value of the discoveries made during the era of The Tempest.

_{Written by Tomasz Plata}

Rozmaitości Theatre in Warsaw
The Tempest by William Shakespeare (Burza, translated by Stanisław Barańczak)
Directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski
Set design by Małgorzata Szczęśniak
Music by Paweł Mykietyn
Premiere: 4th January 2003

Language English

polish theatre

polish theatre directors

krzysztof warlikowski