25xXXI | 25 Years of Iconic Polish Performances: The Stranger
'The Stranger' was only Katarzyna Minkowska's second premiere in a repertory theatre, yet it immediately defined both her directorial style and thematic focus. Here was a theatre willing to speak earnestly about the individual entangled in family relationships, probing the wounds usually revealed only in the therapist’s office. What protected the production from sliding into potential banality was the ever-present shadow of death.
The premiere of The Stranger, directed by Katarzyna Minkowska, signalled an unexpected shift in paradigm. Psychological theatre suddenly occupied a space that had long been reserved for post-dramatic and critical approaches. Those strategies, once dominant, had begun to lose their charge; they were being displaced by therapy culture and the growing turn toward narrative (therapy, after all, is a form of storytelling). The fictions of TV series and novels could suppress, for hours on end, the anxieties triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and global crises — climate, migration, and soon, war. Minkowska’s theatre grew organically out of its moment.
Here was a theatre willing to speak earnestly about the individual entangled in family relationships, reaching toward its most wounded and determining places – the ones discovered in clinical rooms. What protected the production from sliding into potential banality was the ever-present shadow of death – death permeates even the children's play staged by Minkowska (What A Man Is, Everyone Can See, 2025). The director approached the great taboo of late capitalism as a liminal experience, one that stress-tests the family ecosystem, derails its habitual scripts, and sometimes grants freedom when leaving a toxic relationship had once seemed impossible.
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'The Stranger', dir. Katarzyna Minkowska, photo Maciej Zakrzewski / Teatr Polski w Poznaniu
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The Stranger examined precisely that latter scenario. At the same time, it struck a forceful blow at the topos of the mother – an impulse that would resonate across the emerging theatre of the 2020s. Its creators began from their own experience as daughters or granddaughters confronting the overbearing, narcissistic figures of mothers and grandmothers. The book that captured the essence of these dynamics was recommended to the director by Maciej Nowak, artistic director of the Polski Theatre. The recommendation proved to be all the more accurate as Maria Kuncewiczowa also described in her novel (first serialised in Kurier Poranny in 1935) her relationship with her mother. After her mother's death, Kuncewiczowa abandoned a career as an opera singer, became a writer, and chose a fulfilled family life.
In the script (by Minkowska and Tomasz Walesiak), some threads were enriched by elements of the author's biography, others deepened through rehearsal-room discussions. Another surprise was Minkowska's refusal to deconstruct the classic text; she chose instead to follow a work written in the interwar period – something that only a few years earlier would have been an exception to the rule. The impression was both accurate and paradoxical, since most of the staged scenes ultimately exceeded the novel's boundaries.
Kuncewiczowa's The Stranger recounts the final day in the life of Ewelina Róża Żabczyńska, whose memory drifts through her past: her family home in Taganrog, which she left at 16 for Warsaw to study at the conservatory; her love for Michał Bądski, the violin teacher's son, and her hatred for the Russian woman he married; the resentments born of her foreignness and broken heart, which shaped her marriage and motherhood, and finally her later experience of a transformation and reconciliation with her family. But Minkowska's Róża (a superb performance by Alona Szostak) was never alive onstage – she appeared already dead, observing the elaborate rituals of her own funeral.
Her side-door entrance through the auditorium opened the production. With soft nostalgia, she listened to the orchestra assembled on the forestage before the curtain (the Antraktowa Orchestra of the Polski Theatre performed throughout, live). She assured the audience, with a hint of emotion, that everything – the music, the flowers, the weeping children – was arranged for her. Suspended in a metatheatrical limbo, she passed through the phases of her burial, commenting on them and responding to her relatives just as she had in life: demanding attention, the spotlight, and obedience. Yet she no longer had influence over anything – a slowly dawning revelation.
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'The Stranger', dir. Katarzyna Minkowska, photo Maciej Zakrzewski / Teatr Polski w Poznaniu
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The performance followed a clear dramaturgical arc. It opened with the funeral ceremony, in which the relationships between the dead woman and the living were established and reframed; the burial climaxed in a brief montage of black-and-white close-ups of the faces of individual participants filmed at the cemetery. The final stage was the wake, dissolving tensions in casual conversations over wine. Róża left the stage silently through the same door she had entered less than two hours earlier. She cast one last glance at the audience. Her family – deep in lively conversation – was no longer speaking about her.
Minkowska rejected the notion of a miraculous transformation in her protagonist, whose hypersensitivity had always combined with psychological violence. Her victims spoke in the form of funeral orations. The son, Władyś (Michał Sikorski), offered a eulogy perfectly tailored to his mother’s tastes and expectations – a mode of appeasement he had mastered before emigrating to preserve what little autonomy he had left. His flawless delivery was silently doubled by his wife, Jadwiga (Kornelia Trawkowska), whose improvised speech expressed gratitude for being assigned a secondary position in the family hierarchy, ending – this time sincerely – by thanking Róża for failing to notice her resemblance to one of the granddaughters, thus sparing the child from her meddling. Adam's (Andrzej Szubski) speech consisted of silence, mirroring 40 years of marriage. Daughter Marta (Monika Roszko) began by recounting her first erotic dream–one in which, instead of a boy, she saw her mother leaning over her, silk rustling, a nocturne playing (both children’s relationships with their mother were steeped in Freudian tensions). But she was quickly interrupted: singing would suffice– 'It's what Mama would have wanted'.
Standing centre-stage, Marta instinctively began braiding her hair – a trained reflex, part of Róża's conditioning. Having conceived her daughter in marital rape, Róża replaced initial indifference with obsessive nurturing of her talent: 'You're a mongrel, bark […], I don't want to talk to you like this, but I have to.' Marta mimicked the sweeping gestures of an opera singer, baring her teeth, stretching her mouth wide – replacing her nervous, habitual tight-lipped grimace with a new mask – yet she remained voiceless. Her voice had been appropriated to feed her mother's ego.
In the novel, Kuncewiczowa leaves Marta's decision about abandoning singing unresolved. In the production, Marta and her husband Paweł (Mariusz Adamski) modelled an ideal therapeutic couple's dialogue – she asked whether he would accept her ending her career, informed him of her pregnancy, assured him she would invest in the relationship, and he responded in kind. Unexpectedly, Michał Bądski also appeared at the funeral – a man now in a happy marriage, who attached entirely different importance to the youthful infatuation. He delivered the crucial line: sometimes one must leave a relationship. In an instant, he liberated Marta from the romantic myth she had been fed and demolished the sandcastle Róża had spent a lifetime upholding. These scenes exemplified the contemporary therapeutic idiom used to construct character psychology and dialogue – a signature of the generation of theatre-makers now in their thirties. Writing in Teatr, Dominik Gac termed this movement 'Polish therapy theatre'.
It has been only five years since Minkowska's debut in dramatic theatre, yet she has already conquered most of the country's major stages and won a significant share of its prestigious awards. Several people are behind this success. Minkowska (born 1992), who herself received a multifaceted education (in directing, theatre studies, and set design), works with a relatively consistent team. The names of the creative team members recurring in the subsequent productions – Tomasz Walesiak (dramaturgy), Łukasz Mleczak (set design, costumes), Jola Łobacz (costumes), Wojciech Frycz (music), Aneta Jankowska or Krystyna Lama Szydłowska (choreography), Paulina Góral (lighting), Agata Rucińska (video) – already appeared in her debut Stream (2020). Stream was created as part of the TR Debut Award granted to Minkowska at the Kraków Young Directors' Forum, and remains, to this day, part of the TR Warszawa repertoire. Their collaboration has produced a recognisable style: productions that are intimate, and detailed in character portrayal, relationships, and acting, yet simultaneously epic, with –large-cast and multi-layered staging. In short, psychological dramas told with a flair that excel on large stages.
This is why Minkowska opened Monika Strzępka's and the collective's high-profile 2022 tenure at Warsaw's Dramatic Theatre – an institution meant to be radically feminist without alienating its already existing, more traditional audience. My Year of Rest and Relaxation, based on Ottessa Moshfegh's novel, managed to reconcile both sensibilities without artistic compromise.
Subsequent premieres confirmed that this was a phenomenon developing its own format with remarkable consistency. When the Snow Melts (TR Warszawa) won the Konrad Swinarski Best Director Award (2023/24 season) and its script received the Gdyńska Nagroda Dramaturgiczna (Gdynia Drama Prize) in 2025. The fact that this theatre was recognised as both high-quality and popular – establishing an alliance between critics and the public unseen for a long time – is further evidenced by the fact that as many as two productions were adapted for Television Theatre, which reaches an audience of half a million. The Young Audience Stage launched with the exuberant What a man is, everyone can see (Bartosz Bielenia won the Aleksander Zelwerowicz Award for his role as the Dog; Kuba Golla received an acting prize at the 31st National Competition for the Production of Polish Contemporary Drama Play). Among the new directorate's first initiatives was also the televised recording of The Stranger (broadcast premiere: 20 May 2024). Seen again on screen, the production reaffirmed just how forceful the 'Minkowska team's' entry into Polish theatre had been.
Written by Katarzyna Tokarska-Stangret
Polski Theatre in Poznań
The Stranger by Maria Kuncewiczowa
Directed by Katarzyna Minkowska
Dramaturgy by Tomasz Walesiak
Script by Katarzyna Minkowska and Tomasz Walesiak
Music by Wojciech Frycz
Movement by Aneta Jankowska
Set design by Katarzyna Minkowska and Łukasz Mleczak
Costumes by Łukasz Mleczak
Lighting by Paulina Góral
Video by Agata Rucińska
Premiere: 9th October 2021