Polish Radio Theatre constitutes a stage for the word, both written and sung, enriched by music and acoustic effects. Making use of a transceiver, it continues and develops Poland’s long history of radio art.
Pioneer times
On 29 November 1925, following a few months of first transmission trials, extensive fragments of Stanisław Wyspiański’s Warszawianka (La Varsovienne) were broadcast, having previously been adapted and directed by Mikołaj Alojzy Kaszyn (1895-1977), the first full-time manager of the programming division. The premiere of this radio performance, then still under the brand of the Polish Society for Radio Engineering, is considered the beginning of Polish radio art. New radio plays started to appear one year later, this time in front of Polish Radio microphones, most of them montages and adaptations of Polish literature.
With time, original radio plays would start to emerge, written specifically with radio performances in mind. The first one was Pogrzeb Kiejstuta (Kiejstut’s Funeral, trans. AP) by Witold Hulewicz, prepared in May 1928 at the Polish Radio station in Vilnius (Wilno at the time). It was this institution that gave rise to a lot of prominent radio artists, ones of extraordinary character, personality, steadfast attitude, and, most importantly – possessing perfect mastery of their craft.
The profile of the radio stage was shaped by individuals such as Antoni Bohdziewicz, Tadeusz Byrski, Zbigniew Kopalko, Tadeusz Łopalewski, but first and foremost by the writer, translator and publisher Witold Hulewicz. It was he who, as the first artist of the radio stage, popularised the term ‘theatre of imagination’, first used in 1933 in an article by Zdzisław Marynowski, then the literary director of Polish Radio. Around the same time, the now common term ‘radio play’ came into use. The people listed above would continue to influence the shape of radio art after World War II. Researchers maintain that throughout the interwar period, Polish Radio transmitted almost 2,500 radio plays. The new type of theatre would attract the most prominent theatre artists, such as Leon Schiller and Juliusz Osterwa, as well as writers, including Jerzy Szaniawski, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, and Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński.
Each performance of the radio theatre had the nature of a premiere, since broadcasts were not yet recorded on tape. The first attempts at recording them were not made until the late 1930s. Plenty of performances gained significant popularity, with some of them realised and transmitted also by foreign studios. Sadly, only a few texts and audition fragments of the rich pre-war output have survived until today.