Theatre Worthy of an Oscar: Andrzej Wajda & the Stage

biesy_1974_yale_repertory_theatre.jpg, default, Meryl Streep and Christopher Lloyd in a performance of ‘Demons’, dir. Andrzej Wajda, 1974, photo: William Baker / Yale Repertory Theatre

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He directed performances featuring the likes of Zbigniew Cybulski, Jerzy Stuhr, and… Meryl Streep. Although mostly known as a filmmaker, Andrzej Wajda revolutionised the world of theatre, too.

Years after his debut on stage, he said: ‘Theatre is the one remaining place where people still talk to each other’.

Andrzej Wajda directed his first play in 1959 at the Wybrzeże Theatre in Gdańsk. His films Canal (1956) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958) had already been released, so by that time Wajda had won some acclaim as a filmmaker: a nomination for the Palme d’Or and the FIPRESCI Award at the Venice Film Festival. Zygmunt Hübner, the artistic director of the theatre at the time, convinced Wajda to direct A Hatful of Rain, an American play about a Korean War veteran unable to find his place in his new-yet-old reality, as a result of which he turns to drugs and gets stuck in a debt spiral. At the time, no one was talking about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) yet, but the phenomenon itself was common, not only in Western societies.

Wajda recognised that the time was ripe for the play. He employed naturalist means of expression and Stanisławski-inspired methods of acting. However, some Polish critics didn’t appreciate these solutions. For instance, Jordan Koźlikowski wrote, not without malice:

Perhaps realism pushed to the extreme is considered a breath of fresh air in contemporary American art. […] For us, however, this manner of understanding art – as a so-called mirror held up to reality – is by no means new, and we don’t tend to elevate it above all others.

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Mirosława Dubrawska and Zbigniew Cybulski in a performance of ‘A Hatful of Rain’, dir. Andrzej Wajda, Wybrzeże Theatre in Gdańsk, 1959, photo: Tadeusz Link / MNG

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Nonetheless, positive reviews prevailed. Journalists were particularly enthusiastic about the brilliantly cast roles – Wajda’s trademark from the very beginning. Immediately after the premiere, theatre critic Jerzy Eljasiak commented:

Truly, I find it difficult to decide who did a better job in this play: Zbigniew Cybulski, from beginning to end profoundly human and real in the role of a drug addict, or Edmund Fetting as his brother.

Jan Paweł Gawlik seconded this opinion on the pages of Życie Literackie (Literary Life):

One simply has to see what Wajda and Cybulski did to the text of the play in order to properly assess theatre’s chances to project onto the stage the tensions and sensitivities of a man cornered by psychological and moral traps of contemporary civilisation. What they created is a performance terrifyingly precise and terrifyingly merciless in exposing a man with somewhat obsessive accuracy of report – a brilliant performance down to the minutest detail, with excellent acting on the part of the entire cast and a remarkable tension of dramatic force that electrified the audience to a degree long unseen.

As Jan Ciechowicz reported in his article ‘Debiut Teatralny Andrzeja Wajdy’ (Andrzej Wajda’s Theatrical Debut), referring to the director’s own words, during a guest performance at the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre in Kraków, Cybulski entered the stage, but, after a couple of minutes, he stopped performing and turned to the audience, saying: ‘I apologise, I’ve made a mistake, I’ll start from the beginning’. Because he couldn’t stand falsity in acting.

A Hatful of Rain turned out to be a fan favourite and dominated the repertoire – it was staged 147 times. It’s an excellent result for a theatre performance; still, Wajda would come to beat this record more than once.

Three Hamlets

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Pictured: Jerzy Stuhr and Anna Polony, ‘Aktorzy Starego Teatru w Scenach i Monologach z “Hamleta”’ (Actors of the Old Theatre in Scenes and Monologues from ‘Hamlet’), dir. Andrzej Wajda, 1981, Wawel Royal Castle, Helena Modrzejewska National Old Theatre (Stary Theatre), photo: Jerzy Ochoński / PAP

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In the 1960s, Wajda returned to the Wybrzeże Theatre with Hamlet, which he read through the prism of Stanisław Wyspiański’s The Hamlet Study. It was his first – out of four – theatrical encounter with this particular Shakespeare tragedy.

In her book Teatr Wajdy (Wajda’s Theatre), Joanna Walaszek writes that the choice of Hamlet ‘for one’s second directed play was a bold, risky decision. But, in a way, also an obvious one’. She believes that what emboldened Wajda to confront Hamlet was the fact that at the time, Ashes and Diamonds was being shown in movie theatres all over the world.

Wajda himself reminisced years later:

It’s the most difficult play to direct, the dream of every actor and every director. But I was young at the time and deeply convinced I could do anything. Even ‘Hamlet’. I got in way above my head. But it’s hard to be a director otherwise.

Gustaw Holoubek was initially selected to portray the Prince of Denmark, but the role was eventually given to young Edmund Fetting, of whom critics would later write that he was a ‘heroic and lyrical’ Hamlet, as well as an ‘ice cold’ and ‘aloof’ one.

Still, one question arises. Considering the success of A Hatful of Rain, why didn’t Wajda cast the legendary Cybulski as Hamlet? ‘I had the impression that Cybulski was incapable of delivering the lines, that with his slovenly manner of speaking, he couldn’t perform Shakespeare’, the director explained. Behind the scenes, however, people said that Wajda wasn’t sure whether Cybulski would learn the lines at all, since the actor was well-known for his tendency to improvise.

Years later, Wajda would come to regret that decision, admitting on Radio Gdańsk: ‘Nowadays I would cast Cybulski without a second thought, no matter what. I would have the lines written for him on the backdrop, on the floor, on the decorations and the props, anything as long as he was the one to perform’.

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‘Aktorzy Starego Teatru w Scenach i Monologach z “Hamleta”’ (Actors of the Old Theatre in Scenes and Monologues from ‘Hamlet’), dir. Andrzej Wajda, 1981, Wawel Royal Castle, Helena Modrzejewska National Old Theatre in Kraków, photo: Krzysztof Wójcik / Polish Press Agency (PAP)

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Twenty years later, he returned to Hamlet. At that time, he said:

I still wasn’t ready to tackle it [‘Hamlet’] again. Back then [in 1960], it was simply a youthful impulse […] This time, it’s been a matter of a very long decision process. […] In the present times more than ever, one seeks something fixed, a stable point of reference. It’s this sort of values that we find in ‘Hamlet’ […] Simultaneously, however, never before in our history have we found ourselves in a situation akin to Hamlet’s, except the choices our reality leaves us with are far more difficult than the ones with which Shakespeare presents the Prince of Denmark. That’s why today more than ever, Hamlet feels familiar to us, he’s a figure we could identify with.

In June 1981, in the courtyard of the Wawel Royal Castle, Wajda staged an open air event titled Aktorzy Starego Teatru w Scenach i Monologach z ‘Hamleta’ (Actors of the Old Theatre in Scenes and Monologues from ‘Hamlet’), once again filtering Shakespeare through Wyspiański. (Hence that location for the performance rather than any other. After all, the author of The Wedding demonstrates in his Hamlet Study that the Wawel provides the most appropriate scenery for Hamlet’s actions.) In November of the same year, this time in the building of the Old Theatre (Stary Teatr), he staged Tragiczna Historia Hamleta Księcia Danii (The Tragic Story of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark). In both of these performance, Jerzy Stuhr was cast as Hamlet and Anna Polony as Ophelia.

Right before the premiere, during a meeting with journalists, Wajda mentioned: ‘The whole thing with “Hamlet” […] began after the tragic death of Konrad Swinarski, who, as we know, didn’t live to finish “Hamlet” for the Old Theatre’ – in 1975, he died in a tragic plane crash outside Damascus.

As Irena T. Sławińska argued on the pages of Trybuna Robotnicza (The Workers’ Tribune), the new Hamlet for the Kraków stage had to be ‘completely different, but at the same time linked, to an extent, to Swinarski’s unrealised legend’.

Once again, Wajda’s method of directing the actors drew the attention of theatre critics. In the journal Odra, Małgorzata Dzieduszycka commented:

Wajda surprised us all: he cast Jerzy Stuhr in the role of Hamlet. At first, it seemed that it wasn’t going to work. Stuhr makes us think of the grifter ‘Top Dog’ from Feliks Falk’s film and other weasels of the kind. Contrarily, his Hamlet turned out to be brilliant. Human, full or warmth, he inspires trust from the very first moment. Stuhr’s Hamlet changes very clearly as the plot unfolds. His initial spontaneity fades away. He becomes stingy with his gestures, prudent with his words. His reflective nature transforms into wit, sensitivity into cunning.

However, Stuhr recollects that not everybody was pleased with this casting choice: ‘When I stepped onto the stage, I could sense the audience’s silent scream: “How dare you, Top Dog, put on the costume of the Prince of Denmark?”, and I had four hours to convince them that I had the right to’.

To play Hamlet meant, as it still does now, to confront the viewers’ own ideas and expectations as well as the performances of other actors that went down in the history of theatre. In the book Teatr Wajdy, Joanna Walaszek argues:

Whether one accepts Stuhr as Hamlet depends largely on the viewer’s own attitude. If one expects a consistent or artistically sophisticated creation, Stuhr fails, or only succeeds at certain moments. However, if perceived as an actor, a man struggling with the role of Hamlet with passion, devotion, effort, and the courage to expose even his own weaknesses and limitations, then he evokes respect and inspires the sense of community of fate.

The performance itself was met with a mixed reception. In the magazine Fakty, Andrzej Żurowski made no secret of his disappointment: ‘A pity. A great pity. A work that we awaited, expecting a grand projection of the state of our dreams and visions, turned out to be a shattered mirror’. The critic interpreted Wajda’s play through the lens of the events of August 1980:

Wajda’s failure is a figure of Polish theatre’s total failure after August 1980, a failure on a scale unseen on our native stage for the past few decades. Wajda’s defeat isn’t just his own – it marks the defeat of art itself, which, in our extreme present situation, can keep pace neither with the nation nor with reality, and it’s equally unable to pause its race towards reflection on the surrounding world.

The premiere of the third Hamlet took place two weeks before the introduction of martial law [introduced on 13 December 1981]. In January 1982, Wajda wrote a letter to the Old Theatre directorial board, protesting against the reintroduction of the performance, the idea to boycott the play was going around Warsaw. In the end, the play was not only reintroduced (with the director’s approval), but it also enjoyed great popularity among the viewers, who – owing to the political circumstances – interpreted it completely differently than in the beginning.

As Stuhr would later write in a letter to Wajda, ‘Theatre has once again become a place – the only one – to meet people and hear a few words of truth’.

The fourth Hamlet

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Teresa Budzisz-Krzyżanowska in a performance of ‘Hamlet IV’, dir. Andrzej Wajda, 1989, photo: Wojciech Plewiński / Helena Modrzejewska National Old Theatre in Kraków

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The last time Wajda returned to Hamlet was at the end of June 1989, another key moment for the Polish nation. The springtime rehearsals began after the proceedings of the Round Table, during the ongoing election campaign. At that time, Wajda was running for a Senate seat as part of the ‘Solidarity’ Citizen Committee. Photos of him with Lech Wałęsa were plastered all around the city. On 4th June, he was elected to be a Senator of the Republic of Poland, a function he served until 1991.

A few months prior, in December 1988, the director personally approached renowned translator Stanisław Barańczak with a request for a new translation of Shakespeare’s monologues. In the letter, he briefly outlined his vision: the fourth Hamlet was to be a performance about theatre itself, with a dressing room for a setting, with an intimate relationship with the public. He wrote: ‘Teresa Budzisz-Krzyżanowska will play Hamlet; although a woman in this role is a quite banal idea, I consider her Poland’s most talented actor. And because Hamlet, too, is an actor, a person in disguise, the idea will justify itself’. The correspondence between Wajda and Barańczak, published in the programme, sheds light on the way the Polish Oscar-winning director conceptualised acting: ‘For Hamlet the Actor, to persevere until the end is a matter of life and death, of “to be or not to be.” To endure the pressure of the role. To play it through to the end, that is, to survive until the action is concluded. An actor, regardless of sex, is a body through which flows the stream of the stage character’s life’. In the end, Barańczak translated not only fragments but the entire play, which didn’t escape critics’ attention.

Wajda’s fourth encounter with Shakespeare’s grand tragedy turned out to be the most personal and original one. ‘Wajda gives testimony to his admiration for theatre and his awe at the actor’s art of transformation, inexhaustible in its capacity to create new forms’, commented Bronisław Mamoń in the Tygodnik Powszechny weekly after the premiere. Meanwhile, Beata Guczalska, in her recent text ‘Wajda i Aktorzy’ (Wajda and Actors) claims that, although the decision to cast Budzisz-Krzyżanowska as Hamlet was partly motivated by Wajda’s fascination with the acting of Tamasaburo Bando and the work of Tadeusz Kantor, who distributed roles with no regard for sex, it nevertheless ‘became telling that, on the brink of Poland’s new era, in June 1989, the audience was addressed by a Hamlet played by a woman’.

I spoke about the performance with Anna Litak, director of the educational department at the National Old Theatre and a curator of exhibitions devoted to Poland’s most acclaimed theatre directors:

That’s the way Wajda was: once he had an idea, he stood by it stubbornly, looking for arguments to support it. I worked for the [Old Theatre, ed.] Museum, so I was viewed as a keeper of history. Wajda would often approach me and ask whether I was certain that Helena Modrzejewska had never played Hamlet. I said, no, she played Ophelia. But he kept asking whether I was sure, because Sarah Bernhardt had, and, after all, the two were in constant rivalry.

Years later, Wajda reminisced that it had taken him almost three years to convince Budzisz-Krzyżanowska to play Hamlet. He succeeded, among other things, thanks to Barańczak’s new, excellent translation.

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Teresa Budzisz-Krzyżanowska in a performance of ‘Hamlet IV’, dir. Andrzej Wajda, 1989, photo: Wojciech Plewiński / Helena Modrzejewska National Old Theatre in Kraków

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The performance was recorded for Teatr Telewizji (Television Theatre) and first broadcast in 1992. Considering the nature of the play, Wajda decided to record a few words of introduction. During this prologue, viewers could watch Budzisz-Krzyżanowska walk across the stage, take her place in front of the dressing room mirror, and take off her shoes and clothes, and puts on her costume and prepare for the role, not so much of Hamlet, but of an actress tackling the role of Hamlet.

In this way, Wajda uncovered that which had hitherto been unavailable to the public, providing a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the machinery of a performance, partially breaking the theatrical illusion. Perhaps that’s why the idea to set Hamlet in a dressing room was met with such an enthusiastic reception. ‘It’s clear that Wajda is a man of film first and foremost, a medium much more “mobile” than theatre, employing changes of sets. That’s why he has no qualms about breaking with the canons that define theatre’, wrote Andrzej Multanowski for Tygodnik Kulturalny.

Wajda and Dostoyevsky

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Scene from a performance of ‘Demons’, dir. Andrzej Wajda, 1971, Helena Modrzejewska National Old Theatre, photo: Wojciech Plewiński

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Wajda’s Demons, based on Albert Camus’ adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel of the same title, was already shrouded in legend even before its premiere at the Old Theatre in 1971. The performance itself was staged a record number of times – 292.

‘Ticket offices are besieged. The auditorium is full to the brim. Not only Kraków is whispering about it; its renown is growing in the press and through word of mouth,’ commented Jerzy Koenig on the pages of the Teatr magazine.

Meanwhile, in Gazeta Robotnicza, Tadeusz Buski concluded: ‘Wajda’s “Demons” strikes and terrifies, imposing visions and impressions in an aggressive manner. What’s suggestive, especially at the beginning and end of the performance, is Wajda’s painterly imagination, while the music almost literally flagellates the viewer’.

Writing for Dziennik Polski, Krystyna Zbijewska summarised her review with the sentence ‘One descriptor fits the Kraków staging of “Demons”: it’s an exhilarating performance!’; whereas in Życie Literackie, Elżbieta Morawiec enthused: ‘Wajda’s “Demons” isn’t the first success of the season for the Old Theatre. If the theatre is slowly going under, as some fortune-tellers prophesise, then may we all go under like this!’. And Marian Sienkiewicz stated that the performance ‘[was] contemporary theatre’s spine-tingling scream’.

But why was Wajda’s Demons such a one-of-a-kind achievement? Years later, theatre scholar Joanna Walaszek wrote:

Wajda disrupted the order of the novel and of Camus’ play. The plot did not interest him. He immediately threw the audience straight into the reality after the crime. He began ‘Demons’ with the moment when all basic values had already been violated, when the consequences of living outside good and evil are plainly visible, severely undermining the idea of limitless freedom.

During rehearsals, Wajda would change, update, and supplement Camus’ adaptation, ‘pushing the actors, accustomed to memorising ready-made roles, to join him in the process of “writing on the stage”’. So, he was doing something that’s common in contemporary dramaturgic practice, but in the 1970s, it was a bold, pioneering gesture, which triggered various reactions on the part of his collaborators. For instance, when asked why he wasn’t learning his lines, Jan Nowicki reportedly answered that he will once the director learns to direct.

‘However’, adds Walaszek ‘as it turned out, by piling on difficulties of implementation, inducing his actors to take on challenges that pushed them to go beyond familiar conventions and ways of being on the stage, he very effectively stimulated their creativity’.

Demons at the Old Theatre was also the first project on which Wajda worked together with Krystyna Zachwatowicz. He invited the acclaimed stage designer, costume designer, and cabaret artist to join the project at the insistence of Piotr Skrzynecki from the Piwnica Pod Baranami (Cellar under the Rams), who would later be the best man at their wedding.

In 2013, in a documentary titled ‘Biesy’ po Latach (‘Demons’: A Retrospection), Zachwatowicz recollected that Wajda initially wanted to cover the entire stage with real mud, but the theatre didn’t consent. So, together with technical studios, she devised an idea to make artificial mud using polyvinyl chloride – which, as it’s turned out, has remained stuck to the shoes she keeps in storage to this day.

‘Poles brought great theatre’

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Andrzej Wajda during a rehearsal for ‘Demons’ according to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1971, Helena Modrzejewska Old Theatre in Kraków, photo: Wojciech Plewiński / Forum

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Wajda travelled with Demons all around the world. Anna Litak informs wrote that, due to the number of places he visited, he began to be perceived abroad as the director of the Old Theatre – although he’s never held that position.

After guest performances in Zurich, Peter Meier, in an article titled ‘Polacy Przywieźli Wielki Teatr’ (Poles Brought Great Theatre), wrote: ‘The artistic means through which Wajda attains the riveting final effect are derived partly from cinema and partly from the national and local (Kraków-specific) theatre tradition, which cultivates a vivid, emotional style of acting’.

Whereas after a festival in London, Ian Christie commented for the Daily Express: ‘The show forms an astounding whole and makes an enormous impression; such theatre experiences are few and far between, and the majority of other shows offered on the West End seem trivial like child’s play by comparison’.

American critic and director of a theatre Robert Brunstein not only referred to Demons as ‘an epochal event that confirms theatre’s supremacy over every other branch of the arts’, but he additionally invited Wajda to direct an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel for the Yale Repertory Theatre (1974). It was then that Meryl Streep played the role of Lisa Drozdov. Admittedly, it wasn’t too big of a role; however, as Krzysztof Tomasik has recently reminded us on the pages of the Dialog magazine: ‘Wajda was so impressed by the acting of Meryl Streep and Christopher Loyd that he restored a scene involving them that had been cut out of the Kraków version of the play’.

The London shows incited opposition from the embassy of the USSR, which, according to Wajda, ‘decided that we, Poles, have no right to Dostoyevsky, whose critical view of Russia was then considered an attack on the soviet reality, with “Demons” among banned books’. That’s why exactly thirty years had to pass since the American show before Wajda directed Demons for the Moscow Sovremennik Theatre (2004), although he wanted and intended to do so as early on as a year after the premiere in Kraków.

Initially, Wajda wasn’t convinced that the adaptation from the 1970s remained relevant in the new millennium; this, however, changed when, during a preview performance (that happened to take place on the day of the presidential elections which Putin won), an exhibition centre near the Kremlin caught fire. ‘Hearing about the fire in the Manege, I felt as if Fyodor Mikhailovich himself had been adding punchlines to the play’, the director would comment years later.

Experiments with the audience

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Scene from a performance of ‘Nastasya Filippovna’, dir. Andrzej Wajda, 1977. Pictured: Jerzy Radziwiłowicz and Jan Nowicki, photo: Wojciech Plewiński / Helena Modrzejewska National Old Theatre in Kraków

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Demons wasn’t the only performance directed by Wajda that made theatre history; another was Nastasya Filippovna (1977), based on Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, and Crime and Punishment (1984), both staged at the Old Theatre.

On the pages of Dialog, Maciej Karpiński wrote:

The idea to adapt and stage ‘The Idiot’ was at the back of Andrzej Wajda’s mind for a long time. Initially, it was meant to be a TV production, for the purposes of which the director wrote an adaptation of the novel. These plans, however, weren’t finalised. The next stage of work was the preparations and even thr first rehearsals at the Mały Theatre (Little Theatre) in Warsaw, with Daniel Olbrychski as Prince Myshkin and Jan Nowicki’s guest performance as Rogozhin. The literary foundation of the project was Wajda’s old TV adaptation, progressively expanded and altered during the rehearsals. It was in that phase of working on the play (the year was 1975) that the general outline emerged for the idea which would much later materialise in the form of none other than ‘Nastasya Filippovna’.

In 1977, Wajda came up with the idea to stage The Idiot featuring only two actors. Jerzy Radziwiłowicz was to be cast as Prince Myshkin, Jan Nowicki as Rogozhin. In the end, the director decided to stage this small-scale performance in the Modrzejewska Room, which at the time served as a storage for stage props, and to open the rehearsals to the public.

‘The undertaking was something completely new for everyone involved: here, coming into existence before the eyes of 120 viewers, was not only a performance but an adaptation as well’, continued Karpiński, who was one of the participants in the process:

For the director and his collaborators – [it was] a lesson in uttering thoughts publicly, thoughts that weren’t always fully crystallised and legible, thoughts that the thinkers themselves weren’t sure about; as well as a lesson in backtracking on our own ideas, in straying and erring not in the privacy of a closed rehearsal room the but under the merciless scrutiny of the audience. But for them, the viewers, it was a lesson, too: a lesson in viewing theatre not as something ready-made, already fleshed out, whose individual elements address us in a manner most obviously complete; in seeing theatre with all its uncertainty of exploration, in its becoming, in the actors’ struggle with the matter of their own body and voice and the director’s – with the matter of thought that has to be moulded into the shape of theatre.

On the pages of Teatr, Krystyna Zbijewska emphasised the uncommon composure that accompanied her work on Nastasya Filippovna:

The atmosphere of calm, kindness, friendship, and optimism dominates the rehearsals for ‘The Idiot’. One doesn’t feel any nervous tension, haste, or stage fright. There’s no scolding and no shouting. Instead, there are the remarks the director makes over and over again, short exclamations: ‘Bravo!’, ‘Brilliant!’, which stimulate the actors and cheer them on.

According to her, this could give the audience the misleading impression that this is what theatre work is usually like, although – according to an anecdote that has gone down in history – during improvisations, Wajda would ring a bell if he wanted the actors to change direction. Years later, though, the director insisted that he had only used the bell when he had wanted to express his approval.

Whereas the first rehearsals for Nastasya Filippovna were met with great interest and evoked impetuous reactions among the audience, with time, voices of disappointment were heard more and more frequently. Nonetheless, Wajda’s gesture itself was a revolutionary one on the Polish stage.

Interestingly, a few years later, another famous film and theatre director made a similar choice – preparing Woyzeck (1969) for the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, Ingmar Bergman opted for such a rehearsal process. He would say at the time that that sort of experiment wasn’t his own invention, since ‘Molière, too, would open his theatre to the public during the rehearsals for “Impromptu at Versailles”’.

Theatre in a totalitarian reality

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Scene from a performance of ‘Crime and Punishment’, dir. Andrzej Wajda, 1984. Pictured: Jerzy Stuhr, photo: S. Markowski / Helena Modrzejewska National Old Theatre in Kraków

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Overall, Wajda directed several dozen theatre performances. Among the most important ones, scholars list his adaptations of Dostoyevsky – especially Crime and Punishment.

Indeed, the performance was presented at festivals in Bogota, Jerusalem, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Edinburgh, and Madrid. It was put on a total of 241 times. What earned it special appreciation was the spectacular acting duel between Jerzy Radziwiłowicz (who played Rodion) and Jerzy Stuhr (in the role of Porfiry), but Zachwatowicz’s stage design compelled admiration, too. According to Krzysztof Krawat, ‘performances in which directorial vision converges so excellently with the stage design concept are a great rarity’. Meanwhile, Dorota Krzywicka commented:

But it’s not just the brilliant acting that so excellently conveys the oppressive, stuffy atmosphere of entrapment […] Credit is also due to Krystyna Zachwatowicz’s perfect stage design and Edward Kłosiński’s lighting: a system of ‘cages’ consisting of glass walls, partitions, and folding screens, semi-transparent and illuminated in such a way that one can observe the action, but simultaneously smeared with paint and shrouded in semidarkness, so that we, the viewers, have no doubt that we only get to spy on the events.

Years later, Joanna Walaszek wrote that, although Wajda’s theatre adaptations of Dostoyevsky had been the most admired of his achievements in Poland and abroad, he hadn’t managed to attain the same level of success with his films based on the Russian’s prose:

The process of exploring the dramas and mysteries of a person’s inner life, which fascinated Wajda in Dostoyevsky on par with the latter’s vision of the world, proved possible to realise only on stage, in an immediate, living dialogue with others – viewers and partners.

Asked why Wajda returned to Dostoyevsky so often, Anna Litak responds:

What always interested him was the way in which evil can master a person or a society, causing tragedy. Evil is born in an innocent manner, but then it gets out of control and becomes harder and harder to defeat. Wajda would often repeat that he was raised on the Katyń lie [a soviet propaganda campaign that falsely put the blame for the Katyń massacre on Nazi Germany to conceal the fact that soviet soldiers were the real perpetrators, trans.], and that he would like to live to see a time when the truth could be revealed, which would allow him to pay his respect to his father and other victims. Although he held a variety of views, Dostoyevsky was brilliant at identifying and describing the inner workings of totalitarian mechanisms. In his own work, Wajda would always refer to these totalitarianisms, wondering how art could help with survival, leading to the awakening of civic society and to revolution.

The director himself referred to his adaptations of Dostoyevsky using the phrase ‘theatre of conscience’. Through these works, he would reckon with Romanticism, symbolism, Polish history and the myths inscribed into it, as well as the life of an individual functioning within a totalitarian system along with the dilemmas they face.

Theatrical Wajda

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Andrzej Wajda and Wojciech Pszoniak during rehearsals for ‘The Danton Case’ dir. Andrzej Wajda, 1975, Powszechny Theatre in Warsaw, photo: Wojciech Kryński / Polish Press Agency (PAP)

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Wajda was capable of eliciting theatre’s ostentatious theatricality, of playing with it and exposing it. He treated his viewers as partners and collaborators in the creation of meanings, not just as passive observers. He was concerned not so much with staging literature but with creating on its basis a unique encounter between the stage and the audience, diminishing the distance between the two. ‘In cinema, the director hides behind the eye of the camera, always seeing what he or she would like to see. Theatre is completely different. In theatre, we don’t just see each other when we work – we look into each other’s eyes’, he said while receiving the Jan Parandowski PEN Club Award a few months before his death in 2016.

I asked Anna Litak, who had the opportunity to watch Wajda during rehearsals, about the specificity of his theatre work. She responded:

Wajda would select fragments of novels on the basis of which he would build the dramaturgy of the whole play. Besides, he was excellent at picking actors. He didn’t give them many comments, instead mostly watching them closely, observing how they were dealing with a given situation. He would sometimes rush onto the stage, but not the same way as [Krystian] Lupa does, for instance. Rather, he would sit in the auditorium, draw in his notebook, and write. In our museum we have his notebooks, in which everything is sketched out, with the drawings accompanied by descriptions of the situations on the stage or whatever came into his mind as he was watching a given scene. He was a master of montage and had a great sense of space. He worked with sequences, the way one works in film, which is why lighting was so important in his performances – it was the light that brought out particular scenes.

Wajda was a brilliant director in the world of film and theatre alike – which is neither very common nor obvious. One contributing factor was that he perfectly understood the differences between the two media. He was aware that the living, immediate relationship with the public which theatre offers requires a different kind of directorial language and different means of expression than does cinema. In conversation with Bożena Winnicka, he said:

Films imitate events, people’s manner of behaviour […] Theatre has nothing to do with any of that. Theatre is a fundamentally creational art form. Actors face the viewers while standing on the stage that bears no resemblance to reality. […] Our European theatrical tradition originates from the theatre of ancient Greece, the theatre of spoken word. […] Theatre is word, word that must reach the audience, so it must be uttered by someone who’s learned the technique of speaking in such a way that the viewers can hear and understand them. It’s not just about diction, it’s also about the meaning contained in the words. […] Theatre is born of actors and a director must know that. One can be the most inventive producer, but if the actors don’t fill the production with their living bodies and their whole selves, then the play will always be inert, artificial, and, most of all, boring.

Many of Wajda’s theatre performances have permanently been enshrined in the history of Polish theatre. Before The Danton Case by Stanisława Przybyszewska or The Wedding by Stanisław Wyspiański were adapted for the screen, they had their premieres on the stage: at the Powszechny Theatre in Warsaw (1975) and the Old Theatre in Kraków (1963, and then also in 1991), respectively.

Wajda also authored the brilliant recording of Tadeusz Kantor’s legendary work The Dead Class (1976). As he would reminisce years later:

[A]fter 22 years of independent work I became Tadeusz Kantor’s assistant for one day. It happened suddenly, in Kraków, during the shooting for the film ‘Man of Marble’. I watched Kantor’s play ‘The Dead Class’ and immediately had the desire to immortalise this astonishing spectacle on film.

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Scene from a performance of ‘Macbeth’, dir. Andrzej Wajda, 2004, Helena Modrzejewska Old Theatre in Kraków, photo: Grażyna Makara / AW

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Wajda directed his last full-length theatre performance in 2004, in the – then already National – Old Theatre. It was Macbeth, starring Krzysztof Globisz in the main role. Five years later, he additionally directed a happening titled Aktorzy Przyjechali! (The Actors Have Come!), during which 100 actors (including Mirosław Baka, Andrzej Chyra, Jerzy Radziwiłowicz, Jerzy Stuhr, Dorota Segda, Magdalena Cielecka, and Maja Komorowska) recited fragments from the works of Shakespeare in the Long Market Square in Gdańsk. The event accompanied the foundation stone ceremony initiating the construction of the Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre.

And so, Wajda first said goodbye to theatre in Kraków, where he had directed his most important performances, and then, finally and symbolically, in Gdańsk, the city where he had begun his theatre career.

Acknowledgments:

The author would like to wholeheartedly thank Anna Litak for the conversation about Wajda’s performances at the Old Theatre, conducted on 24th February 2026.

Sources:

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A. Wajda, ‘Byłem Asystentem Tadeusza Kantora’ (I Was Tadeusz Kantor’s Assistant), [in:] op. cit., Podwójne Spojrzenie (A Double Glance), Warsaw 2000.

Translated from Polish by Anna Potoczny

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