The last of Witkacy’s dramas and also one of his most important works, it is referred to as a ‘masterpiece of bad taste’ and demonstrates the writer’s extraordinary prophetic sense.
Witkacy (as Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz is called) was an incredibly prolific playwright. He wrote more than thirty plays – all but one of them between 1918 and 1926. He began writing Szewcy (The Shoemakers), the last of his plays, in 1927, in parallel also devoting himself to working on the novels Pożegnanie jesieni (Farewell to Autumn, published in 1927) and Nienasycenie (Insatiability, published in 1930). Between 1931 and 1933, he also wrote the ultimately unfinished novel Jedyne wyjście (The Only Exit). The Shoemakers was completed in 1934, but the first edition of the drama was published in Kraków after the war, in 1948, together with the play W małym dworku (In a Small Manor, written in 1921) – this was the first post-war edition of Witkacy’s dramas. The Shoemakers was first staged in Sopot’s Wybrzeże Theatre in 1957.
Release from the fetters of Pure Form
This work was created at a time when critics showed a hostile attitude to Witkacy’s Pure Form, primarily accusing the artist of being unable to execute his own postulates. Witkacy, discouraged by the reception of his theory, moved towards novels, which, according to his own assumptions, could not be works of Pure Form. In his last drama, he focused on life topics rather than metaphysical content, which also contradicted the theory he had described. Konstanty Puzyna commented on the influence of criticism on the author as follows:
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Now, freed from the shackles of Pure Form, what Witkacy really has to say bursts forth: a furious, expressionistic political and social grotesque, combined with a catastrophic treatise and a – crooked, of course – mirror of mores.
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‘Autoportret’ by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, 1913, photo: Muzeum Narodowe in Warsaw
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Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, "Autoportret", 1913., fot. Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie
The Shoemakers is sometimes referred to as a ‘talky’ drama in terms of genre, situated even closer to the novel – dialogue here is what constitutes the basis of the ideological treatise, the exchange of views, desires and grievances between the shoemakers, prosecutor Scurvy and the Duchess. It is a political drama, depicting the mechanisms governing socio-political relations. Witkacy supplied the text with a subtitle: ‘Naukowa sztuka ze „śpiewkami” w trzech aktach’ (A Scholarly Play with ‘Ditties’ in Three Acts). This is the only one of his dramas that he referred to as ‘scholarly’, indicating that its content examines phenomena, showing certain general relationships that govern the world. And indeed – Witkacy depicts human entanglements in the world of political changes and conflicts with great skill, also anticipating the impending political and social disaster. As Puzyna wrote, the playwright
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grasped that Polish reality was grotesquely unreal in the face of issues that were maturing beyond its borders. And he was one of the first to recognise and formulate certain truths of 20th-century political and social upheavals, the essence and importance of which we are only beginning to appreciate today.
We find numerous provisions in the drama that, over time, through the course of history, began to resonate quite differently – such as the suggestion that, when power does not produce results, ‘we will officially return to torture’, or Scurvy’s statement that ‘Liberation is only through work’, associated today with the ‘Arbeit macht frei’ sign on the gate of the Auschwitz camp.
Collapse of civilization, revolutions & boredom
The main characters appearing in the drama are the shoemakers of the title – master craftsman Sajetan Tempe and two young Apprentices – Princess Irina Vsevolodovna and Procurator Scurvy (the name is associated, not without cause, with a vulgar word in Polish [‘son of a whore’, ed] as well as with the disease). Each of the characters introduced by Witkacy represents a certain rationale or attitude. Thus, the Shoemakers are representatives of the left, the Duchess – of the aristocracy, Scurvy – of the bourgeoisie and the ruling stratum. In addition, the drama also features, among others, the fascist organization of Gnębon Puczymorda’s Henchmen, the Dziarscy Chłopcy [Burly Boys, ed], a group of peasants with a straw-wrap [‘Gnębon’ is associated with the verb ‘gnębić’ = ‘to oppress’, and ‘Puczymorda’ most likely with ‘putsch-face’, ed], or the anarchist Hiper-Robociarz [Hyper-Laborer, ed].
The drama is contained in three acts, each of which is clearly separated from the rest. The first shows a picture of the reality of Poland in the 1930s, or, as Lech Sokół put it, ‘the decadence-ridden world of capitalism’, and the three social classes, represented by the shoemakers, the Duchess and Scurvy’s Prosecutors, and their relationships with each other. The shoemakers, who belong to the working class, complain about their fate, while Scurvy, in numerous monologues, expresses his views on the condition of the modern world:
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Everything has already become so ugly in this world that it’s not worth talking about anything more. This humanity is dying under the oppression of the hulk of the rotting, malignant tumour of capital, on which like these putrefying buboes, fascist governments arise and burst, letting out stinking gasps of a self-denuded, self-sauced, impersonal human throng. […] And that’s the worst part, that work will never stop, because this damn social machine won’t retreat.
Scurvy also believes that the current system is not working:
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The aristocracy has become obsolete: they’re not people – they’re spectres! For too long, humanity has borne these spectral lice. Capitalism is a malignant cancer that’s begun to rot, eat and gangrene the organism that produced it – that’s today’s social structure. We should reform capitalism, not destroy private initiative.
A thought also appears in his head – to change his views to liberal ones, lead a revolution and thus come to power.
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The first act ends with the invasion of the shoemaker’s workshop by the Burly Boys, among whom is also Sajetan’s son, Józek Tempe. This is the first revolution in the drama, as a result of which the shoemakers and the Duchess are arrested. In the second act, the theatrical setting takes the audience to the prison which is a hall of ‘enforced unemployment’, behind whose wall there is a makeshift shoemaker’s workshop. It is this unemployment that is supposed to be the torture endured by the imprisoned shoemakers – those who complained about the hardship of work in the first act come to the conclusion that work is the highest goal. For the imprisoned Duchess – the opposite. She is placed at a shoemaker’s job and forced to sew shoes. Eventually, the shoemakers revolt, ram the wall separating them from the shoemakers’ place of work and begin to ‘work feverishly, fiercely’. The Burly Boys rush into the prison again, wanting to tear the shoemakers away from their occupation, which results in a brawl – a second revolution. As a result, the Henchmen turn into shoemakers, and, together with the Shoemakers, throw themselves into a whirlwind of work.
The third act presents a different situation yet again. The leftists are in power – the Shoemakers are elegantly combed, dressed in expensive flowery bathrobes. However, power does not bring them the satisfaction they crave – Sajetan, in particular, feels an inner emptiness and longs for the time when he was a simple master craftsman, while the Apprentices use their new social status only for their own benefit. The governance of the shoemakers is also abusive: prosecutor Scurvy, dressed in animal skins, lies hunched over and, like a dog, chained to a tree trunk. Later in the plot, new characters appear – a group of peasants in Kraków folk costumes, carrying the Straw-Wrap from Wyspianski’s Wesele (The Wedding), who demand that their rights be respected, as well as the Hyper-Labourer with a bomb, which, however, does not explode because it turns out to be a thermos of tea. The Apprentices decide to kill their master craftsman, which would allow them to envelop him in the legend of a leader of the revolution. But Sajetan, although already dead, continues to deliver monologues:
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It’s a good thing you snuffed me – I’m not afraid of anything anymore, and I’ll tell the truth: the one thing that’s good in this world is individual existence under sufficient material conditions. […] Eat, read, have a chat, have a tumble and go to sleep. Other than that, there’s nothing – that is, their dog-shit, poof-it’s-gone philosophy. Cause what are these so-called great social ideas?
The reign of the Apprentices eventually also comes to an end, when the bureaucrats Comrade X and Comrade Abramovsky appear on stage, the administrators of the new authorities who herald the total mechanization of society. It seems that the action could go on even further, there could be further upheavals and exposures of human lusts, but the sign ‘BOREDOM’ appears on stage, which after a while is replaced by the sign ‘Even worse boredom’. At the end of the act, an iron curtain falls, and the Terrible Voice at the end of the play utters the words:
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It takes a lot of tact.
To finish the third act.
It’s not an illusion – it’s a fact.
Motifs in ‘The Shoemakers’
We will find in The Shoemakers many motifs characteristic of Witkacy’s work, such as extreme pessimism, metaphysical-sexual obsessions (especially in the relationship between the Duchess and Procurator Scurvy), comedy, a conviction about the collapse of civilization. The drama is also characterized by Witkacy’s peculiar language, here particularly embellished with numerous, extremely fanciful invectives, such as [the untranslatable] bamflondryga, purwykołcie, chałapudra, chliporzyg odwantroniony – just to name a few. Boredom also plays a significant role in the drama, but, as Jerzy Ziomek points out, it is not boredom that is meant to be the viewer’s impression. Boredom is first the repetitiveness of work and then, the total lack of activity.
The drama lacks certain stereotypical characters that are constants in Witkacy’s work, such as the ruler, the scholar, the matron and above all the artist. As Ziomek wrote:
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Freeing ‘The Shoemakers’ from some of the obsessive motifs and characters of the previous period of his work and from his explicative commitments to art theory resulted in a drama of the most outstanding kind and, more importantly, a work that is particularly eloquent as a political drama.
Currently, The Shoemakers is Witkacy’s most frequently staged play, and, despite the passage of years since the drama was written, the insights it contains about political and social mechanisms do not lose their validity.
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Translated from Polish by Anna Potoczny
