Theater and Politics: Theory and Practice

Iwona Kurz

Abstract

This article offers a critical discussion of Piotr Dobrowolski’s book Teatr i polityka. Dyskursy polityczne w polskiej dramaturgii współczesnej [Theater and Politics: Political Discourses in Polish Contemporary Drama] (Poznań 2019), which presents “texts for the theater” and their selected stage productions in Poland between 1989 and 2018. Dobrowolski proposes a synthesis, conceptually based on critical theory and substantively on distinguishing selected discourses specific to the theater of that time. He calls these discursive units the “drama” of the Other, history, woman, reproduction, and the liberal economy. The book provokes polemical interrogations concerning the fruitfulness of such thinking about politicality; for if this line of thought is to cover all references to the discourse of the age, the question about the possibility of theater’s political impact loses its contours. The arbitrariness of the author’s choices, in turn, undermines the certainty of the critical synthesis, understood as an approach that offers a holistic perspective yet at the same time takes into account the limitations inherent in synthesising procedures. An important context for the reviewer’s analysis (as well as for the monograph itself) is provided by Paweł Mościcki’s Polityka teatru [The Politics of Theater], Dariusz Kosiński’s Teatra Polskie [Performing Poland], and, above all, Joanna Krakowska’s Demokracja. Przedstawienia [Democracy. Performances]. (Trans. Z. Ziemann)