 | Noir sur Blanc
Warsaw 2005
120×171
192 pages
hardcover
ISBN 83-7392-069-X
Translation rights: Noir sur Blanc
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Sławomir MrożekHow I Became a Reviewer. Varia 3
About the author
Excerpt
In 1966 Mrożek was 25, had already worked as a journalist for the Kraków-based Dziennik Polski (The Polish Daily), and had published two books of short stories, Tales from Bumblebee Mountain and Practical Light Armour; the first has vanished in the mists of time, but the second is regarded as Mrożek’s real debut. He was working for Przekrój (Cross Section) as a satirical cartoonist. He was still writing or had completed his first novel (one of two), The Little Summer. He was writing stories for his next collection, The Elephant. There was no talk of playwriting yet, and The Police would only appear three years later. It is not inconceivable that it might never have appeared, or any of Mrożek’s other plays either, if one autumn day in 1955 the young journalist and promising writer had not been summoned in a friendly way to the office of a lady named Teresa Stanisławska; almost his exact contemporary, she was responsible for running a competitor to the Dziennik Polski, called Echo Krakowa (The Kraków Echo). Not long after, in the 9 October issue, the first theatre review by Sławomir Mrożek appeared. The show he reviewed was the premiere of Kruczkowski’s The Visit, performed at the Słowacki Theatre.
Mrożek’s biographers have said nothing about the period in his rich creative life when he was a theatre critic, nor has he himself ever mentioned having anything to do with the theatre before the start of his career as a playwright. We already know more about his earlier experience as a journalist and the articles and reportage he wrote for Dziennik Polski, where he worked as an ordinary employee of the Stalinist propaganda machine. In fact, he did not write theatre reviews for long, less than two years, but these pieces were the start of the now legendary era of post-war criticism on the pages of Echo Krakowa. …
As a reviewer, Mrożek knew one thing for certain: that his theatre audience was both sensitised and stupefied at the same time. He knew that, for his own good, he shouldn’t feed them nonsense, but nor should he over-abuse their traditional preferences, such as their love of beautiful kitsch, nationalist grandiloquence and noble sentiments. So he interpreted, rather than provoked, preferring to be ironical rather than savage. Admittedly, in this context his critical outlook seems like eclecticism of the first order, but at the same time we should remember that this is the eclecticism of a daily press reviewer who has to write about Hamlet at the Stary Theatre one day, and about The Silver-Horned Stag at the Satire the next, since everyone has the right to live, produce and watch what they like, even if this sort of life and production did not necessarily enthral the reviewer personally.
A separate issue worth closer attention are Mrożek’s comments on the subject of playwriting, a wide variety of which are scattered about his reviews; here he felt at his best, of course, and his most confident. This applies in particular to rehearsals for new interpretations of the classics, including Fredro, Słowacki and Chekhov. Perhaps the most wonderful of all Mrożek’s literary comments are on Chekhov, and some of them deserve a permanent place in the canon of “Chekhovology”. His fondness for Chekhov is not surprising, especially in the light of his own later experiences as a playwright. The characteristic traditional approach to structure, a liking for concrete facts and details and a tendency towards a certain simplicity, a conventional use of the theatre space, while also disturbing the main characters’ sense of reality – don’t we find evidence of Chekhov here?
Anyway… most fascinating of all, of course, are the points in Mrożek’s criticism where we learn most about Mrożek himself – the scattered scraps of autobiography, thoughts about his generation, his situation and frame of mind (some of which would be wound into Short Letters). These include some apparently surprising confessions, such as the one about Mrożek’s passion for all sorts of outfit, costume and clothing in general. (“As for the role of Ms de Lera, I’m afraid a personal weakness of mine makes it impossible for me to take a balanced view – it’s that I’m highly sensitive to a costume that I like or don’t like”). These confessions, more meaningful than we might suppose, should be taken to heart, and not just by the set designers for Mrożek’s plays. I would also remind the directors and actors about The Tailor, and Tango.
Mrożek’s final article, a review of Leocadia by Jean Anouilh, appeared in the Echo on 4 April 1957. A year later he wrote The Police. The Stary Theatre did not want to perform it then, nor did several other theatres. But it had all begun.
Tadeusz Nyczek
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