ABSTRACT
To describe post-war Poland as a totalitarian state would not be far from the truth; yet this oppressed nation has produced art, theatre, literature, music and film equal to any in Europe. The contradictions of Polish history/ culminating in the post-war period of Communist rule, have stimulated creative work and produced a responsive critical milieu of great sophistication. In the post-war period, despite the strings that were attached, which were in any case not always very effective, the arts throve on huge subsidies. If I devote most of my attention in this chapter to what may be called 'alternative' theatre (the term is even less precise in the Polish context than it is in the British) this is not meant as a criticism or disparagement of the other, more 'institutional' kind, wh ich was often highly innovative; and there is, for instance, the distinctively Polish phenomenon of J6zef Szajna's Studio Theatre in the Palace of Culture, where a radical avant-garde vision became part of a thriving 'official' institution. It is also no part of my intention to denigrate the work of the many highly original playwrights whose output either does not belong to the avant-garde, or, like that of Tadeusz R6zewicz, for example, or Slawomir Mrozek, works on the interface of 'legitimate' and 'alternative' styles. But in Poland, as e1sewhere, there have been so me notably radical ways of constructing aesthetic (especially theatrical) spaces, and of deconstructing or subverting 'the tradition', that Cüexisted very uneasily with institutional culture, especially where the 'culinary,2 art of theatre was concerned. It is these 'alternative' groups, or some of them, that are the subject of this chapter, which for reasons of space has had to restrict its coverage very severely.
