ABSTRACT
Krzysztof Warlikowski is a member of the first generation to work exclusively in post-communist Poland as a theatre director. Warlikowski’s theatre has disrupted accepted historiography, broken down traditional gender roles, embraced Jewish memory, frustrated dominant cultural discourses, and produced alternative sexual identities. Warlikowski studied at the prestigious Jagiellonian University before joining the Directing Faculty at the National Academy of Theatre Arts in Krakow in the early 1990s. After joining forces in 1999, Warlikowski and Jarzyna established themselves as the most vibrant, daring, and perspicacious directors of their generation. A barrage of criticism of Warlikowski’s production was underscored by unfavourable comparisons with Konrad Swinarski’s sketched-out plans for Hamlet that never saw the stage due to the revered director’s premature death in 1975. Warlikowski had thus diagnosed one of the paradigmatic problems facing the collision of generations in Poland at the start of the twenty-first century. One of the major themes in Warlikowski’s work has been sexuality.
