ABSTRACT
Polish student theatre between 1954 and 1989 was a unique artistic and political phenomenon among the countries of the Soviet bloc. Its creators, young students and graduates, together with their public (largely composed of people of the same generation), were an important part of the artistic avant-garde and were therefore accorded a degree of cultural prestige, which complicated the task of the censors responsible for constraining the frequently subversive tendencies of their work. This chapter describes the pervasiveness of cultural control in communist Poland and analyses censorship strategies towards student theatre in the period 1976-80 (ending with the emergence of the mass dissident organisation, Solidarity), with a particular focus on the management of information in the press.
