ABSTRACT
Few in the West had heard of Jerzy Grotowski before 1966, when his Laboratory Theatre from Wroclaw came over to Paris to present The Constant Prince at the Théâtre des Nations, but his influence spread quickly. It could be felt at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival before 1968, when his company first appeared at the Traverse, and in the United States, where it turned socialist collectives into religious communes. The Constant Prince was an historical epic by the seventeenth-century Spanish dramatist, Calderön de la Barca, translated by the nineteenth-century Polish Romantic, Juliusz Stowacki, and cut by Grotowski into three parts, with most of the history removed. The Constant Prince could be interpreted as a Christian or as an anti-Christian play, although it was neither. The Constant Prince was at an advantage, for it was not necessary to understand Polish to know what was happening while the Prince was being tortured.
