The Ludowy Theatre in Kraków

Kraków

Kraków also Krakow, or Cracow , is the second largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Situated on the Vistula River in the Lesser Poland region, the city dates back to the 7th century. Kraków has traditionally been one of the leading centres of Polish academic, cultural, and artistic life...

, located at Osiedle Teatralne in District Nowa Huta

Nowa Huta

Nowa Huta - is the easternmost district of Kraków, Poland, . With more than 200,000 inhabitants it is one of the most populous areas of the city.- History :...

, opened on December 3, 1955; at a time, when the official policy of Socialist realism

Socialist realism in Poland

Socialist realism in Poland was an official Communist doctrine used by the pro-Soviet government in the process of forcible Stalinization of the postwar People's Republic of Poland. The policy was introduced in 1949 by a decree of the Polish United Workers' Party Minister Włodzimierz Sokorski...

 came to an end; and, the 1956 de-stalinization

Polish October

Polish October, also known as October 1956, Polish thaw, or Gomułka's thaw, marked a change in the Polish internal political scene in the second half of 1956...

 of People's Republic of Poland

People's Republic of Poland

The People's Republic of Poland was the official name of Poland from 1952 to 1990. Although the Soviet Union took control of the country immediately after the liberation from Nazi Germany in 1944, the name of the state was not changed until eight years later...

 was about to begin. The Ludowy quickly became known as the city's prime avant-garde

Avant-garde

Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....

 stage thanks to collaboration of eminent artists such as theatre theoretician and painter Józef Szajna

Józef Szajna

Józef Szajna was a Polish scenery designer, stage director, playwright, theoretician of the theatre, painter and graphic artist.During the Second World War and occupation of Poland, Szajna was a prisoner of the German concentration camps Auschwitz and Buchenwald.-Further reading:* Archives and art...

, Tadeusz Kantor

Tadeusz Kantor

Tadeusz Kantor was a Polish painter, assemblage artist, set designer and theatre director. Kantor is renowned for his revolutionary theatrical performances in Poland and abroad.- Life and career :...

 (both, from Academy of Fine Arts

Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts

The Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts, or Kraków Academy of Fine Arts , located in Kraków, Poland, is the oldest Polish fine-arts academy, established in 1818.It is a state-run university that offers 5- and 6-year Master's degree programs...

), Lidia Zamkow

Lidia Zamkow

Lidia Zamkow was a Polish theatre actress and director.- Biography :Lidia Zamkow was born on June 19 or July 15 , 1918 in Rostov-on-Don...

, Krystyna Zachwatowicz

Krystyna Zachwatowicz

Krystyna Zachwatowicz-Wajda , born Krystyna Zachwatowicz, is a Polish scenographer, costume designer and actress. She is a daughter of architect and restorer Jan Zachwatowicz and Maria Chodźko h. Kościesza, and wife of film director Andrzej Wajda. Member of the Polish Film Academy. She is a...

 and others.

History

Teatr Ludowy, designed by architects Edmund Dąbrowski and Janusz Ingarden, was built in 1954–1955, with the cubic volume of 14,000 m³, seating 420. It was placed in the centre of a socialist housing estate mainly for ideological reasons (as possible vehicle for workers' indoctrination). However, thanks to revolutionary vision of its first president, Krystyna Skuszanka, Teatr Ludowy became one of the most interesting theatres in the country, with Jerzy Krasowski as its first resident director, and painter Jozef Szajna, as its visionary set designer. Together, they turned the young local venue into an innovative and politically engaging stage with serious intellectual and artistic ambitions. Józef Szajna, a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, became the Theatre artistic director in 1963-1966. In his popular productions of Shakespeare and Greek tragedies, he evoked his own camp experiences; called a theater of death by Peter Brook

Peter Brook

Peter Stephen Paul Brook CH, CBE is an English theatre and film director and innovator, who has been based in France since the early 1970s.-Life:...

.

The name, "Ludowy Theatre", had a unique tradition in Krakow in spite of its ostensibly pro-Soviet connotations. In 1902 (during Partitions of Poland

Partitions of Poland

The Partitions of Poland or Partitions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth took place in the second half of the 18th century and ended the existence of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, resulting in the elimination of sovereign Poland for 123 years...

), another Ludowy Theatre was opened in Krakow by renown actor Stefan Jaracz

Stefan Jaracz

Stefan Jaracz was a Polish actor and theater director. The Stefan Jaracz Theatre in Łódź, Poland is named after him.-Life:He was born in Stare Żukowice, near Tarnów, and died in Otwock, near Warsaw....

, who performed there. It was situated at Krowoderska Street.

Repertoire

For many decades, under communism

Communism

Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...

, Polish theatre employed the artistic technique of political allusion and metaphor

Metaphor

A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...

 in order to overcome censorship. Theatre was not created from the text alone, but from what often remained unspoken and only visually significant. Plays by Aeschylus

Aeschylus

Aeschylus was the first of the three ancient Greek tragedians whose work has survived, the others being Sophocles and Euripides, and is often described as the father of tragedy. His name derives from the Greek word aiskhos , meaning "shame"...

, Carlo Gozzi

Carlo Gozzi

Carlo, Count Gozzi was an Italian playwright.Born in Venice, he came from an old Venetian family from the Republic of Ragusa...

 and Carlo Goldoni

Carlo Goldoni

Carlo Osvaldo Goldoni was an Italian playwright and librettist from the Republic of Venice. His works include some of Italy's most famous and best-loved plays. Audiences have admired the plays of Goldoni for their ingenious mix of wit and honesty...

 were staged. Skuszanka prepared successful Shakespeare productions: Measure for Measure

Measure for Measure

Measure for Measure is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1603 or 1604. It was classified as comedy, but its mood defies those expectations. As a result and for a variety of reasons, some critics have labelled it as one of Shakespeare's problem plays...

 with stage design by Tadeusz Kantor (1956), The Tempest

The Tempest

The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place,...

 (1959), and the Twelfth Night (1961) with set design by Józef Szajna. She staged Polish Romantic drama, such as Juliusz Słowacki's Balladyna (1956) and Sen srebrny Salomei (Silver Dream of Salome, 1959). In 1962 Skuszanka and Krasowski prepared a production of Adam Mickiewicz

Adam Mickiewicz

Adam Bernard Mickiewicz ) was a Polish poet, publisher and political writer of the Romantic period. One of the primary representatives of the Polish Romanticism era, a national poet of Poland, he is seen as one of Poland's Three Bards and the greatest poet in all of Polish literature...

's Dziady

Dziady

Dziady was an ancient Slavic feast to commemorate the dead. Literally, the word is translated as "Grandfathers". It was held twice every year . During the feast the ancient Slavs organized libations and ritual meals...

 with stage design by Jozef Szajna.

The realities of life under communism inspired broader philosophical and ideological questions. Notable plays of the time included productions by Jerzy Krasowski, such as adaptation of John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck

John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden and the novella Of Mice and Men...

's novel Of Mice and Men

Of Mice and Men

Of Mice and Men is a novella written by Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck. Published in 1937, it tells the tragic story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers during the Great Depression in California, USA....

 (1956) with Franciszek Pieczka

Franciszek Pieczka

Franciszek Pieczka is a Polish film and stage actor. A graduate of the Theatrical Academy in Warsaw, he first made his debut in the theatre in Jelenia Góra...

 (as Lenny Small) and Witold Pyrkosz

Witold Pyrkosz

Witold Pyrkosz - Polish actor. He is best known as Lucjan Mostowiak in a very popular Polish serial "M jak miłość", as Pyzdra in "Janosik", as Wichura in "Czterej pancerni i pies" and as Balcerek in "Alternatywy 4"....

 (as George Milton). There was Franz Werfel

Franz Werfel

Franz Werfel was an Austrian-Bohemian novelist, playwright, and poet.- Biography :Born in Prague , Werfel was the first of three children of a wealthy manufacturer of gloves and leather goods. His mother, Albine Kussi, was the daughter of a mill owner...

's Jacobowsky and the Colonel staged in 1957; as well as Jerzy Broszkiewicz's Imiona władzy (Given Names of Power) directed by Skuszanka (1957), about the issues of freedom. Albert Camus

Albert Camus

Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...

's The State of Siege

The State of Siege

The State of Siege is the fourth play by Albert Camus.Written in 1948, The State of Siege—the original sense is closer to state of emergency—is a play in three acts presenting the arrival of plague, personified by a young opportunist, in sleepy Cadiz and the subsequent creation of a...

, was staged jointly with Krystyna Skuszanka in 1958. The novel by Juliusz Kaden-Bandrowski

Juliusz Kaden-Bandrowski

Juliusz Kaden-Bandrowski was a Polish journalist and novelist.-Life:Juliusz Kazimierz Kaden-Bandrowski studied piano at conservatories in Lwów, Kraków and Leipzig...

, Radość z odzyskanego śmietnika (Joy of the Repossessed Dumpsite) premiered in 1960.

As the political climate began to worsen, the theatre was faced with increasing criticism. The directors were accused of ignoring uneducated audience. Skuszanka and Krasowski left the Ludowy in 1963, unable to carry on with their ambitious repertoire. Jozef Szajna, who remained, was often sharply criticized. His productions included: Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist and novelist.Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism...

's The Inspector General (1963), Tadeusz Holuj's Puste pole (The Empty Field, 1965), Witold Wandurski's Śmierć na gruszy (Death on a Pear-tree, 1965), and Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...

's The Castle

The Castle

The Castle is a novel by Franz Kafka. In it a protagonist, known only as K., struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities of a castle who govern the village for unknown reasons...

 with memorable roles by Irena Jun and Jozef Wieczorek (1966). The party guided audiences stopped coming. Szajna left in 1966. In the 1970s the Theatre remained unable to find a formula to satisfy the communist apparatchik

Apparatchik

Apparatchik is a Russian colloquial term for a full-time, professional functionary of the Communist Party or government; i.e., an agent of the governmental or party "apparat" that held any position of bureaucratic or political responsibility, with the exception of the higher ranks of management...

s and the critics. Comedies were staged. Consecutive directors tried to revive the tradition of Polish national and folk theatre. The true rebirth came with the collapse of the Soviet empire

Dissolution of the Soviet Union

The dissolution of the Soviet Union was the disintegration of the federal political structures and central government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , resulting in the independence of all fifteen republics of the Soviet Union between March 11, 1990 and December 25, 1991...

. In Democratic Poland the Theatre was taken over by an actor, director, and politician Jerzy Fedorowicz

Jerzy Fedorowicz

Jerzy Feliks Fedorowicz is a Polish actor, theatre director, poet, politician and member of Sejm ....

 (1989–2005). Under his management, the theatre won considerable recognition, and numerous awards. It was twice invited to the Edinburgh International Festival

Edinburgh International Festival

The Edinburgh International Festival is a festival of performing arts that takes place in the city of Edinburgh, Scotland, over three weeks from around the middle of August. By invitation from the Festival Director, the International Festival brings top class performers of music , theatre, opera...

: in 1996 with Macbeth directed by Jerzy Stuhr

Jerzy Stuhr

Jerzy Stuhr is one of the most popular, influential and versatile Polish actors. He also works as a screenwriter, film director and drama professor...

, and in 1997 with Antigona

Antigona

Antigona is an opera in three acts in Italian by the composer Tommaso Traetta. The libretto, by Marco Coltellini, is based on the tragedy Antigone by Sophocles.-Performance history:...

directed by Włodzimierz Nurkowski. Current director is Jacek Strama, an award winning theatre and film producer.