In the Polish dramatic tradition, there is a distinctive apologia of madness. Mickiewicz's and Wyspiański's protagonists were often noble madmen, but in their case, insanity was reserved for the chosen ones, endowed with the gift of a clear vision of the world and superhuman strength to defy God. In the 1960s and 1970s, Romantic and Neo-Romantic works dominated the repertoire of Polish theatres, in the face of a shortage of contemporary themes. It was then, especially thanks to Konrad Swinarski's productions, that this noble insanity was established as a form of individual protest against the authorities and the society and a fight for the right to maintain a separate identity.

Around the mid-1980s, after certain unexpected events in Central Europe, the subject of the protagonist's madness is addressed several times in the new Polish drama. Naturally, the function of the post-romantic theme, as well as its message, is different then.

Although as early as March 1983 “Dialog” published Obłęd (“Madness”)—a dramatic composition by Janusz Krasiński based on a popular novel by Jerzy Krzysztoń—critics mostly failed to notice the extraordinary popularity of the topic of madness. Krzysztoń's adaptation was made at the request of the director Jerzy Rakowiecki and the National Theatre in Warsaw managed by Kazimierz Dejmek. However, in the 1980s theatres in Poland only paid attention (for completely different reasons) to Mrożek's Portrait, the only outstanding work among others. This peculiar new take on the theme of traditional Polish culture was by no means accidental at that time and place.

Mrożek

In Sławomir Mrożek's Portrait,145 written in 1987, Stalin, with a mysterious smile on his face, appears only once on stage, in the finale of the first scene of Act I. The portrait of the Generalissimus, which is also the title of the work, is shown for a moment, “hung high” at the front, just like in the times of Stalin's cult of personality—“in full light,” accompanied by music. Glorification of the silent portrait is preceded by Bartodziej's Great Improvisation, delivered in complete darkness, a confession of faith, love—and madness at the same time.

The absurd is a key word that played an important role in creating the self-awareness of the theatre of the second half of the 20th century. A person credited with coining the phrase itself and at the same time blamed for all the problems with its use, albeit unjustly, is Martin Esslin. What Esslin did was merely immortalize in the title of his best-selling book, first published in English in 1961, and in French two years later, a slogan that had already been in quite frequent use for years. After all, the concept of the theatre of the absurd was also used by Jean Cocteau as early as 1922, in the preface to Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, as well as by George Bernard Shaw (referring to the language of drama). Jean Paul Sartre wrote in 1946 about the “absurdity of the world” in confrontation with the dramatic protagonist's free will in his “theatre of situations.” In the 1940s, the fullest explanation of the “absurd man” was provided by Albert Camus in his famous Myth of Sisyphus.

It is also known that the so-called absurdists themselves, especially Eugene Ionesco, fiercely opposed the absurdist label that was immediately attached to their dramatic works. Three years after his debut (The Bald Soprano, 1950), and eight years before the publication of Esslin's work, Ionesco found “absurd” to be a fashionable term, “vague enough now, in any case, to mean nothing any more and to be an easy definition of anything.” This did not prevent Esslin from using an appropriately adapted quote from Ionesco's essay on Kafka when defining the theatre of the absurd:

“Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose… Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.”

In the original English version of his book, Esslin made a significant shift of emphasis in the quoted definition by Ionesco: he translated “inutile” as “absurd,” whereas instead of “etouffante” (suffocating) he used the word “useless.” In addition, in the description of the lost roots of man, in addition to religion and metaphysics mentioned by Ionesco, he added a third component—transcendence. This proves Esslin's method of adjusting reality to a predetermined idea.

According to the analysis of Małgorzata Szpakowska from the beginning of 1983, contemporary Hungarian dramaturgy was characterized by the concept of an outsider-hero who “stays out of the way,” either due to his own choice or due to having been pushed aside to the margin by external events. As Szpakowska observes, a descent into alcoholism is a frequent “form of withdrawal” for the protagonists of Hungarian dramas. Examples of such characters can be found in the stage works by György Schwajda, István Csurka and Imre Sarkadi, published in Poland in the period 1965–1982.

The authors of the mentioned dramas make the outside world the reason for an escape into alcoholism. István Herceg, a young poet and writer from one of Csurka's plays expresses it directly in one of his drunken monologues:

The protagonist of Schwajda's Anthem, written in the early 1980s, is an alcohol addict as well, who sank to the very bottom of life, where the only reality is “extreme poverty coupled with addiction”:

“Schwajda's protagonist does not look for excuses,” writes Małgorzata Szpakowska. “Right at the bottom where he ended up, he managed (with the help of his wife) to achieve a kind of a bizarre adaptation to the reality; we are dealing here with a specific form of homeostasis, which may seem desperate from the outside, but in a given situation is the choice of the lesser evil. All the protagonist of ‘Anthem’ wants is to be left alone. And rightly so, as the ‘help’ offered by his neighbors or state institutions only leads to greater misfortune. ‘No, we don't need any help, we don't need any help,’ repeats his wife, Aranka.”

Spiró

Chicken Head by György Spiró is a drama about the extraordinary cruelty and absurdity of an action, the participants of which act as if they had no influence on anything. The action takes place around a carpet hanger in the backyard of a tenement house in one of the worse districts of an unnamed city.

Contrary to the opinions of the domestic commentators of the theatre of the absurd in Poland, the legislator and codifier of this troublesome, frequently used category—Martin Esslin—had noticed a distinct variety of Eastern absurdity and added to the list of absurdists Polish, Czech, Slovak and Hungarian authors much earlier than in 1970, when he published the article cited by Krajewska in French in the book version, and much earlier than in 1972, when its German version mentioned by Sugiera was published.

Already in the summer of 1963 (only two years after the publication of the first book edition of The Theatre of the Absurd, which did not include the representatives of the Soviet bloc, and simultaneously with the publication of the French translation of this book), Martin Esslin published an article entitled Epic Theatre, the Absurd and the Future in the American journal “Tulane Drama Review.” In that article, the author distinguished between two models of contemporary, avant-garde drama (popular, in his opinion, in Anglo-Saxon countries and in France).

The first model referred to the early 1930s and Brecht's epic theatre. The second model—the actual theatre of the absurd—was the culmination of a process started in the 1920s, encompassing both surreal painting and the works of Kafka and Joyce. In this two-fold structure of the new theatre, Esslin included not only the authors already mentioned in the The Theatre of the Absurd (e.g. as Ionesco, Beckett, Pinter, Genet, Adamov). He also subjected the Western authors who completed that list (e.g. Dürrenmatt, Frisch, Arden, Albee) to a similar, bipolar analysis, and, what was most significant, for the first time he introduced two Polish authors to his absurdist considerations: Mrożek and Różewicz—the only representatives of the Eastern Absurd, still poorly recognized in the West. It is important to stress here that we are talking about the summer of 1963.

Esslin emphasized, what is hardly surprising, the relationship of the two Polish authors with the “cultural revolution” of October 1956. He called them “undoubtedly among the most interesting playwrights now active in Europe.”

The Czech drama of that time also starts to address the problem of the victim. What is different in this case is the motive: it is the problem of accidental death which changes nothing, and the indifference of others.

What is striking, however, is the parody-like reference to the model solutions of the old dramatic form by Czech authors—as a kind of complement to the experience of absurdity. Jaroslav Vostrý interpreted this tendency of his compatriots as a sign of a crisis that had to be overcome.

For example, Jan Jílek's play I Want to Live (premiere in 1986) resembles the form of a classic drama: it features five characters and the unity of place, time and action is preserved, with a single plot line. The topic seems to be borrowed from the textbooks of socialist realism. A couple of reckless young workers: Milan and Andula, preoccupied with themselves rather than with their work in a factory, damage a valuable machine. The dramatic problem can be reduced to the question of whether this “love crime” will come to light, or whether the perpetrators themselves will confess their guilt.

But the main conflict of the drama lies in the juxtaposition of two generations: the responsible “old” and the reckless “young.” In this case, the proof of the assumed thesis is never called into question. The initially distinct plot line is quickly broken by a cycle of independent scenes, governed by their own logic of episodes, completely unrelated to the main conflict or thesis. It is in the humorous aspect of these scenes that the real value of the drama lies. One can even suspect that the openly ostentatiously pretextual nature of the plot indicates its conscious disregard by the author.

The final death of an elderly, jovial pensioner named Orliček (Andula's grandfather) seems to be equally accidental and poorly motivated. All his death does is provide a formal excuse to close the plot mixed up in all the episodes. Orliček could not bear the disappointment caused by his reckless granddaughter due to her neglect at work. This cathartic death has little in common with the earlier image of the deceased—a likeable erotomaniac—nor does it change anything. All it does is trigger Andula's exclamation, which is the title of the play.

Martin Esslin was making his discoveries of the “absurdity in the countries of the East” gradually, following, albeit with a delay, the traces of the local fascination with political relevance of post-Beckett and post-Ionesco dramas.

The eastern version of the theatre of the absurd first appeared in Poland, after 1956, while Czechoslovakia did not experience a “thaw” immediately after Stalin's death and had to wait for Mrożek's (in print) and Havel's works (on stage) until 1963, and for the Parisian avant-garde in the repertoire of Czech theatres two years longer, i.e. until 1965.

The situation was also different in Hungary, where no “thaw” in the Polish sense followed the revolution of 1956. The first “absurdist” (in the critics’ opinion) Hungarian drama noticed by Esslin was Istvan Örkeny's The Tot Family, written in 1964. In turn, in Yugoslavia, where censorship was not as strict as in the Soviet camp, “the theatre of the absurd remained in a lethargic state” as there was no need for an Aesopian style.

Hence, one can say that the Eastern theatre of the absurd fully formed only in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. But also in those countries it developed independently of the neighborly connections, as it appeared and had its moment of glory in each country at different points in time. The could only appear uniform from an external, distant, perspective—within an ideological frame assumed in advance.

It is worth noting that as early as 1963 Esslin drew attention to the paradoxical combination within the theatre of the absurd of Marxist, existentialist and post-Wittgenstein philosophies (for example in the questioning of the importance of language as a communication tool).

Also John Gassner (critical of Esslin's theoretical systematics) wrote in the mid-1960s about the emerging possibility of a marriage between the ideas of naturists, absurdists and Marxists.

Perhaps for such ideological reasons, until recently in Poland, a country defined by Mrożek as being “east of the West and west of the East,” the concept of the absurd itself as a descriptive category for native dramaturgy was approached with distrust. The early works by Mrożek or Różewicz started to be treated separately from Western absurdist works and instead came to be viewed in terms of their clash with Romanticism.

The limitations and distinctiveness of the Eastern absurd was determined on the one hand by the system of direct, “real” references to external reality, often camouflaged against censorship in a comfortable corset of absurd form. The system was identical in this respect everywhere—which was demonstrated in different years on the stages of Warsaw, Prague and Budapest theatres. Just as the often quoted Mrożek used to say that: “For us, it was not life that was absurd, it was the system,” also Vaclav Havel showed a similar understanding of the sense of absurdity (it should be reminded here that it was Havel who was named by Esslin as one of the most promising European playwrights of his generation):

“It is not reality that is fake, but its context—a system of [social] relations that is supposed to make sense of the reality, but fails to do so.”

Havel and Mrożek were often paired due to a similar understanding of the surrounding reality. As Tadeusz Nyczek commented: “The plays of both Slavic dramatists, filled with vivid socialist absurdity, turn out to be much more firmly anchored in reality than the usually completely abstract (…) plays by Western absurdists.”

One also ought to mention at this point a Hungarian dramatist, Istvan Örkeny, who in almost identical way explained the behavior of one of his dramatic protagonists, Lajos Tót: “he simply lived in absurd times and situation.” “I believe there is only one real thing—a situation,” wrote Örkeny, which is “a system in which we live and function voluntarily or against our will and out of which we try to escape in a good or bad direction.”

Havel, Mrożek, and Örkeny—the most outstanding absurdist playwrights of their times in their respective countries—agreed in their diagnoses and initial observations as to the nature of the Soviet system, but they created their own, separate and easily recognizable models of the theatre of the Eastern absurd.

Havel's model (described in detail by Tadeusz Nyczek57) was probably the most influenced by Western absurdists, from whom Havel consciously adopted the following practical rules:

First of all—characters that are not psychological types, but rather puppets (Nyczek wrote about the “game of thoughts” in Havel's works that “is similar to the game of chess, where it is always the protagonist who turns out to be the loser”);

As Russian critics unanimously agree, the case of Nikolai Erdman's The Suicide cast a shadow on Russian drama of the 1980s. It was completed in 1930 and condemned to 57 years of non-existence for political reasons.

Several attempts to stage or print the work ended in failure. The censorship was eventually lifted in 1987, when The Suicide was published by “Sovremennaya Dramaturgia.” Later, several soviet theatres staged the play (though it is disputed which was the first to do so). But The Suicide was first produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company at The Other Place, Stratford, on 13 June 1979.

No one could have imagined that the revival of this legendary drama would prove the relevance of the topic of a suicidal escape from the judgement of existence in contemporary Russian drama. Even the most recent studies on this subject indicate only the opposing, generic tendencies in Russian dramaturgy of the 1980s.

First of all—the ever strong penchant for “broad, epic presentation of the reality” in the name of journalistic or “sociological slogans.” According to Ippolit Zborovec, this model performed “purely ideological and myth-creating” functions.

Secondly—the renewed attempts at lyricization of the presented world87—following the psychological American arts (especially Tennessee Williams), which had been highly influential since the 1970s.

Somewhere in between these genre trends distinguished by the theorists lay new thematic solutions that started to appear at the same time when Russians began to discover the dramas of Sławomir Mrożek, Janusz Głowacki and Ireneusz Iredyński—authors who had so far been absent on the scenes of Russian theatres at that time.

But all this was already happening at the end of the Soviet world, which Erdman's protagonist could not accept, nearly annihilating the author himself and his work.

Erdman

It is not difficult to come up with the reasons why The Suicide had been censored for so many years. This apparently pro-NEP, anti-bourgeois comedy was an accurate (and hence dangerous) description of a system, whose main purpose was to suppress and annihilate the individual, in favor of the masses and the world of triumphant ideology.