From Documentarist to Situationist: The Plays of Paweł Demirski

Abstract

The author analyses a certain phase in the work of Paweł Demirski. She argues that, with his deeply politically engaged, brilliantly intelligent theatre, Demirski appeared almost as a dream come true for all those who yearned for a new Sławomir Mrożek, a Polish Bertolt Brecht or a national verbatim theatre. And yet at the same time they were all absolutely disappointed, as his plays were utterly different from those with which political theatre had come to be associated in Poland. The playwright himself said that he owed most to the furious communist theatre of Dario Fo. As for his creative techniques, however, he is closest to the French situationists. It soon turns out that Demirski is at his best making critical approaches (i.e. dramaturgical rewritings) to found material (i.e. the cultural memory of his audiences). Each time, the unsuspecting audience is violently confronted with the brazen tricks of the playwright, who shifts the meanings, subverts sense and makes countless transgressions against good middle-class and traditional notions of logic. Demirski does not wish to free himself from Polish myths, heritage, history and memory. On the contrary, he does not lay claim to creating new orders of ideas and philosophical-aesthetic systems.