Chapter 13 - Writing and Dramaturgy

Summary

In this constellation of playwriting and new writing cultures in Poland, Ewa Guderian-Czaplińska argues that the playwright occupies a central position in twentieth-century Polish culture. In the interwar period, she charts heated dramaturgical disputes over the country’s path to modernisation. Guderian-Czaplińska proposes the term ‘ariergardist’ – artists who forfeit or reject the notion of progress inherent in the avant-garde, before analysing major writers of the postwar and contemporary periods. Marcin Kościelniak takes up Paweł Demirski’s manifesto, calling for a change in interpretive and aesthetic criteria to account for artistic innovation, to articulate contemporary forms of collaboration between writer and director, and to contest the literary associations of playwriting cultures and the modernist notion of ‘autonomous art’. Ultimately, he declares that the term text for staging offers a more accurate designation of writing and directing collaborations than ‘play’ or even ‘text for theatre’.