Polish theatre modernism covers the fin de siècle, the interwar period and contemporaneity. Katarzyna Fazan analyses its dramaturgy and materialization on stage. Wyspiański’s Monumental Theatre was used by Schiller to promote a form of nationalism in the interwar period, but reappears in the post-1989 transformation in the theatre of Grzegorzewski to help explore national identity, memory and the past itself. This reveals the tension between Polish traditionalism, conservatism and processes of social democratization. However, this progressive function – as a training ground for new lived experiences and arena for generating subversive cultural and social relations (Wyspiański, Przybyszewski and Zapolska) – does not necessarily lead to the theatre’s own renewal, as noted by Jarząbek-Wasyl in her analysis of artistic directorship, actors and the status of the audience in Polish modernist theatre. She analyses the forms of theatre (especially in Kraków and Lwów) from entertainment to being a site of political, social and moral protest to suggest that modernist theatre represents heteronomous unity refracting neo-Romantic, twentieth-century avant-garde and postmodern attributes.

Krystyna Duniec and Agata Adamiecka-Sitek question the seemingly incontestable values and lineages of standard historiographies that are foundationally patriarchal and evidence how theatre profited from the trade in women’s bodies, and Duniec notes that through theatre we can chart the move from marginalization to empowered presence for LGBTQ groups. Duniec focuses on the interwar period, which she interprets as a time of tremendous innovation in theatre practices that remain/repeat today. She notes that through theatre we can chart the move from marginalization to empowered presence for LGBTQ groups. The Polish People’s Republic, as Adamiecka-Sitek shows, proclaimed gender equality but in reality reproduced bourgeois gender relations that excluded women from empowered positions in theatre institutions. She then charts how women’s narratives emerged outside of a ‘homosocial’ order built on fraternal ties that she traces from the establishment of public theatre.