Abstract
Such a critical reception for a first play frequently guarantees the playwright instant box-office success and automatic elevation into the canon. But the production of Tumor Brainiowicz at the Slowacki Theatre in Krakow in June 1921 was no breakthrough for Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy, 1885–1939), playwright, painter, critic, aesthetician, novelist, philosopher and writer on drugs, whom his American translator and biographer, Daniel Gerould, has described as ‘one of the most amazing artistic geniuses and personalities of the modern period’.2
‘It seems that we are watching and hearing the ravings of a syphilitic in the last stages of creeping paralysis. …Witkiewicz’s play is a total absurdity from which nothing can ever arise. It is an unnatural clinical abortion. It should be put in alcohol and studied by psychopathologists.’1
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Notes
Quoted in ‘Theatre Checklist No. 6’, compiled by Daniel Gerould, Theatrefacts, vol. 2, no. 2, 1975, p. 5.
Introduction to Stanislaw Witkiewicz, The Madman and the Nun and Other Plays, trans, and ed. by Daniel Gerould and C. S. Durer (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968) p. xxiii.
Three plays from this collection, with the Introduction, and Foreword by Jan Kott, have been reprinted as The Madman and the Nun and The Crazy Locomotive (including The Water Hen) (New York: Applause Theater Book Publishers, 1989).
Konstanty Puzyna, ‘Witkacy in the Polish Theatre’ (paper delivered at the ITI Witkiewicz Centenary Symposium, Warsaw, 1985).
Martin Esslin, ‘The Search for a Metaphysical Dimension in Drama’, introduction to Tropical Madness (New York: Winter House, 1972) p. 4.
Janusz Degler, ‘Witkiewicz on the Polish Stage, 1921–1984’, The Theatre in Poland, no. 10–12 (1984) p. 32.
‘The Writings of Tadeusz Kantor, 1956–1985’, trans. Michael Kobialka, Drama Review, vol. 30, no. 3 (Fall 1986) pp. 125, 136, 155, 169.
Stanislaw Witkiewicz, ‘A Refutation of Anatol Stern’s Objections’ (1924)
quoted in Janusz Degler, ‘Witkacy’s Theory of Theatre’, Dialectics and Humanism (Polish Scientific Publishers) vol. XII, no. 2 (Spring 1985) p. 85
From the last section of Stanislaw Witkiewicz, ‘An Introduction to the Theory of Pure Form in the Theatre’, Skamander, nos 1, 2 and 3 (1920) trans, in Gerould and Durer, op. cit., pp. 293, 295–6.
Allardyce Nicoli, World Drama (London: Harrap, 1949) p. 621.
Manfred Pfister, The Theory and Analysis of Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) p. 129.
Daniel Gerould, introduction to Doubles, Demons and Dreamers (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1985) pp. 13, 15.
Antonin Artaud in 1923, in a preface to Maeterlinck’s ‘Twelve Songs’
quoted in Eric Sellin, The Dramatic Concepts of Antonin Artaud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968) p. 77.
Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958) pp. 46, 77, 94, 95.
Jean Genet, Reflections on the Theatre (London: Faber, 1972) p. 12.
L. A. C. Dobrez, The Existential and its Exits: Literary and Philosophical Perspectives on the Works of Beckett, Ionesco, Genet and Pinter (London: Athlone Press, 1986) pp. 265–6.
See Michael Green (ed.), The Russian Symbolist Theatre (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1986) p. 110.
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge, 1984) p. 193.
Clive Hart, Language and Structure in Beckett’s Plays (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1986) pp. 17–18.
Henrik Ibsen, Letters and Speeches, ed. Evert Sprinchorn (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1965) p. 144.
See Christine Kiebuzinska, Revolutionaries in the Theater: Mayerhold, Brecht and Witkiewicz (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988) pp. 112, 117.
Stanislaw Witkiewicz, ‘A Few Words about the Role of the Actor in the Theatre of Pure Form’, trans. Daniel Gerould, Theatre Quarterly, vol. V, no. 18 (1975) pp. 94–5.
See Victor H. Miesel (ed.), Voices of German Expressionism (London: Prentice-Hall, 1970)
Dorothy Pam, ‘Kokoschka’s “Murderer, the Woman’s Hope”’, Drama Review, vol. 19, no. 3 (September 1975) pp. 5–12
J. M. Ritchie and H. F. Garten, Seven Expressionist Plays (London: Calder, 1968)
See also, Konstanty Puzyna, ‘The Genius of Witkacy’, Gambit, vol. 9, nos 33–4 (1979) pp. 60–1.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: J. M. Dent, 1906) ch. XIV, p. 147.
Boris Eichenbaum, ‘The Theory of the Formal Method’, quoting Victor Shklovsky, Russian Formalist Criticism, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965) p. 114.
Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976) p. 268.
Jan Kott, ‘Witkiewicz and Artaud: Where the Analogy Ends’, Theatre Quarterly, vol. V, no. 18 (1975) p. 70.
Janusz Degler, ‘Witkacy in Poland: Finding a Style for “The Mother”’, Theatre Quarterly, vol. V, no. 18 (1975) pp. 74–9.
In Stanislaw Witkiewicz, The Beelzebub Sonata: Plays, Essays and Documents, ed. and trans. Daniel Gerould and Jadwiga Kosicka (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1980).
For an analysis of Witkiewicz’s techniques in dramatising Wahazar’s violent monomania, see James W. Parker, ‘Witkiewics’s “Gyubal Wahazar” and Riebout-Dessaigne’s “L’Empereur de Chine”’, Polish Review, vol. XVIII, nos 1–2 (1973) pp. 35–6.
Daniel Gerould, Witkacy: Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz as an Imaginative Writer (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981) p. 325.
Czeslawa Korzeniowska, quoted in ‘Theatre Checklist No. 6’, Theatrefacts, vol. 2, no. 2 (1975) p. 8.
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Howard, R. (1994). Witkiewicz and the Theatre of Death. In: Docherty, B. (eds) Twentieth-Century European Drama. Insights. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23073-0_4
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