Motivi biblici nell’opera teatrale di Stanisław Wyspiański e Jerzy Grotowski
Creators: name: Bernardini, Luca
Publisher: name: Università degli  Studi di Milano
Year: 2011

description: The paper deals about two plays by the so called “fourth bard” of Polish literature, the modernist <br>playwright Stanislaw Wyspianski (1869-1907). Best known for his drama The Wedding (1901), Wyspiański <br>devoted his first theatrical work, an opera libretto published only after his death, to Daniel (1895). <br>In this early  work, the Biblical theme is developed according to the messianic virtues attributed to <br>poetry by the main Polish romantic poet and playwright, Adam Mickiewicz. While writing about Daniel, <br>Wyspiański was inspired by a Rembrandt’s painting, Belshazzar's Feast (1635) preserved at the National <br>Gallery in London. As a matter of fact, the biblical thread of Daniel’s prophetic dream about the subduing <br>of Three Kings (Daniel 7: 24) was exploited by Wyspiański in order to allude to the political predicament <br>of the Polish nation oppressed by the three parting powers: Prussia, Austria and Russia. The play was <br>therefore edited by Austrian censorship and was staged for the first time only in 1927, once Poland had <br>regained her independence: not on a Polish scene, though, but by the Krokewer Yidish Teater in Dawid Liebl’s <br>yiddish translation.  <br>The second play partly centered on a biblical theme is Akropolis (1904), a monumental drama set in Cracow’s <br>Pantheon, the Wawel cathedral. In the second act of the play, the characters of the tapestries hanging on the <br>walls of the cathedral come to life. One of the tapestries portraits the story of Jacob (Genesis: 25-33). <br>Wyspiański was very likely inspired by  Raffaello’s fresco paintings in Eliodor’s room at the Vatican, <br>and by Gerhard Hauptmann’s fragment Das Hirtenlied. The playwright closely follows the text of the Bible <br>but for a few „apocryphical” insertions, the more relevant of which refer to Jacob’s struggle with the Angel. <br>The Angel defies Jacob, founder of tribes”, claiming that he’ll thread „on the weak ones, in this graveyard <br>of tribes”. Much has been debated on where the action of the drama should take place. Wyspiański himself thought <br>about staging Akropolis in the cathedral on the Wawel hill, but the best known production of the play, performed <br>by Jerzy Grotowski (1962), dispensed from the original setting. For Wyspiański, the cathedral on the Wawel hill, <br>with her tombs, was the most significant achievement in Polish national history  and culture, but for Grotowski <br>the most meaningful event in the history of the whole humankind had taken place in Auschwitz extermination camp. <br>Grotowski sees the setting of the play – using Wyspianski’s words - „in a graveyard of tribes”. This graveyard <br>is not longer the peaceful and magnificent cathedral where the playwright used to stroll in search of <br>inspiration, but a dramatically real one, the graveyard in which millions of human beings belonging to <br>all nations have been buried after having completed the crematorium in which they and their companions <br>will be burned. Grotowski has not altered Wyspiański’s lines, just changed the order of the scenes, <br>so that Jacob’s struggle with the Angel could be at the centre of  a play which could be reintepreted <br>by the light shed on Auschwitz  extermination machine by Tadeusz Borowski’s concentrationary  short stories. <br>The last line of the play comes from a caption imagined by Wyspiański for its monumental drama, but the old <br>words have for the modern audience a tragic and complete new meaning: „they’re gone, spirals of smoke float <br>in the air”.  <br><br><br><br><br><br>
description: Altre Modernità, 2011: La Bibbia in Scena