Opium nieszkodliwe teatru, czyli o «Tragedii Eumenesa» Tadeusza Rittnera
Theater’s Harmless Opium: «The Tragedy of Eumenes» by Tadeusz Rittner

Summary/Abstract: According to Zbigniew Raszewski, Tragedia Eumenesa (The Tragedy of Eumenes) was one of Tadeusz Rittner’s worst plays. The present article engages polemically with this opinion. It evokes favourable reviews that followed the play’s 1920 premiere at the Juliusz Słowacki Theater in Kraków, as well as Lesław Eustachiewicz’s positive assessment from 1961. It also revisits the reviews of the 1922 flop at the Reduta Theater, which, paradoxically, reveal the text’s potential, namely the possibility of reading of the manuscript. Rittner’s comedy employs a poetics of the grotesque, farce, and irony, and, above all, uses overt theatricality and the category of dream as quasi reality. The author of the article identifies the theoretical foundations of this late drama in Rittner’s programmatic essay O snach i bajkach (On Dreams and Fairy Tales, 1909), where he does not renounce kitsch or fairy-tale props. The analysis leads to the conclusion that in The Tragedy of Eumenes, Rittner consciously engages in a dialogue with the aesthetics characteristic of the decline of the Habsburg monarchy—with its fascination with masquerade and Spanish theatre, as well as the poetics of dream and adventurous fairy-tale—and at the same time opens his text to multiple staging possibilities.

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