„Dojechałaś do końca, kochanie”
‘You’ve reached the finish line, sweetheart.’

On the ageing and demise of theatre

Summary/Abstract: Duszyczka (A Little Soul) by Tadeusz Różewicz was the penultimate production staged by Jerzy Grzegorzewski and at the same time the director’s last production, included in the repertoire of the National Theatre for seventeen years after his death. The author, a theatre historian and archivist, researcher of Grzegorzewski’s work and a multiple viewer of Duszyczka, attempts to describe the life of the play, which despite being deprived of the director’s care, nevertheless retained the shape given to it by the author to the end. He draws attention to how the aging of the performance, both in the metaphorical and quite literal sense (the physical aging of actresses and actors, the wear and tear of the stage objects) may have affected its reception. To this end, he confronts the surviving archival documentation of the performance with the personal experience of a multiple viewer. Despite the author’s declared reluctance towards this methodology, the article can be categorised as part of the current of the so-called affective archive.

• Details
• Contents