Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-s9k8s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-04T19:20:37.417Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

A Myth Vivisected

Grotowski's Apocalypse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2021

Extract

An account of Apocalypsis cum figuris has long been overdue. It is total theatre, collectively created, no sooner thought through than orchestrated for the proper instruments, for the specific members of the company. It is the most mature fruit so far produced by the ascetic labors of the Wroclaw Theatre Laboratory. In any case, it is an event, one of more than local interest, and we don't get those every day of the week. It needs, therefore, to be recorded as accurately as possible before it slips out of focus. Fair enough, only how? Seldom does something so straightforward prove so baffling.

Ordinarily in describing a play we can always fall back on the script, on the lines and the plot. In Apocalypsis there are only the bare bones of a scenario. In the reading, the text is a haphazard jumble of quotations from the Bible, liturgical chants, Dostoevski, T. S. Eliot, Simone Weil.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1971 The Drama Review

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This article is reprinted from Polish Perspectives, which is published under the auspices of the Polish Institute of International Affairs. It appeared in Vol. XIII, No. 2, February, 1970. The production of Grotowski's Apocalypsis cum figuris began in Poland in 1968 and is still being performed twice a week at the Laboratory Theatre Institute in Wroclaw. Pictures of the production along with an edited version of the program notes appeared in T45.