Teatralne echa Roku Józefa Wybickiego, czyli gdański przyczynek do trudnej sztuki świętowania jubileuszy
Theatre Reverberations of the Józef Wybicki Year, Or, Gdańsk’s Contribution to the Difficult Art of Jubilee Celebration

Summary/Abstract: This article discusses the forgotten theatrical part of the celebrations of the Józef Wybicki Year in Gdańsk in 1972, which preceded by fifty years the analogous anniversary tribute to the author of the Polish national anthem in 2022. The pre- miere of Wybicki’s comedy Kulig (The Sleighing Party), directed in 1972 in Teatr Wybrzeże by Maryna Broniewska, an experienced producer of Enlightenment plays, is marked by the off-putting stigma of ‘national jubileeism.’ Nevertheless, it provides an interesting stimulus for looking at this anniversary context through the prism of the entanglements, visible only now, of Wybicki’s comedy, which is representative of its age—and with it, the entanglements of the entire theatre heritage of the Polish Enlightenment—in the ideological conditions of the most important breakthroughs in the history of Polish post-war theatre. The key point of reference for the observations made in the article is the post-transformation assessment of the potential of Polish 19th-century theatre repertoire presented by Piotr Morawski in his research monograph Oświecenie: Przedstawienia (The Enlightenment: Performances). The attempted reconstruction of the shape of the performance itself, based on the extant archive material, focuses, in turn, on revealing the director’s strategy of disambiguating the play’s meanings, which are not that obvious, and creating a distinctive staging frame for them.

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