SLAWOMIR MROZEK’S TANGO: COMMUNISM AS IDEOLOGICAL NO-EXIT
SLAWOMIR MROZEK’S TANGO: COMMUNISM AS IDEOLOGICAL NO-EXIT

Summary/Abstract: Mrozek’s play Tango opens a long list of stagings of Hamlet in Communist Central and Eastern Europe that mark a sustained theatrical effort to make-up for the time when the play was banned in the USSR on Stalin’s orders, from 1924 until his death in 1953. Even though they were not “tantamount to dissent” or intended to bring down these countries’ Communist governments, Hamlet-based productions like Tango scored small victories against censorship by restoring centrality and complexity to the Shakespearean classic in the context of an ideologically claustrophobic Soviet bloc. In the political context of a Communist Europe, Tango can also be seen as a grotesque, or absurd, paraphrase of Sartre’s No Exit, a play which takes place in the same room where three characters find out that they have been brought together for all eternity to act as each other's torturers, confirming Sartre’s ineluctable adage that “hell is – other people

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