Fakt teatralny

Theatrical fact The article is an analysis of Tadeusz Różewicz’s Birth Rate (“the biography of a play”) as an “unhappy” performative act that cannot establish a new paradigm of textual performance (as in Ryszard Nycz’s reading of Różewicz’s text) or epitomize the postmodern breakthrough in the theatre (as in Halina Filipowicz’s interpretation). In this case “unhapinness” refers to the singularity of the catastrophe (inability to write and complete a particular play in a particular moment of history for a particular institutional form of theatre) and to the relationship between the poet and the theatre conditioned by the experience of ressentiment. Such an interpretation requires as a context not the “wholeness” of Różewicz’s literary output but historical and cultural occurrences accompanying the fact of publishing Birth Rate. Różewicz undermines the institution of Polish theatre in the late 60s as a vehicle of collective mourning that enabled the audience to oversee the facts which were uneasy for collective memory and hard to work through