The Professional's Guilty Conscience: a Letter from Poland

Abstract

Too often, western thinking about the Polish theatre is limited by its ‘exportable’ names – or, more insidiously, by the expectation that it should satisfy our own assumptions about how theatre ‘ought’ to be participating in the national struggle. Zygmunt Hubner is probably more typical of theatre professionals in Poland. As director of the Powszechny Theatre in Warsaw, he neither supports the government, nor regards himself primarily as a maker of ‘political’ theatre: and here he describes the dilemma of the theatre worker who, while depending on state subsidy, nevertheless wishes to speak to his audiences in ways that matter. It is a dilemma which seems scarcely less conducive to arousing a ‘professional's guilty conscience’ in the theatre of the so-called ‘free world’.