Konrad Swinarski's Midsummer Night's Dream

Extract

The first night of Konrad Swinarski's A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Stary Teatr in Cracow took place on 22 July 1970, then a national holiday commemorating the establishment of the People's Republic of Poland. Thanks to Swinarski the Stary Teatr was one of the best companies in Poland; he expected the actors to engage fully with their work, and he had a great gift for inspiring their imagination and emotions. Actors of great personalities belonged to the cast of this Midsummer Night's Dream: Wojciech Pszoniak (Puck), Anna Polony (Helena), Wiktor Sadecki (Oberon), Wojciech Ruszkowski (Quince), yet the main quality of the production resided in the high standard of acting of the ensemble. Swinarski set his actors a difficult task—he wanted them to act both comedy and quite serious drama at the same time. His idea was to search for and enlarge analogies among the threads of the drama, accentuating the oppositions and contrasts in order to stress the internal contradictions of the fictional world. Moreover, he wanted to show all the events of the play in two different, contradictory perspectives: the fairy-tale perspective and the court perspective.