Doctor Faustus in Poland

Extract

In 1963, Jerzy Grotowski's Theatre Laboratory in Opole, Poland— an industrial town of 50,000 some sixty miles from Auschwitz— produced Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Not one word was changed in the script, but the text was reordered into a “montage,” as Grotowski calls it, drawing on all the Quartos and rearranging the sequence of scenes, creating new ones and eliminating some others. We are printing the program notes to this production, including the sequence of scenes as Grotowski conceived them,. Although the play was performed in Polish, Grotowski wrote the program in French. The Theatre Laboratory is small, seating only sixty, and productions are mounted only when they are ready. For Faustus the long, low theatre room—about forty by fifteen feet—was painted black, and the set consisted of two long tables running the length of the room and one smaller table at one end of the room. In a future issue, we shall have an article about the Theatre Laboratory's work and an interview with Grotowski by Eugenia Barba, who spent some months in Poland with Grotowski's company. We would like to thank Mr. Barba for sending us the program and photographs printed below. —The Editor