The Wild Provocations of Poland's Divine Comedy Festival

Howard Shalwitz and Brandice Thompson of the Center for International Theatre Development (CITD) invited director Shana Cooper, designer Misha Kachman, Polish theatre historian Malgorzata Semil, and myself to represent CITD at the eighteenth Boska Komedia (Divine Comedy) 2025 Festival in Krakow, Poland. Together we roamed the historical streets of Old Town, sometimes with minutes to spare as we rushed from venue to venue. In seven days, the four of us saw thirteen plays from a total of thirty-three international and national productions.

Festival director Bartosz Szydlowski’s theme was “Waiting for the Barbarians.” Barbarians, who are disruptive and a threat to convention, demand confrontation with the times as the festival productions attack, provoke, and often expose the ridiculous. In this festival, the audience doesn’t just observe but is forced to participate, to take in, to react. Remaining indifferent is not an option.

When asked what makes the festival unique, Shana Cooper responded: “Polish theatre…is where the taboos, the fears…can be discussed front and center and experienced through artists in raw, emotionally exposed, physically and intellectually fearless ways…demonstrating total freedom of expression.” The actors, by complete immersion in the work through extraordinary skill, talent, and passion, redefine the theatre’s long tradition of political engagement. It’s a mad voyage.

However, witnessing one unique production after another, I came to experience this festival known for political-social-cultural rebellion as an introspective, existential rebellion exposing purely empathetic, recognizable human behavior. 

The festival pushes the boundaries of theatre with new strategies for playmaking. Bold directorial concepts and fearless ensemble participation define the development process. Quoting Misha Kachman: “Art is…about rare, select individuals who can do extraordinarily unique, highly idiosyncratic things.”

I came to experience this festival known for political-social-cultural rebellion as an introspective, existential rebellion exposing purely empathetic, recognizable human behavior. 

While each event was a world unto itself, they often used similar strategies. I’ve divided eight representative productions into three categories:

• Where social media has oversized influence.
• Where contemporized historical/political theatre is the defining aesthetic.
• Existential pieces where the world is expressed in surprising and often moving ways.

Social Media

Scenes from a Marriage

At the National Stary Theatre, Katarzyna Minkowska updated Scenes from a Marriage, based on Ingmar Bergman’s television series, as a psychological portrait of relationships informed by social media’s influence. Dating apps and platforms like Instagram and TikTok reduce intimate connections to an appealing photo or video and spread pseudo-psychological advice.

An older couple, played by Magda Graziowska and Szymon Czacki, two of Krakow’s most venerated actors, are found in an uncomfortable therapy session setting up the story and the theatrical devices. For instance, the constant presence of a camera projects the actors' faces on a live feed on multiple screens and mirrors located all over the set. Three more couples of different ages intertwine, revealing emotional illiteracy by painfully navigating marriage, partnerships, betrayal, grief, love, and loss… scenes from a marriage.

All the characters seem trapped on a constantly rotating turntable world, brilliantly lit and filled with choreographed movement, creating a circuslike dynamic. The Goldberg Variations adds a piano underscore of quiet vulnerability. All of this contributes to an impressive balance between a director’s potentially overwhelming concept and clear storytelling.

At the three-hour mark everything stops, and in complete stillness there’s a stunning, earned moment of an extended, gut-wrenching monologue describing loss and the relentless pain of grief. Finally, the director brings us back to the circus with a full cast celebration as the back wall is revealed to be covered with mirrors reflecting all the observers in the theatre.

Foreplay

Foreplay deals with an entire younger generation searching for a sense of self-esteem and identity through social media, exposing themselves to criticism and ugliness. The quote from the movie Tár, “the architect of your soul appears to be social media” succinctly encapsulates this world.

Originally staged in Wroclaw, Poland, this is a museum installation with performers. Wiktor Rubin and Jolanta Janiczak, the director-playwright duo, utilize staging strategies that push the viewers out of their comfort zone. There are devices similar to those in Scenes from a Marriage where enlarged faces are projected in real time. In contrast to the typical projection by actors on stage, the natural voices are amplified with equipment, creating an intimate vocal realism, as though you are having a conversation with a person sitting next to you rather than watching an actor perform. 

The piece, inspired by the Netflix documentary, recounts the true story of Gabby Petito’s camper van journey across the western United States. Attempting to find meaning through vlogging on social media, Gabby and her boyfriend struggle with diametrically opposed ways of expressing themselves. One actress portrays the moms of both characters, exposing inherited family trauma and the tragedy of growing up devoid of basic intimacy and love. Ultimately, we witness a murder which is followed later by suicide. The piece effectively asks the question: Who is responsible for ending these young lives?

But Foreplay is also a musical with performers from Wroclaw’s Capitol Musical Theatre, accompanied by Krzkysztof Kaliski playing a variety of instruments. Two sets of choruses comment on the action: three older Victorian men, leering and omnipresent, and three contemporary young women dressed in goth street clothes in counterpoint to the men. “What we talk about when we talk about love” is a repeated, beautifully sung lyric.

Brutal reality surfaces with a lengthy recitation of statistics around domestic violence and a real-time five-minute demonstration of what it takes to strangle a human being. And yet again, a finale exhibition exposes multitudes of stars projected on all surfaces, a powerful and beautiful juxtaposition for this relentless horror story

Spy Girls

One of the most anticipated pieces in the festival focuses on the Ukrainian war. This time social media is a vehicle employed in active resistance to the Russian insurgence into Ukraine.

Magda Szpecht, who has devoted herself to open-source intelligence work, uses art as activism. The performance demonstrates the methodologies of open-source investigation cyber-activist operations by way of fake social media accounts.

It was produced by Estonia’s Vabalava theatre with Polish, Estonian, and Ukrainian artists, dramaturgy by Olga Drygas, and music by Krzysztof Kaliski. Masked performers under pseudonyms Mad Matrixx, Cyber Shadow, and Void Vigilante disguise their identities for protection. We never see their faces. Using fake profiles on dating apps, the creative team involves Russian soldiers in online relationships, sometimes lasting months, extracting information about geographic positions and frontline activity.

The performance space is a working video studio/garage interior filled with a giant screen revealing Russian locations on GPS maps and text from soldiers communicating via twitter with the performers. An astonishing array of dick pics in a continuous scroll on the big screen are visual evidence of actual communication. This director’s staging demonstrates the “catfishing” of the Russian soldiers.

Musical punctuation and dark humour are built into the event. Entertaining, silly theatrics are juxtaposed with physical violence as a frustrated performer/activist smashes a laptop to bits. The reality of this never-ending war so close to home undercuts any theatrical distance.

The climax is actual voice contact. After several failed attempts, a Russian boy finally answers. It’s a breathless moment, knowing that it’s real.

It takes courage and solidarity and we, as mere theatre audiences safe in Krakow, watch with profound respect for the courage of everyone involved. Spy Girls demonstrates an agency to shape the future, and a sense of freedom in theatre that is more than mere escape.

Historical/Political Theatre

The Attack on the National Stary Theatre. The Birth of a Nation.

In this production, Jakub (Kuba) Skrzywanek, arguably the most influential theatremaker in Krakow, explores theatre as a tool for transforming social and political thinking.

In his epic and personal play, Skrzywanek and his team play with fiction and reality: real historical figures and invented ones move in multiple timelines. In part, this project is based on a new interpretation of the iconic Polish play Liberation. But this is not about presenting a new take. Poland is a country of ghosts, as Kuba says. The intention, by confronting grief, is to shake the audience out of its martyrological malaise; social, political, and ideological victimhood. Kuba takes a buzz saw to historical traumas that define Polish history.

It’s most appropriate that a play about theatre and decades of Polish history takes place in the National Stary Theatre. It begins with impressive pageantry, as the theatre itself becomes the central character. Historical figures make themselves heard and seen with a full-bodied sonic event slamming doors and windows, and with banners paraded on long poles representing major tragedies and disasters in Polish history. After a crowded ceremonial memorial reading of Polish names in the lobby during intermission, we witness a manufactured, darkly humorous, smarmy, contemporary memorial service. Finally, well into the third hour, there’s an extended, unrelenting sequence where a director directs actors over and over in a scene confronting guilt and complicity. From national trauma to personal trauma. No more grief, enough martyrdom.

As with many of the festival’s productions, audiences must live and breathe in real time along with the action, often uncomfortably so, in repetitive ritualized experience. There’s no escape into mere observation.

Maybe the story here is about Kuba, Jakub Skrzywanek, the theatre’s artistic director and creative force. Young, brash, intelligent, and charming, his work is a generational response to Polish national mythology—evolution, not revolution. Move past, move on, go forward. His theatre has no bounds and restrictions, like the restrictions often imposed by trustees, board members, or even artistic directors of regional theatres in the United States, out of concern for potential negative audience responses. As Kuba told us, he answers only to the minister of culture which gives him immense freedom from scrutiny, criticism, and censorship.

As with many of the festival’s productions, audiences must live and breathe in real time along with the action, often uncomfortably so, in repetitive ritualized experience. There’s no escape into mere observation.

At almost four hours, the experience escalates to a brilliant monologue vacillating between hope and despair—never didactic, never telling us what to think or believe; while a gigantic bright orange sun slowly lowers, retreats, and lowers again, as the back wall opens to a mirror revealing the audience as if on stage: a collective public on trial.

The Trial of Eligiusz Niewiadomski

The text is based on the court document “The Trial of Eligiusz Niewiadomski for the Assassination Attempt on the Life of the President of the Republic of Poland, Gabryel Narutowicz, on December 16, 1922.” 

Bartosz Szydłowski, director of the Divine Comedy Festival, created a satirical look at patriotism and nationalism in a reproduction of the trial with some of Poland’s most renowned actors as part of the cast. The audience, in the cavernous Kaznia Nowa Theater, watch by way of live feed on a gigantic screen as the courtroom drama plays out by the actors in real time in an adjacent space.

The trial of Gabryel Narutowicz’s killer is a trial of specific political doctrine and ideological zeal which results in violence. The political murder was not random violence, but the result of hatred and fear of foreignness deliberately stoked by the far right. In his final words before the court, Eligiusz Niewiadomski stated that the murder of the first president of independent Poland was his duty. The radicalization of the right and its growing popularity in society, leaves no doubt that violence will escalate. 

The historical event is a mirror of today’s complex social and political issues. The theatre raises questions about the dangerous fantasies which continue to stir national emotions. Poland’s issues are our issues.

Watching the trial on a screen achieves a kind of separation from history, a layering of awareness, a sense of the immediacy of radical ideas by using contemporary filmic technology. After the death sentence was passed, the actors enter the theatre one by one to celebrate the assassin's political legacy creating an immersive, disturbing, escalating event—part mourning ritual, part protest.

The Weavers

The Weavers, an adaptation of a naturalistic play by Gerhardt Hauptman, also contemporizes a specific historical event: the first major worker revolt in European history by the horrifically oppressed Weavers of Silesia, Poland in 1844.

The creative team, headed by Maja Kleczewska and scenic designer Mateusz Znaniecki, use their artistry to depict the working-class versus capitalism by transposing the historical narrative into the Polish Solidarity movement, exposing exploitation and injustice and cruelty. You can see Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg in the character of the controlling capitalist industrialist, hovering (literally suspended by a harness) over the workers for half of the play, smirking, smiling and laughing at the working class. “Divine Comedy,” indeed. 

But the captivating event of the piece is the sheer stage energy; the choral and individual voices of the oppressed in a relentless, passionate, uninterrupted symphony of existential pleading in a primal scream exposing the anguish of the individuals and demands of the collective. “WHOEVER IS WITH US IS NOT AGAINST US” is chanted repeatedly. The ensemble is the Silesian Theatre company who, by the way, went on strike opening night in Silesia demanding more equality in actor wages. Art reflects life of course.

The director’s expertise is formidable, having choreographed constant, complex intertwined crowd movement with a large ensemble while a live-feed camera operator staged in the center of the crowd strategically captures and projects individual faces. The notable scenography reveals a multilayered, hyperrealistic design with images of constant bombardment, chaos, and destruction building to a projection of Picasso’s Guernica. The play escalates and careens to the end with ear-shattering on stage explosions and all the shirtless weavers, motionless in stark tableaux in juxtaposition to the play’s constant movement, sing a rousing anthem, an event of beauty and solidarity.

Existentialism

The last two plays, perhaps those with the greatest emotional impact, are completely different experiences that share similar messages through bodies captured on stage: aging, eternity, and existential outcries.

A Year Without Summer

This internationally popular A Year Without Summer, co-produced by Austrian choreographer/director Florentina Holzinger and Boska Komedia Theatre Festival, takes as inspiration Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and humanity’s struggle with the consequences of its own act of creation. We watch the human body’s attempt to control, to survive, to live forever. In a complex series of stage exhibitions, featuring both able-bodied and disabled performers of all ages and ethnicities, including but not limited to professional actors, movement specialists, and community performers; Holzinger’s production explores narratives about bodies, the environments we inhabit, illness, anomalies, and disintegration. And we see the affirmation of the human body—imperfect and mortal—its ability to shock, to transgress, and to make love in an all too human vivid on-stage experience.

Holzinger destroys old modes of storytelling in the encounter between stage artists and the audience and thumbs her nose at what is conventionally accepted on stage. But “is this really theatre?” some voices debate. This enormous stage event combines choreography, circus, theatre, martial arts, and radical performance, with numerous complex theatrical props, set pieces, lighting and musical effects: Sigmund Freud; oozing, slithering, intertwined bodies; animatronic bugs; gymnastics, ice skating on an actual suspended ice rink; Frankenstein’s monster himself (very tall and charming); constant multiple naked bodies from youngsters to grandmas in all shapes and sizes. Perhaps the most visceral example of breaking norms is a very long sequence where all the performers portraying caregivers and patients deal with an ever-intensifying gastrointestinal disaster, with said performers slipping and sliding through the excreted mess, including dangerously exposing the front rows of the audience. Sorry souls are literally buried in excrement. Art finds unnatural ways to show up. Maybe this piece best explains the festival’s title, “Divine Comedy.”

Again, as in almost all the pieces we saw, there is an unrelentingly unhurried pace resulting in a ritualized event. Dante says, “Roam the landscape of your innermost world.” Maybe. Art assaulting the audience. Does suffering force us into consciousness? The Polish audience’s appetite and ability to consume atrocity and horror is impressive.

Maybe The Year Without Summer is an attempt at cleansing our bodies infected with hate and fear. Quoting Dante again “You were not made to live your lives as brutes, but to be followers of worth and knowledge.”

The Restless Retirement Home

“Has it come already?”—has old age arrived, the central character asks, and is it time to start the communal home project she and her friends have dreamt of for years? When is it too late? Does old age come with the shame of wanting to live? Does a feel-good story about a bunch of oldster friends agreeing to live together to escape loneliness make for compelling theatre?

Michał Buszewicz has cast the oldest generation of actors from Szczecin’s Teatr Współczesny in The Restless Retirement Home to create a story about a utopia that just may come true. Lifetimes of stage experience are evident as this cast breezily, and with complete immersion and skill, inhabit each of the characters.

The creative team interviewed actual retirees from Szczecin about their thoughts, opinions, and realities. These experience-experts’ images are projected intermittently on screens in an ever-morphing scenic design.

The scenes move quickly as the director is only invested in the most relevant moments, such as younger family members accidentally discovering the sexuality of older bodies in awkward and embarrassing activity, tricks to keep caregivers away, occasional clashes of temperament, and the best one: a group snorting ashes, of recently cremated departed inhabitants up their noses! There’s also an ever-present musician with a protuberant trombone slinking around, playing, punctuating, to comedic effect.

Lots of comedy in a play about the end of life. Again: Divine Comedy.

The ringing of an old-time alarm clock signals the inevitable departure of each one of the residents. The device is used repeatedly, when, as a celebration of all lives, the production design surprises with a stage wide scrolling projection of fantastic senior faces accompanied by a full-throated, moving choral hymn.

The two images of the Divine Comedy Festival that have stuck with me, a senior myself, in a festival full of memorable images are, one: in a Year Without Summer where gently falling snow completely conceals the excrement-covered world in a blanket of pure white while a nude figure skater gracefully performs a free dance on a suspended ice rink. And two: the oldsters in the retirement home quietly leaving life one by one as the remaining residents carefully perform, in perfect unison, a choreographed dance of arms and hands bidding a final farewell.

“Waiting for the Barbarians” was the theme of the Divine Comedy festival. Barbarians came to the festival in full disruptive force. Yet ultimately, in the concluding event of each production, the artists delivered stunning moments of life-affirming, breathtaking beauty.