The play takes us to the 1962 Opole, specifically to Teatr Laboratorium (the Lab Theatre). The characters are based on the legends of Polish theatre: the Director, the Scribe, the Set Designer, and the actors and actresses. The team finds themselves in an artistic and existential clinch. The actors are tired with the side hustling, the poverty, the housing crisis, and the uncertainty of the future. Meanwhile the Director is trying to come up with an idea that would conquer Paris and then the world. The breakthrough happens when they decide to perform Wyspiański’s Acropolis but in a radical reinterpretation: the story wouldn’t be set in Wawel but rather in a “camp” that is the sum of the events of Auschwitz and the totalitarian regime.
The drama follows the process of making this legendary play – from the back-breaking physical exercises (“the mask made of the facial muscles”), through ideological disputes, to the final scene of entering the box-crematorium. The background is made of the gray reality of living during the Polish People’s Republic: the censorship, the academies in honour of the October Revolution, and the personal problems.
Słobodzianek manages to demythologise the legend behind Teatr Laboratorium creating a piece that – as the title suggests – is simultaneously mocking and being apologetic.
The author strips the Director of his “holy guru” title. The Director in Our Acropolis is a visionary as well as a ruthless manipulator and an egocentric. He treats the actors as instruments feeding on their traumas, insecurities, and weaknesses just so he can make them reach their personal heights. The great art is crated not through inspiration but thanks to the fumes of alcohol, the stench of sweat and accompanied by the tunes of “Tango Milonga” played on beat-up violin.
The parts that made the metaphysically shocking elements of the historical play are seen here “from the backstage” as an assembly of attraction, fight for survival, and a cynic play with the regime. The drama is filled with bitter irony about the Polish reality in the 1960s. Słobodzianek points out how the great theatrical avant-garde sprung from the crude socialism and the post-war trauma.
The lexical layer of the play is based on intentional, harsh dissonance. Słobodzianek mixes together three distinct worlds. First being the Young Poland, solemn, and rhythmic Wyspiański’s verse full of biblical and antique references. Next is a hermetic, intellectual, particular theatrical newspeak full of slogans about a “total act” or “transgression”. The third element is the brutal “language of the backstage” – private conversations of the actors, filled with colloquialisms and the crude reality of Poland at the time. This linguistic melting pot, completed by the French of the assistant – Eugeniusz, creates an effect of grotesque and highlights the divide between sublime idea of high art and the prosaic, material reality of its makers.
Our Acropolis is a tribute given not only to Grotowski but rather his theatre and his actors – a “cannon fodder” of the theatrical revolution. Słobodzianek shows that the masterpiece that became a staple in our history of theatre textbooks was made out of the “mud” of human imperfection, fear, poverty, and desperation.