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Behind the Arras, through the Wall: Wajda's ‘Hamlet’ in Krakow, 1989

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Tony Howard
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Abstract

The list of female Hamlets, in which the most familiar names range from Siddons and Bemhardt to Frances de la Tour, is extraordinarily long. Tony Howard here discusses a great but much less familiar production featuring a female Hamlet, both in its socio-political context and in the context of the earlier work of its director, Andrzej Wajda. Teresa Budzisz-Krzyzanowska was Wajda's Hamlet in Hamlet (IV) – which, momentously, opened in Poland in 1989, just as the Solidarity-led opposition came to power. Tony Howard, who is writing a cultural history of the phenomenon of female Hamlets, teaches at Warwick University. He has written for NTQ on Polish subjects ranging from the Marxist work of Jozef Szajna to such oppositional groups as Theatre of the Eighth Day and

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 13 , Issue 49 , February 1997 , pp. 53 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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References

Notes

Quotations from Teresa Budzisz-Krzyzanowska are from an interview with her in Warsaw, translated by Barbara Plebanek, who made this essay possible. Quotations from Wajda are taken from his book, A Double Vision (London, 1990), and from the Stary programme for Hamlet (IV), which printed extracts from his correspondence with Baranczak. The production was received at first with little enthusiasm in Poland, perhaps because the political events were so attention-seizing – though Dialog magazine published an extensive analysis (No. 6, 1990) – but it has slowly, and rightfully, assumed the status of a classic.