„Odys jestem, wracam spod Troi…” – Tadeusz Kantor i jego recepcja Odysei

Abstract

“Odysseus I am, returning from Troy…” : Tadeusz Kantor and his perception of the ‘Odyssey’

The ‘Odyssey’ is the central myth of our/European spiritual path. In 1944, in German-occupied Kraków, Tadeusz Kantor staged the drama by Stanisław Wyspiański (1869–1907) The Return of Odysseus. Kantor planned to stage this drama at the Railway Station i Kraków, crowded with German soldiers and police. At that time the Nazis were in full retreat, and Kantor envisaged Odysseus as a soldier coming home by train following the German surrender at Stalingrad. The timeliness of The Return of Odysseus in 1943–1944 was confirmed by reports of successive defeats of German troops. Neglected, dirty, populated with refugees and homeless people, the train station – in Kantor‘s vision – became the only possible place in which the individual one can mingle with the anonymous crowd while remaining anonymous himself. The artist depicted Odysseus as the embodiment of the war criminal, a traitor, an informer – as both perpetrator and victim. In the reality of war, ”the era of the crematorium ovens” there is no Ithaca, there is no reality – the world has been reduced to reality of the lowest order; it has become a trap. An important object was a dummy cannon barrel. The illusion of theater, its safe ”conventionality”, lost its raison d’être under conditions of the occupation. Ulysses/Odysseus must truly return. Kantor‘s idea was to make the theatrical drama reflect the drama of life, to make the actors’ experience the same as that of the audience. The return of Odysseus, according to Kantor, was not meant to ”detach” from reality, sending the viewer back to the world of the Homeric hero – it was an ethical and artistic response to current traumatic events. Kantor was to return to his wartime Odysseus in his Theatre of Death, entrusting him with the roles of the inn-keeper (The Dead Class), the waiters-turned-guards, the armored violinists and the recruits (Wielopole, Wielopole), and The Great Geometer (Where Are the Snows of Yesteryear).