Freedom, History, Pacifism: Stanisław Hadyna’s Playwrighting

Włodzimierz Szturc

Abstract

This article discusses the dramatic output of Stanisław Hadyna, a folklorist and composer, known above all as the founder of Śląsk Song and Dance Ensemble. The author analyzes Hadyna’s four unpublished dramas, written in 1969–1976, originally in English, then in Polish, and awarded at UNESCO competitions. Their protagonists include Thomas Paine, Martin Luther King, and Mahatma Gandhi. The article also draws on the documentation of the staging of one of these plays, Declaration 76, at Krakow’s Juliusz Słowacki Theatre in 1977; during the decline of the communist Polish People’s Republic, it carried a courageous civic message. The author presents Hadyna’s works as dramas of freedom and oppression in different historical periods; he interprets them as letters from a besieged world and, at the same time, as poetic treatises on the experience of loneliness and separateness. He emphasizes the homiletic dimension of these works, which are constructed as sermons written for many voices, and points to the Lutheran provenance of Hadyna’s evangelical-spiritual vision of man. Hermeneutical analyses highlight the eclectic nature of the playwright’s dramaturgical solutions and interpret his use of various theatrical and performative conventions (mystery play, tableau vivant, epic theater, happening) and religious traditions.