SOURCE: “Theatrical Reality in the Plays of Tadeusz Różewicz,” in Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 26, No. 4, Winter, 1982, pp. 447–59.

In the following essay, Filipowicz provides an overview of Różewicz's life and career.

Although Sławomir Mrożek is the best-known Polish dramatist in the West, it is Tadeusz Różewicz who has revolutionized post-war drama in Poland. Considered by many one of the outstanding avant-garde European poets and playwrights, Różewicz revolts in his plays against realistic psychology and the storytelling of conventional drama and uses the formal principles of construction found in modern poetry and art. He thus creates a fluid dramatic form, more open and loose than forms developed by causal and discursive dramaturgy, which is capable of reflecting his view of malleable human nature in a world of instability and endless flux.¹

A Polish Jew, Różewicz was born in 1921. From 1941 to 1945, he...