This essay discusses two post-1989 adaptations of Shakespeare's The Tempest in the Polish theatre that use text distortion, fragmentation, and intertextuality as ways of addressing the difficult heritage of World War II. Applying the notion of migratory aesthetics in a theatrical context mobilises the interpretive potential of contemporary theatre as an act of recalling a traumatic past. Generational trauma is addressed and processed through the productions of Krzysztof Warlikowski's Burza (2003) and Paweł Miśkiewicz's more recent Burza Williama Szekpira (2018). These two productions are analysed according to strategies typical of traumatic recall, i.e., dissociation and repression, to reflect on the dystopian elements in The Tempest, aspects already addressed by Jan Kott in his pre-1989 interpretations of the play.

This article details two ways of conceptualizing the experience of the past by the characters in Olga Tokarczuk’s prose fiction, which assume the form of a personal micronarration and the form of a microtheater. Utilizing Frank Ankersmit’s categorization of symbolic (metaphorical) signs and indexical (metonymic) signs, the article draws attention to the coexistence of different orders of speaking and staging (theatricalizing) history in the works under discussion. What is emphasized is the fundamental but ambivalent role of the body that as the vehicle of memory and an object of various processes of appropriation and reification. Such an ambiguous status of the body is underlined by the usage of the motifs often present in Olga Tokarczuk’s writing: those of the doll/puppet and of miniaturization. These speak to the desire to go beyond the anthropocentric vision of the human and the world, life and death, agency, and passivity.

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This paper provides a brief outline of the reception history of Othello in Poland, focusing on the way the character of the Moor of Venice is constructed on the page, in the first-published nineteenth-century translation by Józef Paszkowski, and on the stage, in two twentieth-century theatrical adaptations that provide contrasting images of Othello: 1981/1984 televised Othello, dir. Andrzej Chrzanowski and the 2011 production of African Tales Based on Shakespeare, in which Othello’s part is played by Adam Ferency (dir. Krzysztof Warlikowski). The paper details the political and social contexts of each of these stage adaptations, as both of them employ brownface and blackface to visualise Othello’s “political colour.” The function of blackface and brownface is radically different in these two productions: in the 1981/1984 Othello brownface works to underline Othello’s overall sense of alienation, while strengthening the existing stereotypes surrounding black as a skin colour, while the 2011 staging makes the use of blackface as an artificial trick of the actor’s trade, potentially unmasking the constructedness of racial prejudices, while confronting the audience with their own pernicious racial stereotypes.

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