Słavomir Mrozek
The lone Polish playwright on my list of great dramatic influences, Słavomir Mrozek (SWAVO-meer M’RO-shek) is the contemporary Georg Büchner, though he is a ripe old 78 years old today and will soon be leaving us, unfortunately. And like some others on my list, I am not that familiar with all of his work. But as I hope I have argued, one need not know everything about a person or their work to be moved deeply by it.
I’ve only read two of his plays: Tango and Vatslav. But both of these plays are revolutionary in the style of the theater of the absurd where characters are not so much people as collections of socially delineated norms and ideals to be ridiculed and torn down. Like Büchner, he exposes society’s ugly side. But he goes even further; he shows us that this ugly side is actually the side we all live in, not the nice one.
Though he uses biting humor and satire, his vision of society is a product of his own life under the Soviets. He is a quintessential Soviet-era Pole: biter, skeptical, sardonic, and unerringly practical.
Unfortunately, there is not much on the web about Mrozek.