Born in 1960, he was educated in the theater and worked as a seasonal laborer; he recalls being an activist for the Independent Student Group and working as a journalist. In other words: a Polish intellectual whose youth was spent during the People’s Republic Era, and who entered adulthood after the system change. Small wonder that the main subject of his writing is Poland. Yet it is remarkable indeed that it is equally grounded in the surroundings of the contemporary Pole as it is in the universal human psyche.

Tomczyk began with film scripts, short prose and opinion pieces, and went on to write for the stage, without abandoning television (series and programs) and radio. It was only with his multiple-award-winning drama Vampire in 2002, and above all, with his famous Nuremberg of 2005, that the critics began placing him among Poland’s leading contemporary playwrights.

Vampire describes the case of a murderer from Zagłębie who gained notoriety in the People’s Republic era. An innocent man was sentenced in his place, even though the militia found the real culprit. We might begin to suspect that we are in the world of Sławomir Mrożek’s farce The Police, as indeed, we are dealing with justifying investigation procedures instead of seeking the murderer. But this drama gains a great deal in its formal, metatheatrical complications. The play is performed under the supervision of the Conferencier, who declares himself to be the true culprit of both the staged and real crimes, and is thus a real murderer (but in a theatrical sense!). This great manipulator will himself be manipulated, however, as the whole intrigue proves itself to be a comic and terrifying game of unidentified forces.

Another drama about manipulation and the obsession to rule others’ lives is Nuremberg, which is more serious in content yet more formally modest. It is simply a long conversation between two people at a table, in a small apartment. On the one hand we have the demonic, cold-blooded, and seemingly humble Colonel Kołodziej, on the other, the well-prepared, though perhaps naive journalist Hanka. The aging serviceman would like to join sincere patriotism with cynical realism; in the former he sees a chance for rehabilitation, the other he uses to justify his behavior. The modern and carefree journalist comes to accept the moral ambivalence of the world, thus revising her views on her own life.

In this transformation is the core of the concept behind Nuremberg, a drama about untried culprits who were victims, and of victims with soiled consciences. This deeply pessimistic and essentially metaphysical view seems to prevail in the playwright’s world; it also seems to correspond to the dialogical sense in all of his works and to his ability to construct plots and psychologically complex protagonists, so rare in our present-day theater.

Though the author of the pathos-saturated Incas 1946 and the brilliant one-act A Fragment of the Larger Whole, Tomczyk also has a talent for satire. An example is The Engagement, a witty and insightful portrait of contemporary Poles. The author builds the action around preparations for the marriage of two young people from backgrounds with extremely different identities, views, and customs. Their families get into a conflict, naturally, though neither side is clearly in the right, which means that the viewer’s sympathies lie with all the characters. Altogether, things proceed rather predictably, even consciously formulaically, because the author is borrowing motifs we know from literature: from Revenge, from The Wedding, from Tango, from the Enlightenment comedies of manners, and from Pan Tadeusz.

Tomczyk’s last farce, Breakout, had its televised premiere in 2016, with a star-spangled cast. A Warsaw writer spoiled by easy fame and, as it turns out, a swindler, stops off in a small town, where he meets two attractive women and a mysterious Demiurge mechanic. The star’s cynical attitude, manifested as a worldly wisdom, meets unexpected resistance from the other participants in the debate on “how to live,” which is equal parts serious and ironic. The essence of the dramatic magic here will be, again, transformation and manipulation, now laced with lyricism and melancholia, and a Chekhovian sensual charm.

Tomczyk is influenced by the Polish school of political/philosophical drama, which looks at ideological quarrels through intimate conflicts. Romantic pathos brilliantly joins with the farcical form of dialogues in Interregnum, perhaps the author’s best-known work. It might be described as a road play, because it takes place, like the absurd Waiting for Godot, like the epic Mother Courage, like Sławomir Mrożek’s allegorical On Foot, during a flight from a country that has lived through a catastrophe. Naturally, its reference to the Smoleńsk airplane disaster is not the most important element in the play, it is merely a pretext to show a nation and a society in a state of disintegration, in a wasteland during an interregnum. The three “young educated city people” heading abroad stop at the home of a provincial family, which ultimately reveals itself to be a stylized restaurant. Here two Polands meet, two mindsets, two languages. Somewhat as in Gombrowicz’s Marriage, the arrogant overgrown boys show their contempt for the villagers using media-borrowed slang; then they decide to make the peasant a king, in order to seize control of him. They arrange a wedding and a coronation, theatricizing what has long been theatrical, involuntarily becoming dependent on the fiction they are creating themselves. The world of this story has all the hallmarks of a carnivalized revolt, the ruffled and strangely costumed protagonists recall the “poor mannequins” from Kantor’s theater, figures of a humanity devoid of spirit and reason.

Is this a morality play of a grotesque? Wojciech Tomczyk’s Poland, faithful to tradition and clownishly theatricizing modernity, deserves to be called the heart and mind of contemporary Europe, which no longer even believes in the reality of its own ruins.

Artur Grabowski