Jerzy Jarocki’s Afterlife in The Case According to Samuel Zborowski by Julius Slowacki

In the article the author presents an outstanding director’s Jerzy Jarocki’s spectacle, produced at the
National Theatre in Warsaw, entitled The Case According to “Samuel Zborowski” by Julius Slowacki. The
action of the spectacle takes place in the reality and in dreams; in heaven, hell, at the bottom of the
ocean. At the time of the birth of life on Earth and also in 1584, when in front of one of the Wawel gates
a Cossack hetman — Samuel Zborowski — is being executed. The director, following the Slowacki’s
texts, used a fragmentary composition of the drama and upon it he built the original in style Story of
a Polish Collective Madness. According to Juliusz Kleiner Samuel Zborowski is the strangest poem in the
Polish literature being a conglomeration of not connected, even contradictory scenes. Their combination
into a cohesive whole was possible only within the framework of poetics and the logic of dreams. Jarocki’s
directive/adaptive strategy argues that dense of meanings, oneiric text may be legible today, consistent
and continually valid. Jarocki’s semantically open spectacle, embedded in the poetics of sleep, turned out
to be not only attractive, but also stimulative.