Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre: Cricot 2, The Dead Class and the Theatre of Death

Tadeusz Kantor’s theatre is remembered for one image: old men squeezed into school desks, each holding a dummy of the child he used to be, while the director himself stands among them on stage. Kantor was a painter first, and his Cricot 2 company in Kraków moved through a new idea, and a new manifesto, every few years.

A painter who made theatre in occupied Kraków

Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater describes Kantor as “An avant-garde artist, painter, draughtsman, art theoretician, stage designer and director, author of happenings.” He was born in Wielopole Skrzyńskie in 1915 and died in Kraków in 1990.

His theatre began in hiding. “During the German occupation he founded the experimental Underground Independent Theatre, where he staged clandestine productions of Juliusz Słowacki’s Balladyna (1943) and Stanisław Wyspiański’s The Return of Odysseus (1944),” the Gorki Theater’s biography of Tadeusz Kantor records. La MaMa in New York adds that these shows were “performed in private homes.”

Cricot 2 and a manifesto for every stage

In 1955, drawing on the pre-war Cricot artists’ theatre, Kantor founded Cricot 2 with Maria Jarema and Kazimierz Mikulski. The writer Mischa Twitchin notes that “Each stage of his theatre was accompanied by a new manifesto.”

There was emballage, which La MaMa describes as “packaging and stripping actors and objects of any recognizable form,” and a Zero Theatre “completely devoid of any action or events.” From 1965 Kantor also staged happenings, such as The Anatomy Lesson after Rembrandt (1968).

Year	Stage, in Kantor’s terms	Production
1943-44	Underground Independent Theatre	Balladyna; The Return of Odysseus
1955	Cricot 2 founded	With Maria Jarema and Kazimierz Mikulski
1956	Autonomous Theatre	The Cuttlefish
1961	Informel Theatre	The Country House
1963	Zero Theatre	The Madman and the Nun
1967	Happening Theatre	The Water Hen
1973	Impossible Theatre	Lovelies and Dowdies
1975	Theatre of Death	The Dead Class
1980	The memory plays	Wielopole, Wielopole (Florence)
1988	The memory plays	I Shall Never Return (Milan)
1991	Posthumous premiere	Today Is My Birthday

The Dead Class and the Theatre of Death

“In 1975, he published the manifesto of his Theatre of Death; its corollary was his world-acclaimed production The Dead Class,” the Gorki biography says. La MaMa describes the Theatre of Death as work that “explored the persistence of memory and its interplay with time and the construction of history.”

Old men, school desks and their child selves

Culture.pl sets the scene: “The main characters of the play are elderly men who return to their school desks after many years, carrying backpacks and mannequins.” The mannequins are figures of the men’s childhoods, and the entrance comes to a recurring tune, the François Waltz.

“A lesson takes place, and the senior pupils make faces, crying out and shoving one another,” the same account goes on. Scenes from the classroom blend with the outbreak of the First World War and with fragments of Witkacy’s play Tumor Brainowicz. Norman Kleeblatt of the Jewish Museum called it a “harrowing performance” in which “live actors carried effigies of their younger selves.”

Culture.pl says The Dead Class “has been performed more than 1,500 times, in many countries around the world,” and that Newsweek named it the best play in the world in 1976.

The mannequin as the actor’s model

For Twitchin, “Kantor’s own contribution to the theory of the actor was to propose the mannequin as the actor’s model.” UNIMA’s puppetry encyclopedia traces the idea to Bruno Schulz’s The Cinnamon Shops: Kantor “always used mannequins as doubles of live actors,” and theorised the “bio-object”, a joining of live and artificial elements. That is why object theatre, which claims Kantor as an ancestor, still cites him.

The director in the room

In The Dead Class, La MaMa says, “Kantor himself took the role of a master of ceremonies, conducting his actors.” Twitchin describes how “Kantor would occasionally address one of the actors, or indicate with a gesture for the music to become louder or quieter.”

Kantor explained the habit himself, in words Twitchin quotes in Total Theatre magazine’s essay on Kantor’s theatre of memory: “The director should be hidden, he is not needed on stage. But I stand there.” His presence was meant to break the spell, as if to say, in his phrase, “I do not like that.”

Wielopole, Wielopole and the last plays

“Wielopole, Wielopole premiered in Florence on 23rd June 1980.” Its poster showed the parish church of his hometown, and its action unfolds in a “Room of Imagination” where family life, wartime memories and scenes of Christ’s passion overlap. Kantor’s own rule was blunt: “Life is sufficient material for making theatre.”

Let the Artists Die followed in 1985, and in I Shall Never Return (Milan, 1988) Kantor for the first time became “a fully-fledged actor.” He died in Kraków on 8 December 1990, after one of the last rehearsals of Today Is My Birthday. When it opened in January 1991, “an empty chair belonging to Kantor played a role in the performance,” and Cricot 2 soon stopped performing.

Kantor in America and on tour

The Dead Class reached Edinburgh College of Art in August 1976, where Irving Wardle reviewed it for The Times. In New York, La MaMa says it “is proud to have presented his work to New York audiences over two decades.” In July 1984 Cricot 2 brought The Dead Class and Wielopole, Wielopole to the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles.

A Bay Area contrast: the director in plain view or in the headphones

No source records any meeting between Kantor and Chris Hardman; the link is a critic’s sentence. In a 1990 essay on experimental theatre, Theodore Shank grouped “Painters and sculptors such as Robert Wilson, Tadeusz Kantor, Laura Farabough, Chris Hardman, and Alan Finneran” as artists used to total artistic responsibility. Hardman had studied sculpture at Goddard College, and Antenna’s Amnesia played the same Los Angeles festival the week after Cricot 2.

The two answered the director’s question in opposite ways. Kantor stood in plain view, while Hardman’s audiences walked his sets one at a time, guided by a recorded voice. Kantor’s mannequins doubled his actors, and Antenna’s plywood look-alikes in Moving Sculptures (1982) doubled Marin residents. Both belong to the story of theater without actors, where objects and recordings carry the show.

Aspect	Kantor and Cricot 2	Hardman and Antenna
Training	Painter and stage designer	Studied sculpture at Goddard College
Director’s place	On stage, conducting	Off stage, a voice on tape
Audience	Seated, watching	Walking through the set
Doubles	Mannequins of the actors’ child selves	Plywood figures of local residents
Source of memory	Kantor’s own life	Other people’s recorded voices

Frequently asked questions

For two other stages that broke the rules in very different ways, read about Laterna Magika in Prague, where actors played with film and La Fura dels Baus, the Catalan company that chased its audience. The Antenna Theater chronology lists Amnesia, Moving Sculptures and Etiquette.