Dziecko w teatrze ― rekonesans

Abstrakt

A CHILD IN THE THEATRE — RECONNAISSANCE

The article deals with the question of the presence of a child as a character on the stage in the Polish repertoire theatre. In the past, generally speaking children characters were played by adult actresses/actors. This kind of situation was hardly acceptable in the cinema, where ― from the very beginning ― children characters were performed by children, e.g. Jackie Coogan in Chaplin’s The Kid or Shirley Temple in Butler’s Little Colonel. One can assume that in the theatre ― according to the convention ― an adult actress/actor as a child was hardly visible, the audience just saw a child. The real presence of children on the stage destroyed traditional dimension: on the one hand ― there is a represented world, on the other ― a representing one. A child is present on the borders of these two worlds. Taking into account a few appropriate Polish theatre productions prepared during the last twelve years, the article tries to prove that a child on the stage has a performative as well as a subversive potential. The Jungian Analytical Psychology and the performative turn over in the 1960s are good contexts for the conclusions.