Towards a Poor Theatre

Published in 1968 and edited by Eugenio Barba, this collection of essays, interviews, and training documents presents the theatrical philosophy and practical methodology of Polish director Jerzy Grotowski. Grotowski's Theatre Laboratory, founded in 1959 in the small city of Opole and later relocated to Wrocław, became one of the most influential sources of innovation in modern theatre. The book assembles texts spanning roughly a decade of work with a small permanent company, tracing the development of what Grotowski calls the "poor theatre": a radical stripping away of everything inessential to the theatrical event.

In a preface, the British director Peter Brook establishes Grotowski's singular importance, asserting that no one since Konstantin Stanislavski, the foundational figure of modern actor training, has investigated the nature of acting as deeply. Brook describes the Theatre Laboratory as a genuine research center and recounts inviting Grotowski to work with his own company for two weeks, an experience that produced a series of "shocks" (11) for each actor: confronting personal evasions, sensing untapped resources, and questioning why one acts at all. Brook clarifies that for Grotowski, acting is not an end in itself but "a vehicle" (12), a way of life rooted in a tradition Brook describes as Catholic or anti-Catholic.

The title essay, "Towards a Poor Theatre," lays out Grotowski's foundational argument. Rather than borrowing eclectically from other art forms, the Theatre Laboratory seeks to isolate what is distinctively theatre. Through systematic elimination, Grotowski determines that theatre can exist without makeup, costumes, scenography, a separate stage, lighting, or sound effects, but it cannot exist without the live relationship between actor and spectator, which he terms "perceptual, direct, 'live' communion" (19). He contrasts this approach with the "Rich Theatre," a model dependent on "artistic kleptomania" (19) that synthesizes literature, sculpture, painting, and technology into hybrid spectacles yet remains permanently inferior to film and television. Grotowski proposes poverty as the theatre's strength: for each production, a new spatial arrangement is designed for actors and spectators, enabling infinite variation in their relationship.

Central to Grotowski's method is the concept of the via negativa, a Latin term meaning "negative way." Rather than accumulating skills, the actor's training aims to eradicate the organism's resistances and blocks so that inner impulse and outer reaction become simultaneous. Grotowski draws on wide-ranging influences, from Stanislavski's physical actions to Indian Kathakali dance-drama to Japanese No theatre, but insists his method is not a combination of borrowed techniques. Instead, it concentrates on the actor's "ripening," a total stripping down and laying bare of intimacy that he calls "translumination" (16), a state in which the actor's inner life shines through the body as if illuminated from within. Formal composition and disciplined structure do not limit this spiritual process but actively lead to it; form acts as "a baited trap" (17) to which the inner process responds.

In "The Theatre's New Testament," a 1964 interview with Barba, Grotowski distinguishes between the "courtesan actor," who accumulates an arsenal of tricks and clichés, and the "holy actor," who undertakes self-penetration and self-sacrifice through elimination. The holy actor must construct a personal "psycho-analytic language of sounds and gestures" (35), developing extraordinary vocal and physical capacities, including the exploitation of resonators, areas of the body that amplify and color vocal sound. The actor uses the role not as a character to inhabit but as a "surgeon's scalpel" (37) for self-dissection. Grotowski specifies that his intended audience consists of spectators with genuine spiritual needs who wish to analyze themselves through confrontation with the performance, and argues that the theatre must attack shared mythic material to create common ground between actor and spectator.

In "Theatre is an Encounter," a 1967 interview, Grotowski asserts that the core of theatre is not the literary text but the encounter between creative people and between performers and text. Great texts function as catalysts that "open doors" (57), setting in motion the machinery of self-awareness. Grotowski explains his preference for texts from the great tradition, such as those by Polish romantic poets, Marlowe, and Calderon, as voices of ancestors that permit a confrontation between past generations' beliefs and present-day experience.

Three production analyses demonstrate these principles in practice. Ludwik Flaszen, the Theatre Laboratory's literary adviser, describes the production of Stanisław Wyspiański's Akropolis, in which the original drama's setting in Cracow cathedral is transposed to a concentration camp. The actors build "an absurd civilization; a civilization of gas chambers" (64) from metallic junk, while biblical and Homeric scenes become the desperate fantasies of inmates. Barba's account of Dr Faustus describes a montage of Marlowe's text in which Faustus, interpreted as a saint rebelling against God, offers a public confession structured as a last supper. Flaszen's introduction to The Constant Prince, based on Calderon's text in Juliusz Słowacki's Polish transcription, describes a production in which Ryszard Cieslak, Grotowski's closest collaborator, opposes his persecutors with passivity and kindness, achieving an ecstasy through suffering that critic Josef Kelera describes as "a state of grace" (89).

In "He Wasn't Entirely Himself," Grotowski offers an extended assessment of Antonin Artaud, the French theatre theorist whose concept of the "theatre of cruelty" had become widely influential. Grotowski credits Artaud with prophetic intuitions but argues that Artaud left no practical technique, only metaphors. He diagnoses Artaud's limitation through Artaud's own words, "I am not entirely myself" (123), and proposes his alternative: the "total act," in which the actor's sincerity is modeled in the living organism, ordered and brought to consciousness without dissolving into chaos.

Two chapters document the Theatre Laboratory's training exercises across different periods. The 1959 to 1962 exercises detail progressive physical work, plastic exercises based on opposing vectors and personal associations, facial-mask exercises, and extensive vocal training addressing respiration, resonators, and diction. Grotowski's introductory note explains that this period sought a "positive technique" but later evolved toward the via negativa, with exercises becoming pretexts for discovering individual obstacles rather than answering practical questions. The 1966 training, recorded by Franz Marijnen, shows this evolution. Grotowski articulates a fundamental rule reversing conventional practice: "First you bang on the table and afterwards you shout!" (183). Bodily activity must precede vocal expression.

"The Actor's Technique" and "Skara Speech" distill these ideas into practical advice. Grotowski insists that associations are not intellectual thoughts but physical returns to precise memories: "It is our skin which has not forgotten, our eyes which have not forgotten" (218). He warns against "publicotropism" (242), a term from the Polish theatre artist Juliusz Osterwa for the actor's orientation toward audience approval, identifying it as the artist's worst enemy.

In "American Encounter," a 1967 interview in New York, Grotowski addresses creative ethics and traces the development of the exercises plastiques, psycho-physical movement exercises, from their origins in yoga, which proved too introverted for actors, through the discovery that physical elements could be transformed into elements of human contact. He describes how the actor, working through relationships with others, eventually discovers the "secure partner" (247), a special being before whom the actor reveals the most personal truths.

The book closes with "Statement of Principles," written for internal use within the Theatre Laboratory. Grotowski diagnoses modern civilization as split between intellect and instinct and positions theatre as an opportunity for integration. He defines the actor's total act as the paradoxical act of opening up rather than closing in, requiring not exhibitionistic courage but "the courage of the defenseless, the courage to reveal himself" (257). Practical rules include absolute discretion about colleagues' intimate creative work, prohibition against private exploitation of any element from the creative process, and daily physical readiness. Grotowski defines the method not as a prescription but as a point of orientation, requiring each participant to form a personal variation open to risks and ongoing search.