Letter: Andrzej Wajda obituary

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/oct/14/letter-andrzej-wajda-obituary

Version 0 of 1.

Andrzej Wajda was a creative and imaginative theatre director.

I met him at the Aldwych theatre in 1970, when I was a young, hopeful actor. I had worked in the émigré Polish theatre in London and was about to go to Bristol to do a two-year drama course at the Old Vic theatre school. Wajda had been invited to the World Theatre festival season that year. He brought a successful and unconventional production of Stanisław Wyspiański’s Wesele (The Wedding), which had been in repertoire at the Stary theatre in Kraków since 1963, and of which he later made a film.

As the play was in Polish, a reader of the play in English was needed for audience members who used headphones during the performance, so I went along to the Aldwych to meet Wajda and to see if I was capable of doing the job. He welcomed me graciously at the stage door and allowed me to sit with him in the balcony and watch a dress rehearsal of the play before the opening night.

The play was quite stark in its production and, as was the practice with a number of classical plays at this time, was done in an experimental manner, much like Peter Brook’s RSC A Midsummer Night’s Dream the same year.

His other successful theatre productions included Stanisława Przybyszewska’s The Danton Affair, which he subsequently made into the film Danton.

I did not get the job of reader. I was not experienced enough.