Krzysztof Warlikowski

Krzysztof Warlikowski left Poland to attend university in Paris, before returning to Warsaw to finish his studies. He began presenting his work as a director in the 1990s to growing recognition in Poland. Starting in the early 2000s, he started working on the international stage, notably by also directing operas. He presented his first show at the Festival d’Avignon with Hamlet in 2001, followed among others by Angels in America in 2007, (A)pollonia in 2009, and Kabaret warszawski in 2013. He is an emblematic figure of the post-communist Polish theatre. Invited to the Piccolo Teatro of Milan, directed at the time by Giorgio Strehler, he proposed an adaptation of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, before becoming interested in Dostoyevsky and Elias Canetti. Observing the Poles of his generation's relative loss of interest in the theatre, he launched himself into an approach that he would keep to more than ever: creating a theatre for his contemporaries, a theatre that questions, that disturbs, that takes hold of non-consensual societal themes. Working on the creations of Kafka, Shakespeare, Koltès, Gombrowicz, Sarah Kane, Hanoch Levin or Tony Kushner, he tackles supposedly taboo subjects that concern the intimate, sexuality, anti-Semitism, while inventing new forms of performance likely to re-establish the link between the public and the dramatic work. Going beyond the borders of his native Poland, he presents his shows in the four corners of a Europe, it too destabilized, turned upside-down, in which his questions find an immediate echo. From 2009, without abandoning the major playwrights who accompanied him at his beginnings, he started to work on shows made up of literary fragments taken from authors as different as Hannah Krall, Jonathan Littell or J.M. Coetzee and whom he associates with Euripides or Aeschylus.