Artykuły

Lech Wałęsa, the legendary leader of the Solidarity movement which brought down Communism in Eastern Europe, and first President of an Independent Poland, was in attendance during a play based on his own past performed at the Wybrzeże Theater this past Sunday. The play was called "Wałęsa: A happy story made sad by its' own happiness"

"It's a very good thing that this play was made, that we are trying to understand our position, our behavior. I thank the actors and those who made this play a reality. I must say, with a frankness that is somewhat Bolshevik - this is very very far from my own personal views, from what we fought for, what we believed in and how we understood things," said Wałęsa after the play.

"In spite of this fact," the President continued, "I thank you for your effort, because there are many true elements to this play, and I'm quite surprised that you obviously worked off of some documentary materials that were very close to the truth, that you stuck with the facts albeit interpretted them very differently...My generation had a totally different understanding of those facts. I hope that this play doesn't give us the opinion of a bankrupt generation."

During a press conference prior to the performance, the former President admited that he was initially sceptical about the idea of putting on the play. "The Directors and those who proposed the idea were, however, so adament and convincing in their arguments, and that just threw my hands up and said - do what you want. As for the acting, I was surprised and I realized that they were right all along; the actors and the director - that it was possible to show this in an interesting way."

Commenting on the title, the former President said "It ended happily, because we have democracy, so our struggle was not in vein, but the effects of this democracy are unsatisfactory today, but these effects have their cause less in democracy than in particular people."

The action of the play takes place between the historic strikes at the Gdańsk Shipyard in 1980 and the beginning of the Round Table Discussions that brought on the beginnings of free government in 1989. Arkadiusz Brykalski played the historic leader of Solidarity.

The author of the play is the literary director Paweł Demirski, who says that "this is a story about Lech Wałęsa, about Solidarity, and through this story we show that, just as it was done 25 years ago, we must fight against the system today; that despite winning our freedom we still need real trade unions that fight for the dignity of the working classes and for dignified working conditions."

He added that Wałęsa is a hero in his play who "over the years has been put under tremendous pressure but always managed to overcome the problems he was faced with in a clever way."

Demirski also noted that "It pains me that such a beautiful thing from our history was destroyed by petty people. Solidarity was a beautiful thing, an unprecendented event in World History. Yet the ethics of Solidary came about because of marginal, yet extremely unwise decisions. The kind of decisions people make without thinking, as if hung over."