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The Libido of Transformation

The Olsztyn production treats Anastazja P./Marzena Domaros not as a riddle of scandal but as a figure through whom the unruly political, erotic, and class desires of Poland’s transformation are exposed.

Libido transformacji
Teatr · 15 January 2026 · read the original in PL →

The Libido of TransformationLibido transformacji

In the Olsztyn production, Marzena Domaros/Anastazja Potocka is our transformational Madame Bovary, her mind furnished not by Walter Scott but by Dynasty, glossy magazines, Harlequins, and folk fantasies of grand seigneurial life.

The cover of Anastazja P./Marzena Domaros’s Erotic Immunities showed a duvet being pulled back, with the edifice of the Sejm emerging from beneath it. In Jolanta Janiczak and Wiktor Rubin’s production, inspired by that book, a white duvet covers the stage of the Olsztyn theatre like a curtain. From behind it come shouts in which we recognize slogans from the campaign for the first-term Sejm (1991-1993) - "peasants to Wiejska!" - while on the curtain appears a huge red inscription, "Because you’re worth it," one of the many advertising slogans that, in the early 1990s, tried to catch television viewers’ attention in the break between the main news bulletin and the eight o’clock film.

Marketing from that period - whether it was selling political labels or washing powders - appealed to the same thing: the desires and aspirations awakened by the new market and democratic reality, when on the one hand the old, familiar world of the Polish People’s Republic was collapsing into rubble, condemning whole social groups to years of pauperization, and on the other everything seemed possible, millions believed that the "weather for the rich" had come for them as well. The production speaks not only - as its subtitle promises - about "sex and transformation," but tries to grasp the whole tangled mass of transformational desires, to reveal the pulsing libido of the early 1990s in all its manifestations: political, cultural, erotic; especially those whose excess now seems particularly grotesque.

A Dream of the NinetiesSen o najntisach

When the curtain rises, we see the chamber of the Sejm. It will be the stage on which the drama of transformational desires unfolds. The politicians seated there are presented by first name only: Olek, Leszek, Wladek, Stefan. Yet we easily recognize the figures from the 1990s who inspired them; we can guess whom the character of Jacek in a denim shirt invokes, or Antoni with his obsession with files.

The Olsztyn production does not indulge in speculation about "who really stood behind Anastazja P." It is not interested in hypotheses about Polish or foreign services that might have been steering the young woman, or even in whether Anastazja/Marzena is telling the truth. In the first scene, before we even see the Sejm, we glimpse for a moment the "real heroine": a girl from Zblewo who dreams of breaking out of a Pomeranian village and, by way of Gdansk, makes it to Warsaw, leaving her own little daughter to be raised by her parents. For the creators of the production, however, the "truth about Anastazja/Marzena" lies not in the place from which she began her journey, but in the fantasy, full of absurd aristocratic and worldly pretensions, that put the girl at the very center of the greatest political-sexual scandal of the early 1990s.

The whole production looks like a dream about an era that might have come to its makers as they fell asleep at dawn after a long night of research. Scenes reconstructing Potocka/Domaros’s narrative sit alongside fanciful eruptions of Janiczak and Rubin’s imagination. From the stage come dialogues we might associate with quite recent debates over the meaning of sexual consent. A cross hangs on the wall of the stage Sejm, although it was not hung there until 1997 - yet it has stamped itself so deeply on our consciousness that it is hard to imagine the beginnings of our democracy without that symbol’s dominance.

The actors step out of role and begin speaking for themselves. In one of the funniest scenes, the actor recreating a situation described in the book - an MP telephones a bishop to obtain a dispensation for revelry during Lent - speaks on the phone with a "spiritual emergency service" about nudity in the theatre from the point of view of Church teaching. Actresses with pasted-on moustaches play men, while all the politicians appear throughout without trousers, which intensifies the oneiric, unreal, grotesque effect.

The Meaning of ExposureSens obnażenia

"There has not been such a hit for a long time. Queues forming outside bookshops long before they open are a sight booksellers have not seen for several years. Secondhand dealers say that since Urban’s Alphabet nothing has sold so well" - this is how Gazeta Stoleczna reported on the sales success of Erotic Immunities. In the end, more than 400,000 copies were reportedly sold, which would be an impressive result even today.

What accounted for the popularity of Potocka/Domaros’s publication? Sex, especially in combination with politics, always sells, and the book entered the market at a time when there were not yet tabloids industrially trawling for political scandals. The publication symbolically pulled down the trousers of politicians from every party, exposed their hypocrisy, showed them as grotesque erotomaniacs unable to control their lusts - something a society weary of the pretensions of the new political elite evidently needed.

The historian of the Third Republic Antoni Dudek, asked years later about Erotic Immunities, stated that "the political significance of this affair lies in the fact that it became part of a series of scandals that helped discredit the entire first-term Sejm." The key phrase here is "one of many scandals." The first-term Sejm did not need Anastazja P. in order to discredit itself. An electoral law with no thresholds produced a Sejm in which nearly 30 parties and political groupings sat, which in practice made it impossible to build any stable majority. The first government formed in that Sejm - Olszewski’s - fell as a result of the "night of the files," traces of which we can in fact see in the Olsztyn production. Olszewski’s successor, Waldemar Pawlak, was unable to form a government. When the next cabinet, Hanna Suchocka’s, fell, Lech Walesa dissolved the Sejm.

Since then, Polish politics has become significantly more professionalized. The chaotic party system, composed of a swarm of micro-groupings - including formations such as the Polish Beer-Lovers’ Party - was eventually replaced by a duopoly dominated by Tusk and Kaczynski. At the same time, the story Janiczak and Rubin present stubbornly refuses to become the past. The politicians who served as inspiration for the stage characters continue to play public roles - if not as active parliamentarians, then as opinion-forming commentators. Files, agents, abortion, the place of the Church in a democratic state all remain objects of emotionally charged political disputes.

In the new logic of polarization, it is increasingly difficult for politicians to compromise themselves - to a certain extent they can always count on the loyalty of "their" tribe - while at the same time neither side expects much from the political class or anticipates anything good from politicians. What we see in the production does not so much "expose" some hidden truth about politics or the recent political history of the Third Republic as confirm what we have long thought about them, with a more or less cynical resignation. The real exposure takes place elsewhere: in the emotional portrait of the heroine, in the way the production shows her naivety, sensitivity, lustfulness, ambition, and helplessness.

Miss A.’s Lovers

In the mid-1990s song Miss S.’s Lovers, Jacek Kaczmarski looks at contemporary politics as the story of the stormy, unhappy relationships between the title heroine - representing the society of the transformation era - and her successive suitors, politicians competing for the electorate’s favor. The "intellectuals" - Tadeusz Mazowiecki’s government - "would keep discoursing on ideals," neglecting the material needs of the woman they desired. The "businessmen" - Jan Krzysztof Bielecki and the Liberal Democratic Congress - "treated her shortly / as though she had already been divorced many times." The "judge of consciences" - Macierewicz - "rummaged too much in her life story." Ultimately, discouraged by one Solidarity suitor after another, "Miss S." chooses "the one who once tormented her" - the post-communists from the Democratic Left Alliance and the Polish People’s Party.

A similar pattern is replayed in the production. Successive political suitors seek the favor of "Miss A.," trying to seduce her and drag her into bed. At the same time, it is sometimes not quite clear whether they are trying to seduce Anastazja/Marzena or the electorate; whether they are courting a desirable woman or voters’ ballots. In several scenes the production offers a fascinating interpretation of the political languages of the 1990s, presenting them as proposals for where to "invest" the era’s surplus libidinal energy, exploding from every orifice.

Antoni, with an inquisitor’s passion, wants to redirect it toward settling accounts with the old system, toward revenge on its functionaries. Jacek spins visions of a utopia guaranteeing every possible kind of justice, including sexual justice. The moustachioed liberal Janusz wants to harness transformational energies to work for a growing GDP. When, in one scene, Anastazja/Marzena finds herself alone with him, she declares that she feels completely safe: Janusz is aroused not by the body of the woman accompanying him, but by the vision of skyscrapers rising in the center of Warsaw like stock-market charts in a great bull market.

All the political romances end for the heroine of the production in greater or lesser disappointment. Anastazja/Marzena can serve here as a figure representing the experience of the whole society of the 1990s, "falling in love" and "falling out of love" with successive politicians, becoming disappointed in turn with Mazowiecki and Walesa, with post-Solidarity and with the post-communists.

The heroine’s personal story also expresses a social truth: the brutal collision between her false, invented aristocratic pretensions and dreams of the great world, and reality. For the story of Anastazja/Marzena can be seen as the story of a failed class ascent in the era of transformation. After the publication of Erotic Immunities, Wlodzimierz Kalicki wrote in Gazeta Wyborcza of the book’s heroine and narrator: "In her fate, gestures, and manner of speech there is simply the truth about many girls and boys from the deep provinces who, without particular regret, said goodbye to their family homes, went to schools in larger towns, and finally sought their life chance at university." In the times of the Polish People’s Republic, the journalist continues, such people would have made careers in official student organizations, neglecting their studies but preparing a comfortable future for themselves. "In our none-too-normal times," Kalicki concludes, "when the qualifications of a club manager or organizer of student hiking trips are enough to lead political parties [...] Marzena-Anastazja, instead of becoming the star of a dormitory, became a countess, a French correspondent, and the heroine of the Sejm."

Today, such a portrayal of the heroine would be regarded as strongly classist; then, the standard was different. Unlike many student activists from the Polish People’s Republic, Anastazja/Marzena ultimately does not succeed. The book’s sales success does allow her to pay off the debts incurred on the road to the Sejm, but the capital of visibility is no longer enough for a political career or a lasting celebrity status. The transformation promised that anyone could reinvent themselves and be whoever they wished, if only they showed the right cunning, ruthlessness, determination, diligence, talent - in the story of Anastazja/Marzena, we see that nevertheless not everyone could.

The Transformational Madame BovaryTransformacyjna pani Bovary

The heroine of the Olsztyn production resembles one more figure: Madame Bovary. Flaubert’s protagonist, the wife of a provincial doctor, immersed in the romances of Walter Scott and unable to distinguish art from life, enters into a destructive affair with an aristocrat. Marzena Domaros/Anastazja Potocka is our transformational Madame Bovary, her mind furnished not by Scott but by Dynasty, glossy magazines, Harlequins, and folk fantasies of grand seigneurial life.

Flaubert’s novel would not be a masterpiece if the writer had created a satire of his heroine or a morality tale condemning her, if he had been unable to sympathize with her desires, however naive and mawkish they might be. In the Olsztyn production, the creators show, on the one hand, all the stupidity, ugliness, predation, homespun vulgarity, and trashiness of the 1990s; on the other, they are able to look with empathy at the heroine’s dreams - something that would not have been possible without Milena Gauer’s excellent performance, deserving special distinction in a very good cast.

In the middle of the production, we see a projection showing a film shot outside the contemporary Sejm. A naked Anastazja/Marzena tries to enter its grounds. She is stopped by a menacing-looking guard. The chaos of the transformation, the times when such figures could move freely through the Sejm, are long over. Yet their specters do not cease to haunt us. It was their desires that shaped today’s Poland.

Y done · S save · G great · B bad · N not for me