The decade of the 1930s was a remarkable one in Poland—a time of triumph, turmoil, and turbulence. As Ivar Kreuger and Jeanne de la Motte: Two Plays by Jerzy Tepa demonstrates, it was also a surprisingly rich period in Polish literature. A number of exceptional dramatic works were written during those years, not only by such influential writers as Gombrowicz and Witkacy but also by dramatists whose names are not as well-known today, among them Jerzy Tepa.
Tepa’s second play, Ivar Kreuger (1934), met with similar success as his first and secured his literary reputation. Directed by the distinguished stage and radioplay director Wacław Radulski, Ivar Kreuger dramatized the life of fabled fraud and con man Ivar Kreuger, who perpetrated one of the largest financial hoaxes ever conceived. Innovative in its staging and its structure, Tepa’s self-titled “film-play” was—like Fräulein Doktor before it—a cautionary tale about the dangers of political opportunism.
Over the next few years, Tepa wrote other plays, the most important being Jeanne de la Motte (1937), a story of Revolutionary-era France that Tepa perceived as an analogue for the political situation in Europe and the rise of the Third Reich. The play was originally commissioned by the Théâtre L’Ódeon, but its production was halted by the outbreak of the war it had foreshadowed.
Yet, despite Tepa’s great theatrical success in the 1930s, none of his plays had been published in their entirety. (Fragments of Ivar Kreuger and Jeanne de la Motte were printed contemporaneously in the literary journals Fantana and Lwów Literacki, respectively.) Most of Tepa’s plays, in fact, were presumed to have been lost during the war years, as was the case with so much literature of the age. The recent rediscoveries of Ivar Kreuger and Jeanne de la Motte, the two plays that comprise the present volume, therefore allow a fascinating glimpse into a rich and vital period of Polish literary culture unfamiliar to most English readers and scholars. Ivar Kreuger and Jeanne de la Motte: Two Plays by Jerzy Tepa not only introduces Tepa and his work to new readers; it also confirms how he tapped into the concerns of his age to create true theatrical sensations and to become one of the leading voices of the Polish interwar era.
