SOURCE: “Tadeusz Różewicz's The Card Index: A New Beginning for Polish Drama,” in Modern Drama, Vol. XXVII, No. 3, September, 1984, pp. 395–408.

In the following essay, Filipowicz asserts that Różewicz's The Card Index exhibits an open dramaturgy and a rejection of literary conventions which have caused a strong impact on Polish drama.

The Card Index (Kartoteka) is the best known and most seminal of some fifteen full-length plays by Tadeusz Różewicz, foremost Polish poet and dramatist who has achieved an unimpeded style of his own.¹ Written in the late 1950s, when the arts in Eastern Europe were emerging from the dreary period of enforced socialist realism, The Card Index revolutionized Polish theatre by its radical concept of open dramaturgy, an approach which does not imitate or embellish life but creates a self-contained reality on stage. Using the formal principles of construction found in modern poetry, art, and...