They arrived in Western Australia in 1914 and visited the richest gold mines of the day at Kalgoolie. Then they traveled east to attend the Congress of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Adelaide, where Malinowski was to give a paper. News of the outbreak of hostilities in Europe reached them in Australia, and Witkiewicz found himself on the opposite side of the conflict to his friend, who was from a part of Poland controlled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Malinowski was formally interred as a hostile alien, although, in fact, he was able to continue his anthropological research based at Sydney University. He even married in Australian and started a family. Witkeiwicz, on the other hand, was a subject of the Russian Empire and he hastily arranged to return to Europe where he joined the Russian Imperial Army as an officer, to the exasperation of his father who died in 1915. Witkacy served in the elite Pavlovsky Guard and was seriously wounded. After the February 1917 Revolution he was briefly elected commander of his Battalion and was therefore in some danger as a tsarist officer after the October Revolution. Eventually in 1918 he was able to return to Poland. His troubled life now had a passionate direction: Art, and especially his Theory of Pure Form in the theatre.

To speak of life lived on the brink is something of a cliché, but for Witkacy it has an acute appropriateness. His play, The Metaphysics of a Two-headed Calf, was written in 1921, in the midst of a remarkably prolific creative period during which he turned to writing plays. This is a play on the idea of rites of passage into adulthood. It is written in three acts set in the Nugini jungle, the ‘demonic city’ and the desert. There is little respite and no comfort in Witkacy’s theatre. It attacks the past and feeds off the personal details of the author’s own life. The difference between the living and the dead is unimportant in this summary of the constituent parts of his world. Being is gauged, in Witkacy’s work, in the face of annihilation.

Witkacy’s writing, his painting and his theatre are a conscious and deliberate attempt to create himself as an original being. This striving for absolute self-origination is crucial to early twentieth century modernism. Rosalind Krauss has written that this emphasis on self-generation is a “metaphor referring not so much to formal invention as to sources of life. The self as origin is safe from contamination by tradition...” (1986: 157) The original present opposed to the past, is at the heart of modernism. It is with this protean modernist struggle that Witkacy is engaged in all his writing for the theatre. It is a theatre that is enacted first and foremost in the psychic space in his brain. Its scenographic spaces are only more expansive to the extent of the four walls of Witkacy’s room. This was his world. Ironically, the strength of his ‘pure form’ text is in its substantial resistance to performance.

As the Nazi army entered Poland from the West in 1939, Witkiewicz fled East. On 18 September, when the Russian Army attacked Poland, Witkiewicz shot himself.

       —   Adrian Guthrie (Note from programme of 1998 production, Chester, U.K.)

Daniel Gerould (translator and editor) 1992, The Witkiewicz Reader, Ann Arbor: Northwestern University Press
Rosalind E Krauss 1986, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press