Agata Łuksza's "Polish Theatre Revisited"

Agata Łuksza is assistant professor at the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw. She is author of Glamour, Femininity, Performance: Actress as an Object of Desire. Łuksza lives in Warsaw, Poland.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Polish Theatre Revisited: Theatre Fans in the Nineteenth Century, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Epithets crucial to Czaki’s image as an ingenue appeared also in descriptions of her performances. Even at the early stage of Wisnowska’s career, “natural charm” and “sincere feeling” intertwined with “intelligence,” “sophistication,” and “flirtatiousness.”

If you open my book, Polish Theatre Revisited: Theatre Fans in the Nineteenth Century, on page 99, you may find it difficult to follow the narrative without knowing the context. In this part of the book I juxtapose public images of two Polish actresses performing in Warsaw in the 1880s: Jadwiga Czaki and Maria Wisnowska. Nowadays, even readers familiar with the history of Polish theatre most probably do not recognize these names, but back in the late nineteenth century they were local celebrities among Polish audiences. This page can also give you a false impression that my book is primarily about these two actresses, or about theatre performers in the late-nineteenth-century Warsaw, while in fact, it focuses on theatre fans, not their idols. Moreover, while I do pay attention to local context, my aim is to transcend “national” theatre histories by presenting local theatrical life against the globalization of theatre culture, and by inscribing experiences and practices of Polish theatre fans into a larger story about the early fan cultures emerging within the nascent consumer society.

That being said, there is something uncanny about page 99, considering that my research on theatre fan cultures of the past started with the analysis of an early Warsaw example of a “fandom war” – between fans of Jadwiga Czaki and Maria Wisnowska.

Learn more about Polish Theatre Revisited at the University of Iowa Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue