Meeting with Krystian Lupa

After he was banished from Polski Theatre, Lupa managed to produce the “Trial” due to the support of European cultural establishments and foundations. The Onassis STEGI was one of the first bodies to back this initiative and invites directors and actors to an open discussion with him concerning his work and especially his new piece presented at the Onassis Stegi.

In 1943, one of the most important personalities of the contemporary Polish and European theater was born in Silesia, Poland. In his youth, he experimented with studies in Physics but he soon turned to the arts, graduating as a graphic designer from the Krakow School of Fine Arts, after which he went on to study cinema and theater. Influenced by the theater personality and visual artist Tadeusz Kantor, the director Andrei Tarkovsky and the theater director Konrad Swinarski, he started directing in the mid 70s turning to psychological theater, an esoteric theater of human relations, and he has by now become renowned for the way he handles silence and time.

Since the early 1980s, he has presented some of his most characteristic productions in collaboration with Stary Teatr. He soon started cultivating his obsessions through the works of Bernhard, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Broch. He adapted “The Brothers Karamazov”, “ Platonov”, “The Sleepwalkers”, “Immanuel Kant and The Three Sisters”, while in 1996 he joined Teatr Polski.

He visited ATHENS for the first time in 2004 in the context of the ATHENSFestival with a theatrical adaptation of Nietzsche’s “Zarathustra”.

The high quality of his art is mirrored in the penetrating performance of his actors and the amazing cohesion of the way he directs. In his 75th year, he continues to produce influential performances, the most recent of which are “Woodcutters” in 2014 and “The Trial” in 2017.