Till Wonka, Sebastian BaumgartenThe Return Of Odysseus – Dramatised Reading with Till Wonka

In June 1944, in Nazi-occupied Kraków, Kantor (1915–1990) and fellow artists secretly staged Stanisław Wyspiański’s The Return of Odysseus. At a time when gathering itself was dangerous, war was not a backdrop: it entered the work’s form. Wyspiański’s play draws on Homer’s Odyssey but dismantles its victorious hero. Odysseus returns not to Ithaca but to a devastated Europe. Home has become unrecognisable; the returning hero is a stranger in his own land. 

For Kantor, this destroyed room was not theatrical scenery. Real objects marked by the wartime city entered the performance in all their poverty and damage; actors and audience shared the same precarious space. Here he formulated a defining principle: theatre should not illustrate reality, but collide with it. Odysseus carries catastrophe into a home that can no longer receive him.

Now, the 1944 production is returning in the form of a staged reading. In the Rangfoyer of the Maxim Gorki Theater, the set designed by Kantor has been reconstructed as a permanent installation. Here, actor Till Wonka and director Sebastian Baumgarten explore Kantor’s texts from his production The Return of Odysseus, bringing the historical material to life once again.