The unfinished play by Stanisława Przybyszewska has been supplemented with fragments of Jacobin speeches and describes the last hours of the left-wing leaders of the Revolution: Maximilien Robespierre and Louis Saint-Just.
The events take place on the 7th of Thermidor, during the second year of the Revolution, in a session hall of the Committee of Public Safety, at the back of the Republic’s Parliament building. The people present there are the members of the Committee who, a day later, will overthrow the rule of revolutionary democracy. This revolt will become a model, not only for the capitalistic political transformations in the centuries to follow, but also for the Polish transformations of 1989.
The spectators will sit within arm’s reach from the debating politicians and will be able to observe their struggles intertwined with songs of the republican tradition. They will be able to scrutinize their faces – filmed by several cameras and displayed on screens above their heads. They will hear their whispered conversations captured by 21 microphones. They will observe them behind the scene and in the meeting hall of the National Convention which became a model for all the following democratic assemblies that gradually turned into farce.
We live in a world forged by 18th-century revolutionaries. Even if, as it is stated by Przybyszewska, the revolutionary government was ended by the first willing Bourbon, the capitalist reality was formed by the bourgeoisie rebelling against feudalism, and their idea of freedom became crucial for modern civilisation. The idea is in fact so crucial that it has become translucent and can now mean anything. Because everyone believes in freedom: a feminist at a Manifa, a businessman at a congress in Krynica, a teenage, ultra-conservative fan of Korwin-Mikke.
Yet, a different motto of the demolishers of the Bastille remains more controversial. It is equality, perceived by Wodziński as an unrealised ideal. The conspirators pay special attention to equality in their speeches – that is why hunger and poverty return as the reasons of their defeat. The Polish Theatre version of “Thermidor” depicts revolution more as an unfinished project than a cosmic catastrophe.
Witold Mrozek, “Zamach na Robespierre'a”,Gazeta Wyborcza.
