The general view of Tadeusz Rittner, a highly successful playwright of the early 20th century, as an uncommitted realist and author of ‘well-made plays’ has, no doubt, been formed and fixed by Zbigniew Raszewski, renowned historian of the theatre who wrote the introductions to the postwar editions of Rittner's plays. This article shows a rather different picture of Rittner, based on his journalism, autobiographical novels and lesser-known dramas in which he pursued his innovatory theatrical visions. The complete Rittner is, in fact, made up of metatheatricality, the grotesque, the aes-thetics of Viennese modernism and a fair share of commercialism.

Tadeusz Rittner steered clear of political themes in his dramas with the single excep-tion of the Wrogowie bogaczy (The Enemies of the Rich). First performed in 1921, the play exposes the insane madness of social (Bolshevik) revolution. At the same time, though, the tragic horror is handled with ironic distance and diverted into absurd grotesque. Moreover, Rittner invests the individual scenes and exchanges between the characters with hints and references that turn the story into a playful game with the theatrical traditions, including the familiar set of plot drivers, i.e. the pursuit of power, love/eroti-cism and art/imagination. For all its cleverness, the play, when staged at the Słowacki Theatre in Cracow, turned out a complete failure. One simple reason for it was that Rittner’s broad, generalized vision failed to meet the current demand for a more con-crete reenactment of historical events.