Happy Days - Master Performance of Maja Komorowska

Presentation of „Happy Days” is a tribute to Maja Komorowska, one of the most outstanding Polish actresses who played several times in Łódź at International Festival of Plays Pleasant And Unpleasant (among others in spectacles directed by Krystian Lupa and Zbigniew Zapasiewicz). The play „Happy Days” by Samuel Beckett, directed by Antoni Libera, is the Master Presentation; it premiered in Dramatyczny Theatre in Warsaw in 1995.   

„ I have seen quite a lot of good, interesting, successful roles. But great roles are not so common and acting masterpieces are very seldom and you can come across them only a few times during lifetime. The role of Winnie played by Maja Komorowska is just the masterpiece. After so many years I still have in my eyes her vanishing figure, as if she was suck down by a mound in which she was buried – in the first act waist-deep, in the second act – up to the neck. A toque with a feather on her head – grotesque in this final situation – seems to be a sign of faith and unabated hope. […]  A continuous monologue full of associations and memory jumps (years of practice with Joyce did not go down the drain) is written like a score. Beckett in his own specific way is very precise to mark pauses, rhythms, pace and even – through the construction of affirmative sentences and questions – composes a certain melody of speech. But there is one thing he cannot define: the tone. It is the actress’s domain. Voice features, all ways of speaking, physical acts of delivering a monologue are the matter of interpreting the role by Komorowska”, Janusz Majcherek wrote about the spectacle in „Gazeta Wyborcza” emphasizing the brilliant acting of Komorowska. Many times in reviews of „Happy Days” it was said that Komorowska created her role according to the score written by Beckett and at the same time she succeeded in creating a unique, individual and original character.           

„Happy Days” is full of absurd, small events, rituals repeated every day which make up the sense of her life. Their layering starts to frighten, to cover the character, it suffocates her like a surreal form in which she is buried up to her neck. Apparently worthless words become a certificate of a lost battle for existence. „Happy Days” is a stage picture of Beckett’s soul who, according to Antoni Libera (director and expert on Beckett) „was the man for whom existence, in its rule, was the source of ineffable torment. It was something incomprehensible to find yourself in this world in the human form and it aroused amazement and fear; what is more important it could not be tamed in its weirdness. You can say Beckett was not subject to this immunizing system which makes the individual get used to existing in time and starts to treat this state as something obvious. In this man there was no fundamental consent to life and, what is more, a common affirmation of life.”            

Maja Komorowska is an outstanding theatre, film and TV actress and a pedagogue. She made her debut in 1960 and soon after that she joined Theatre of 13 Rows found by Jerzy Grotowski; later she co-operated with him in the period of Laboratorium Theatre in Wrocław. Then she joined Współczesny Theatre in Warsaw (till these days). She played in films directed by Krzysztof Zanussi, Andrzej Wajda, Istvan Szabo and in theatre spectacles directed by Erwin Axer, Maciej Englert, Krystian Lupa.

Artur Międzyrzecki wrote about her: „No doubt that Maja Komorowska is the star but this is a specific stardom, the only one of its kind. Far from ostentation, actor’s fussiness, complacency. If in this case we can talk about a star, Maja Komorowska is the star of love and co-responsibility who loves her landscapes, her relatives, her colleagues”.   

She has received many awards and distinctions, she was decorated with Gloria Artis Gold Medal and the Grand Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta „for her outstanding contribution to national culture, for her achievements in art and pedagogical activity”. In 2024 Komorowska turns 87. She is one of the most outstanding artists considered the example of acting and the authority in this field.