Polish theatre to perform writer’s unfinished play after it was completed by AI

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

A theatre in Kraków will perform a previously unfinished play by one of Poland’s most famous writers that has now been completed using artificial intelligence.

The work in question, So-called Humanity in Madness (Tak zwana ludzkość w obłędzie), was the final play by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, commonly known as Witkacy, a prominent playwright and painter of the interwar period.

Witkacy began to write the work in 1938 but it remained unfinished at the time of his death at the age of 54 in September 1939, when he took his own life after the invasion of Poland that month by Nazi Germany from the west and the Soviet Union from the east.

The Słowacki Theatre, which was founded in the 19th century and is the largest in Kraków, notes that “only fragments [of the play] have survived” but “artificial intelligence (AI) has been used to supplement the missing content”.

The performance will also make use of virtual reality (VR) technology. “All of Witkacy’s creative activity will serve as material for the AI ​​machine learning process to create a virtual world, scenography, props and character avatars,” says the theatre.

The play will include performers from the Ivano-Frankivsk Drama Theater in Ukraine, who will take part via a video link and perform in Ukrainian, and has been created in partnership with CyberRäuber, a German digital performing arts collective. Its creation was supported by European Union funding.

“The project will be a pioneering undertaking that will set new standards for what theatre can achieve in the digital era,” claims the theatre.

The play will open tomorrow, with advertising materials listing the authors as “Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz and artificial intelligence”. The project has aroused great interest, with tickets for both scheduled performances sold out.

The director of the play, Krzysztof Garbaczewski, told local newspaper Gazeta Krakowska that their endeavour is a kind of “textual archaeology” that has attempted to “extract this drama from oblivion”.

“There are only four characters and some description left [from what Witkacy wrote] and it turns out that, based on this data, artificial intelligence is able to pick out certain threads or clues that we can follow and [use to] develop this non-existent text,” he explained.

In a separate interview with the Gazeta Wyborcza daily, Garbaczewski said that their use of AI is particularly appropriate given the issue of “humanity in madness” addressed by Witkacy’s play.

“Using artificial intelligence can also be treated as irrational behaviour – we do not know the exact way this tool works, and yet we use it,” said the director. “But I give the floor to art – I never impose the interpretation of my performances and I will not do it now either.”

Last month, Radio Kraków, a public broadcaster, separately launched an experimental radio channel run almost completely by AI, including with AI presenters.

However, the project, which was supposed to last for three months, was ended after a week following a public backlash. The station nevertheless claimed it to have been a “success”.

Among the programmes broadcast was an imagined, AI-generated interview with Wisława Szymborska, a Polish Nobel Prize-winning poet who died in 2012.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Teatr im. Juliusza Słowackiego (press materials)