User:Cheapdayrtn/ThePolice
The Police is a play written by Polish playwright Slawomir Mrozek.
Written in 1958 it is Mrozek's first play and one of his most acclaimed early works. It has appeared on television in the United States and was also produced at the Phoenix Theatre, New York, in 1961. [1] Most recently it was performed at BAC in London as part of the TimeOut Critics' Choice season.[2]
Written in the style of Theatre of the Absurd, although Mrozek later rejected this classification, the play is almost entirely free of references to concrete time and place.
In a universal manner, the play is about the degeneration of police apparatuses, about power whose raison d'etre is the "subject-oppositionist." The point here, however, is not only to delineate relations between master and servant, but also to reveal the changes which these relations cause in consciousness in people, to demonstrate the inconstancy of their ideological stances. These themes are most fully illustrated in the absurd finale, when the protagonists mutually arrest each other, piling one arrest on top of the next. Mrozek thus finds a way to describe the times of Stalinist terror in Poland.[3]