News

2025-26 Season

15/09/2025

A panorama of various Polish fates, social themes, and reflections on transience and ecology. Five premieres, including a world premiere. And directed by Małgorzata Bogajewska, Klaudia Gębska, Kamil Białaszek, Piotr Cieplak, and Jan Klata. Welcome to the National Theatre’s 2025/2026 season!

In his first premiere on the National Theatre’s stage, and the first premiere of the 2025/2026 season, Jan Klata has reached for Tadeusz Miciński's The Polish Thermopylae→. As he announced in the program, it is "a phantasmagoria about the cursed fate of our corner of Europe. About Poland, Russia, Ukraine, about the shadow that Fate has cast on successive generations of History's cannon fodder." In 1997, at the National Theatre, rebuilt after a fire, Jerzy Grzegorzewski opened his directorship with Stanisław Wyspiański's November Night. It was an investigation of the tradition of Polish uprisings and the painful dilemma: "To fight or not to fight?" This question has become urgent again in the "pre-war period" we are living in. The premiere of The Polish Thermopylae will take place in the Bogusławski Hall on November 22, 2025, to mark the 260th anniversary of the National Theatre.

In line with the National Theatre's declared mission to foster those at the beginning of their artistic careers, the last premiere in 2025 will be staged by Kamil Białaszek (directing and adaptation), one of the hottest names amongst the young generation of Polish theatre directors. His work intersects with a legend of postmodernism, David Foster Wallace, whose Infinite Jest→ is considered a milestone in American literature of the 1990s. This disturbingly timely, over 1,000-page novel raises questions about the paths we take due to our thoughtless pursuit of entertainment and media addiction. It promises to be a performance full not only of youthful energy and brilliant reflection to which the director has already accustomed us, but also of unconventional musical and multimedia ideas. The premiere of Infinite Jest, translated by Jolanta Kozak, will take place on the Jerzy Grzegorzewski Wierzbowa Stage on December 13, 2025.

Tennessee Williams is returning to the Wierzbowa Stage, this time in a production by a director with an extraordinary talent for interpreting American psychological dramas. Małgorzata Bogajewska has repeatedly demonstrated to National Theatre audiences the sensitivity and precision with which she can create stage-based worlds. The director will direct Sweet Bird of Youth, an intimate story about the pros and cons of acting, in an original adaptation with a significant emphasis on female characters. The premiere of the play, translated by Jacek Poniedziałek, is scheduled for March 2026.

The next young name on the National Stage bill this season belongs to a director who graduated from the Krakow Academy of Theatre Arts. She has made quite a splash in the theatre world, presenting a production at festivals that she originally created for a student project. Klaudia Gębska has already won several awards and distinctions, and her subsequent productions are being transferred to the Polish Radio Theatre and Television Theatre. At the National Theatre, she will stage the play Men Explain the World to Me, based on the most famous collection of essays by Rebecca Solnit – an author who supported the #metoo movement and inspired the term "mansplaining." To balance this critical perspective, another award-winning and popular young artist, Mariusz Gołosz, will be responsible for the adaptation. The world premiere of the text, translated by Anna Dzierzgowska, will take place in April 2026 on the Studio Stage.

The season concludes with a return to the National Theatre of a work the theatre community has long awaited. Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk's most acclaimed book, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, has already been adapted for both stage and film, but this production will be exceptional both for its ecological viewpoint — so necessary in these times of climate crisis, and yet so close to the heart of director and adaptor Piotr Cieplak — and for the story's moving consideration of the nature of transience. The premiere is scheduled for May 2026, on the Theatre's main stage, in the Bogusławski Auditorium.

 

  • 2025-26 Season

    A panorama of various Polish fates, social themes, and reflections on transience and ecology. Five premieres, including a world premiere. 

  • THE POLISH THERMOPYLAE

    In his first play at the National Theatre, director Jan Klata has opted for Tadeusz Miciński's The Polish Thermopylae. Opening Night: 22 November 2025

  • INFINITY JEST

    Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace directed by Kamil Białaszek | Opening Night: 13 December 2025 

  • CHARLATANS

    “When I’m not acting, life is black and white,” says the heroine of Pablo Remón’s play. Charlatans directed by Grzegorz Małecki, Polish preview: 13 June 2025.

  • HAMLET

    Jan Englert crowns his twenty-eight seasons of artistic work at the National Theatre with a performance of Hamlet.

  • HEAVEN AND HELL

    Although Maria Wojtyszko's play touches upon the painful subject of losing loved ones, Jakub Krofta's deft staging provides light entertainment for the whole family. 

  • OTHER DELIGHTS

    This adaptation of the novel Other Delights is the second staging of one of Jerzy Pilch's works at the National Theatre, following The Holy Father's Skis.  

  • FAUST

    Faust is a story based on an ancient legend of a scholar who yearns so much for just a moment of happiness that he makes a pact with the devil. 

  • A DREAM PLAY

    After the well-received Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Sławomir Narloch returned to the National Theatre with another premiere – A Dream Play by Strindberg.

     

  • KING LEAR

    King Lear may be Shakespeare's boldest examination of human nature. Jan Englert will play the title role in the National Theatre's production.

  • WAITING FOR GODOT

    "What do we do now? Wait. [...] We're waiting for Godot". Piotr Cieplak directs Waiting for Godot by Beckett. Is this a classic yet? Does it still have its avant-garde power?

  • FREDRO: THE JUBILEE YEAR

    To celebrate 230 years since Aleksander Fredro's birth, the National Theatre invites you to an evening dedicated to the life and works of Poland’s greatest comedy writer. 

  • TALES FROM THE VIENNA WOODS

    Małgorzata Bogajewska directs for the second time at the National Theatre. This time she draws on Ödön von Horváth's 1931 drama.

  • THE THEATRE MAKER

    The play by Thomas Bernhard, one of the most outstanding playwrights of the second half of the 20th century. In the title role – Jerzy Radziwiłowicz. 

  • ALICE'S WONDERLAND

    Have you ever quarreled with the Time or visited a forest where things have no names? Alice’s Wonderland is a musical performance based on the famous novel by Lewis Carroll. 

  • THE MISANTHROPE

    Jan Englert stages a classic play by Molière. What is Alcest's misanthropy: an uncompromising commitment to the truth or a doomed uprising against social conventions?

  • THE DECALOGUE

    A meditation upon the moral foundations of the present – an iconic work of Polish cinema, rethought thirty-five years after its creation by Krzysztof Kieślowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz. 

  • MARY STUART

    Grzegorz Wiśniewski returns to the classic drama about human passions interwoven in a ruthless machinery of history and intrigue.

  • MÜNCHHAUSEN FOR ADULTS

    Baron von Münchhausen lived in the 18th century and told incredible stories about himself. Maciej Wojtyszko directs his own play about the famous adventurer and mystifier.

  • Solidarity with Ukraine | Солідарні з Україною

    The ensemble of the National Theatre stands in solidarity with the Ukrainians who are fighting for the independence of their homeland.

  • PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK

    1900. On a hot, stormy day, Mrs Appleyard's boarding school residents go on a picnic near Hanging Rock. The new theatrical version of the Australian prose classics. 

  • SNAKE SKIN

    Artur Urbański directs his own play which main character is Ruth Berlau, one of Bertolt Brecht's closest associates and life companions.

  • AUTUMN SONATA

    A story about the need for love and acceptance, about an inherited emotional coldness, about the psychological costs of creativity. A theatrical version of a film script by Ingmar Bergman. 

  • MOTHER JOAN OF THE ANGELS

    A performance about the need to experience something that surpasses us. In the title role of the prioress – Małgorzata Kożuchowska. 

  • HOW TO BE LOVED

    This is the performance about love and moral responsibility for another person as well as the mechanisms controlling human memory. The dramatisation of the story by Kazimierz Brandys.


  • LUNGS

    Briliant, full of humour and touching love story of a young couple. Breakups and comebacks, passion and sex, the first important decisions and the search for meaning in a complex, modern world.


  • UHLANS

    The Museum of All-Time Polish Uhlans. Exhibits of the national exacerbation. A serious comedy in three acts about the entanglement in myths of Polishness. 


  • THE IMAGE MAKERS

    The truth about the essence of creation and responsibility in art. Director Viktor Sjöström is working on the film The Phantom Carriage, based on the novel by Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlöf. 

  • FOREFATHER'S EVE

    Mickiewicz's poetic drama interpreted by Lithuanian Master Eimuntas Nekrošius — theatre visionary known for his unique theatrical language.


  • KORDIAN

    The Polish nation's tragic choice: to die heroically in the name of a noble idea or live a life "making shoes for dogs"? — the alternative presented to Kordian in two parables.

  • FLEA THE SWINDLER

    Tremendous fun and great laughs – not just for kids. The antics of the Flea are directed by Anna Seniuk with the music composed by Maciej Małecki.


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