Theatre
The Morality of Mrs Dulska
Moralność pani Dulskiej
Gabriela Zapolska · 1906
Opening lines
Dulska
Kucharka! Hanka! wstawać!…
Cook! Hanka! Get up!…
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from wolnelektury.pl
Synopsis
In a handsome apartment building, its owner, Aniela Dulska, rules over a husband who hardly says a word, two daughters kept in ignorance and tenants whom she throws out at the first scandal. To keep her son Zbyszko at home, who runs around the cafés and after women, she turns a blind eye to his attentions to the maid, Hanka. But Hanka finds herself pregnant, Zbyszko swears out of defiance to marry her, and the whole household sets about making sure that nothing becomes known.
Context
Written in a few weeks in the autumn of 1906 for the municipal theatre of Lviv, which could not assemble the cast in time, the play was first performed at the municipal theatre of Kraków on 15 December 1906, in a staging by Ludwik Solski, then in Warsaw and Lviv in January 1907; the text appeared the same year from Orgelbrand. The author gave it two sequels. The heroine's name entered the language: dulszczyzna denotes bourgeois hypocrisy. Bolesław Niewolin brought it to the screen as early as 1930. Paul Cazin translated it into French in 1933; Teresa Murjas gave the English version in 2007.
Who it is for
Three acts, a single family in its drawing room. The comedy lies in each character's way of speaking, and the text reads as well as it plays.
Prizes and reception
The most famous play by its author and one of the most performed in the Polish repertoire, with more than two hundred stagings since its premiere.
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