Polish · 1930–2013
Mrożek started as a newspaper cartoonist in Kraków, and the plays keep the cartoonist's method: one absurd premise, drawn cleanly, taken to its logical end. Tango, his best-known, has a young man in a household of anarchic bohemians demanding order and discovering that his revolt has no content, and it ran everywhere in Europe in the 1960s. He left Poland in 1963, published an open letter denouncing the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and was banned at home. He lived in Italy, France, Mexico and finally Kraków again. In 2002 a stroke left him aphasic — a playwright who could not use language — and he recovered enough to write a memoir about it. His drawings are still reprinted in Polish papers, and the phrase Mrożek-like is ordinary Polish for a situation that is absurd and official at once.