the people, who “have become wildly, cruelly, bestially loyal,” into unpatriotic action or speech, the Sergeant himself will have to serve as a substitute revolutionary. Reluctantly he agrees to this unnatural proposition, shouts an invective against the Infant King and his uncle the Regent from his window, and is promptly arrested.

In act 3 the results of the Sergeant’s devotion to duty are manifest. The police force has been granted funds for rebuilding the prison and for recruiting new personnel. The General himself has become interested in the Sergeant’s case and will personally conduct the interrogation. Meanwhile, the policeman-turned-revolutionary is becoming increasingly confused about his identity. He has observed his country and his fellow citizens from the same cell window that was the vantage point of the former Prisoner, but he has arrived at different conclusions: The population looks sullen and dissatisfied to him, the railway system is atrocious, and the Infant King and the Regent are morons.

When the General arrives, he is accompanied by the former Prisoner, now his special assistant serving as an expert on subversive activity. The Prisoner/Aide devises a plan to goad the Sergeant into throwing the very bomb at the General which he himself had used ten years before; since the bomb failed to explode then, there is no danger for the general, but the act of throwing the bomb would convict the Sergeant of terrorism. The Sergeant needs little persuasion to throw the bomb; this time it does explode, but it fails to kill the General, who has taken cover in the toilet. While the General, the Prisoner/Aide, and the Chief of Police place one another under mutual arrest for failing in their respective duties, thus providing exciting investigative prospects for the police, the Sergeant, now completely turned revolutionary, shouts, “LONG LIVE FREEDOM!” at the top of his voice as the play comes to an end.

The Police uses the techniques of the Theater of the Absurd. The play employs cartoonlike characters—Mroek began his literary career as a newspaper cartoonist—and the cliché-ridden dialogue typical of the plays of Eugène Ionesco. Like many of Mroek’s early plays, The Police also exhibits the influence of Alfred Jarry, whose play Ubu roi (pr., pb. 1896; Ubu the King, 1951), set in Poland, is considered the prototype of the contemporary anti-illusionist theater. Mroek works in this anti-illusionist vein by creating an unidentified country composed of grotesquely distorted real features of Polish society. In his production note he warns that “this play does not contain anything except what it actually contains. This means that it is not an allusion to anything, it is not a metaphor, and it should not be read as such.” This caveat, while affording Mroek a modicum of protection, is clearly duplicitous, for by his very prohibition Mroek ensures that audiences will understand the parallels to life in Poland during the Cold War.

Thus the country is not named; indeed, it is ruled by an Infant King and his uncle, the Regent, who appear only as pictures in state offices. The characters do not have any personal names that might associate them with Poland but are identified only by their dramatic functions or their professions. The police officials have mustaches and wear jackboots, swords, and high, stiff collars. The Prisoner has a “pointed beard like those of nineteenth-century progressives.” The result is a Kafkaesque no-man’s land, at once nightmarish and ridiculous, run by a grotesque, menacing bureaucracy. Like many absurdist plays, The Police employs comic devices but is not ultimately a comedy: No harmony is created or restored at the end.