Rare is the visitor who falls in love with Warsaw at first sight. It is a citywhose dirty walls and stern faces are hard to ignore. Its landscape often seems to have been chiseled from a single piece of dull granite. It is, at first glance, an unlikely muse.

Yet Warsaw is a highly cerebral city, one forever underestimated by the foreigner. It is a city of ideas and conceptual resonance, a place which can sometimes be easier to love with one’s mind – rather than eyes – open.

Because and in spite of these things, it is a great city, a place of profound inward culture. More’s the pity that the greatest manifestations of this culture – its stages – are ill appreciated by the government and under-patronized by its inhabitants.

Make no mistake, Warsaw’s theater scene is the most vibrant in Poland. A number of new theaters have opened over the last few years and tickets sell fast these days. Try, for example, to get tickets for children’s plays at Teatr Lalka – they go on sale once a month, you have to queue for them and they usually sell out within a half hour.

These positive trends have come about in a period of economic uncertainty, with little cooperative promotion of the sector and in the face of government indifference to private theaters. That’s something to be proud of, something which bespeaks the strength of Poland’s theater-going tradition. But it also hints at the sector’s unexploited potential.

The curtain calls

There’s relatively little to be done about the overall economic environment, but cooperative promotion and greater state aid for private theaters – or at least less hindrance – are eminently doable.

Take for example New York’s Broadway or London’s West End. These are the biggest umbrella brands in contemporary theater and they’ve been carefully cultivated by their respective cities. True, they have the advantage of being part of two of the world’s busiest cities and are both anglophone-dominant, whereas Warsaw is a low-traffic capital and Polish is rarely learned as a second language.

But careful, strategic nurturing of the industry – together with smart advertising – can help to overcome one issue, while a greater number of English-language performances and the proliferation of sub- or supertitles during performances can address the other. There has been some progress in this second area – Teatr na Woli has, since last October, incorporated supertitles into its performances. Other theaters have sporadically employed this solution, but demand could easily persuade them to adopt it whole-heartedly.

As for government aid, there’s a quick fix – allow a tax relief for corporate sponsors of theaters. The money lost on taxes could be partly recouped on increased ticket sales (seven percent VAT applies). That might not solve funding problems altogether, but it’s a place to start.

There are other obstacles for the industry – tickets are relatively expensive and the theaters themselves are inconveniently scattered throughout the downtown area. But there’s no reason that theaters couldn’t take center stage in efforts to promote the modern face of Polish culture.

Reach the right audience, in the right way, and it could be love at first sight.