The general view of Tadeusz Rittner, a highly successful playwright of the early 20th century, as an uncommitted realist and author of ‘well-made plays’ has, no doubt, been formed and fixed by Zbigniew Raszewski, renowned historian of the theatre who wrote the introductions to the postwar editions of Rittner's plays. This article shows a rather different picture of Rittner, based on his journalism, autobiographical novels and lesser-known dramas in which he pursued his innovatory theatrical visions. The complete Rittner is, in fact, made up of metatheatricality, the grotesque, the aes-thetics of Viennese modernism and a fair share of commercialism.