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Kamila Černá EDITORIAL..................................................................................................... 2
Jana Patočková Václav Havel Leaving and Returning............................................... 3
The Last Days of Prague Chamber Theatre at Comedy Theatre......9
Zuzana AugustováThe Last Days of Mankind: A Decadent Show
and the Aesthetics of Embarrassment.........................................11
Jana Soprová Garbage, the City, and Death............................................................ 13
Kamila Černá 15 Years of Theatre in Dlouhá Street........................................... 15
Jana Patočková the break of noon................................................................................. 21
Luboš Mareček – Jitka Nováková The Phenomenon of Reduta Theatre in Brno.............................. 23
Richard Erml Europeana – Laughter from Hell.................................................... 29
Jan Kerbr Ostrava – an Oasis of Theatre That Refuses to Pander...........31
Jan Jiřík Theatre with a Passion for New Plays.......................................... 37
Lenka Šaldová Les enfants terribles........................................................................... 43
KALEIDOSCOPE........................................................................................... 47
NOTEBOOK................................................................................................... 55
CZECH THEATRE 28
Issued by Arts and Theatre Institute
Celetná 17, 110 00 Prague, Czech Republic
Editor-in-chief / Kamila Černá
Editors / Zbyněk Černík, Petra Ježková, Jan Jiřík
Translations / Robin Cassling, Julek Neumann
Cover and layout / Egon L. Tobiáš
Printed by / Tiskárna TOBOLA
e-mail: [email protected]
© 2012 Institut umění – Divadelní ústav
ISSN 0862-9390
×Peter Handke: The Hour We Knew Nothing Of Each Other / Prague Chamber Theatre – Comedy
Theatre, 2012 / Direction and set design Dušan D. Pařízek / Costumes Kamila Polívková
> Photo Jan Dvořák
2/
editorial
editorial
T
he year 2011 will be remembered in the history of
Czech theatre above all as the year it lost its best and
internationally most renowned playwright, Václav Havel.
In 2009, following a pause in which he devoted himself to
politics, Havel made a successful return to the Czech and the
world stage with his play Leaving, and in 2011 he directed
its film version. The premiere screening of Leaving in March
sparked much discussion, as it was enthusiastically embraced
by some and angrily scorned by others, mostly owing to the
extreme grotesqueness of and almost theatrical stylisation of
this art film. Like in the play, in the film the author included
references to his own experiences in politics and alluded to the
dark side of the modern-day political machine. Leaving is so
far the only example of a world-class politician using the stage
to grapple with his or her departure from high politics, but in
Havel’s case it was unfortunately also his bid farewell as an
artist. In the article Václav Havel Leaving and Returning, Jana
Patočková writes about Havel’s artistic revisiting of meaningful
themes, his drama, and his fate.
Havel’s departure exacerbated the sense of insecurity that has
come to pervade Czech theatre in recent years. Here I’m not just
talking about financial insecurity – Czech theatre lacks more
than money, it lacks a developed system of public funding for
theatres. Intellectual and artistic uncertainty is growing deeper,
playwrights search in vain for serious themes, and artists often
have no clear idea of how, what, and even why to perform.
There are of course also exceptions, theatres that are able to
maintain high standards and a sharply defined artistic profile
and programme. In recent decades, Prague Chamber Theatre,
working from the premises of Comedy Theatre, is one such
company. Its strong, solid dramaturgy, outstanding ensemble
of distinctive performers, and its trademark directorial style
managed to garner the company favour among audiences
and critics, but did not secure it enough money to survive. In
July 2012 this long under-funded company will unfortunately
disband. Its final season and two recent on-stage successes
are the subject of the article The Last Days of Prague Chamber
Theatre at Comedy Theatre.
Theatre in Dlouhá Street represents a creative ‘sure thing’
in the Czech scene in terms of the quality of its repertoire and
its professionalism, and proof of this is the fact that in 2011
three of its productions were ranked among the most critically
acclaimed productions of the year and its production of Paul
Claudel’s The Break of Noon, directed by Hana Burešová, won
the Alfréd Radok Award and came in first in the Theatre News
poll as ‘production of the year 2011’. Kamila Černá assesses this
company in 15 Years of the Theatre in Dlouhá Street, and Jana
Patočková reviews the production of The Break of Noon.
Brno’s Reduta Theatre has in recent years emerged as one
of the most progressive Czech stages. Credit for this is due to
Jan Mikulášek’s successful productions, but above all to the
company’s efforts to become the centre of unorthodox stage
work in Brno. In The Phenomenon of Reduta Theatre in Brno
Jitka Nováková writes about history and reconstruction of the
building and Luboš Mareček profiles the company. Richard
Erml writes about Mikulášek’s production Europeana, which
attempts to penetrate the soul of Europe and its 20th-century
history.
Ostrava – an Oasis of Theatre That Refuses to Pander
by Jan Kerbr acquaints readers with the special features of
Ostrava’s theatre scene. Jan Jiřík writes about Flying Theatre
and its work connected with contemporary Czech and world
drama in Theatre with a Passion for New Plays. Lenka Šaldová
reviews the major event of the most recent opera season: the
site-specific production of Les enfants terribles by the opera
company at the National Theatre in Prague on the premises of
Bohnice psychiatric hospital.
Kaleidoscope contains reviews of several recent noteworthy
Czech productions. The Notebook section observes two
anniversaries – twenty years of the Kylián videotheque in Prague
and the centenary of the founding of the oldest Czech theatre
periodical Puppeteer.
Even though this volume of Czech Theatre begins with
a leaving and a farewell to a playwright who was one of the most
important figures in the Czech arts and Czech history and with
a look at a theatre that did much to contribute to all the best that
has emerged in Prague’s theatre scene over the past ten years, in
these times of uncertainty this issue has first of all tried to draw
attention to the ‘sure things’ in Czech theatre with a selection of
major events and productions that have recently appeared on
the Czech stage and helped to preserve the good name of Czech
theatre.
Kamila Černá
Václav Havel Leaving and Returning
Jana Patočková
Václav Havel > Photo Viktor Kronbauer
ÙVáclav Havel, The Memorandum / Theatre on the Ballustrade, Prague 1965 / Directed by Jan Grossman / Set design Boris Soukup
Costumes Mirka Kovářová > Photo Jaroslav Krejčí
ÚVáclav Havel, Temptation / Theatre on the Ballustrade, Prague 1991 / Directed by Jan Grossman / Set design Ivo Žídek / Costumes Irena Greifová
> Photo Viktor Kronbauer
T
he crowds spontaneously accompanying Václav Havel on
his last journey were a telling testimony and reminder
about how many of us – at that moment maybe the
majority of the Czech public – honoured him and saw him as
a true statesman. As somebody understanding the position
of the country’s President as a public interest oriented task,
transcending both domestic threshold and the constraints
of electoral periods rather than an opportunity to mere selfpromotion or to assert personal interests.
Now, as the time of critical reflexion of the body of his work,
both political and artistic, begins, it is good to start by thinking
first of his last play – Leaving (Odcházení) with which he returned
to stage after a long absence. Its first production at the Archa
Theatre in Prague (2008) was directed by David Radok and
was very successful; soon afterwards, other Czech productions
demonstrated that there were also other possible interpretations of
the text. When the author himself later directed a film version of
his play, there were two types of reactions. With some honourable
exceptions, film critics assessed the movie with reserve or outright
rejection. After the author died, there were efforts to remedy the
lack of critical acclaim by numerous nominations for the Czech
“Film Academy” Award – The Golden Lion. (In the end, the
film was awarded two prizes, one for the author of the play and
scriptwriter in one person, the other one for editing.)
Public reception, although the audiences were not as big
as expected, was much more favourable. Maybe the audience
understood better the fact that in his film version of Leaving
Havel kept for us his own peculiar perspective, both irreverent
and serious, of the sorry state of being a ruler in this world. At
the close of his “active” life, he was trying, through his film, to
come to terms with the reverse, excruciating features of his own
/5
experience and with the paltriness of today’s world of politics in
which he had spent so many years and to which he had sacrificed
so much. He was able to do this with humour and to include
his favourite peculiar little jokes; yet what is hidden underneath
these jokes is not much fun – not even in this drastically funny
movie. What else could he finally offer, he who had to watch the
progressing decline of (not only Czech) political stage that he
ÙVáclav Havel, The Garden Party / Theatre on the Ballustrade, Prague 1963
Directed by Otomar Krejča / Set design Josef Svoboda
Costumes Jan Kropáček > Photo Jaroslav Krejčí
ÚVáclav Havel and Pavel Landovský as actors in production
of Havel’s Audience / LP cover
helped to restore and that he took – despite all the theatricality
he was lending to his political mission – seriously to the very
end, but a sad comedy, or even a sad farce?
Characteristically for Havel, Leaving is a play – and a movie –
about failure: about the very last failure consisting in the so-called
rational, pragmatic solution to the main hero’s situation. The
parody of “rational” argumentation means the reason’s suicide. It
is the end much worse than that of Shakespeare’s King Lear, the
tragedy Havel chose as one of the “contexts” or mirrors in his own
play: for Lear, as we know, dies when in his madness he manages
to see through his own folly and, indeed, regains his mind. In
the similar way that references to Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard
in Havel’s play show, in a parody mirror, the disintegration of
the onetime “non lucrative” human values, so King Lear, too,
becomes the background that reflects wretchedness of pragmatic
reason of our times in a grotesque shape.
The reaction both to Havel’s last work for theatre and to his
first film experiment that fulfilled his life-long wish to shoot
a movie was, as it were, in harmony with his poetics of absurd
and grotesque. At the beginning of that poetics was a theme
that was not new to Czechs – from mid 1950s on it was indeed
one high on the agenda of (not only) Czech dramaturgy: life
opportunism of “small Czech people” whose main principle is
6/
ÙVáclav Havel, Largo Desolato / Theatre on the Ballustrade, Prague 1990
Directed by Jan Grossman / Set design Ivo Žídek / Costumes Irena Greifová
> Photo Josef Ptáček
ÙVáclav Havel, Temptation / Theatre on the Ballustrade, Prague 1991
Directed by Jan Grossman / Set design Ivo Žídek / Costumes Irena Greifová
> Photo Jaroslav Krejčí
to survive at any price. Ever since it was first expressed in the
period before the Second – and even First – World War in works
by Jaroslav Hašek or Karel Čapek, it remains the “submersible
theme” of Czech literature and drama. Its metamorphoses
contain a large chunk of history, especially the shifts in a small
nation’s self-reflexion, a nation that kept learning for a long
time how to survive and how to get cosy in its pettiness. In the
drama of late 1950s, this theme appeared in different shapes.
Surprisingly, it first entered the most official of the domestic
stages – the Drama Department of the National Theatre – and
that meant the “large” format (plays by František Hrubín
and Josef Topol, one play by Milan Kundera). And almost in
parallel, in a completely different form related to the direction
of the French Avant-Garde at the turn of 1940s/1950s (Ionesco,
Beckett), the same theme also entered the newly created small
Theatre on the Ballustrade (Divadlo Na zábradlí) with Ivan
Vyskočil and soon afterwards also with Václav Havel.
Havel started at the Theatre on the Ballustrade as a stage
hand and lighting operator. A little bit later he entered its
stage for the first time as a co-author, with Ivan Vyskočil, of
the production of Hitchhiking (Autostop, 1961). It was a loose
succession of several small-scale sketches linked by the theme
of hitchhiking, a cherished social phenomenon of the time that
was also a metaphor for freedom. At the same time, the sketches
already demonstrated the terminal illness of the language
fossilized in clichés. The automation of the language reflected
the decay of human inner feeling, mechanization of a person
devoured by absurdity.
Theatre on the Ballustrade became the first home of the
Czech version of the theatre of the absurd and went on to
develop it throughout 1960s. Thanks to its leading personalities,
its director Jan Grossman and its “in-house playwright” Havel
it won a reputation that transcended Czechoslovakia’s borders.
At the same time, Havel had to thank the theatre for being
and remaining for a long time his first stage that both helped
forming his work and critically tested it. Ironically, it remained
his theatre anchor even at the time when his plays were
banned from production both there and in all other theatres in
Czechoslovakia – it was as though he continued to write his texts
/7
characterized his main discovery and contribution to the socalled theatre of the absurd, and not only to the Czech one:
a central image of the world as a bureaucratic machinery and
of a small man as a bureaucrat whose main ambition is to be
a cog in an anonymous bureaucratic system.
At the beginning, Havel’s theatre was that of total distance. The
perspective on the system and its parts, on characters that through
ØVáclav Havel, Leaving / Movie adaptation, 2011 / Directed by Václav Havel
> Photo Bontonfilm
ÚVáclav Havel, Leaving / Archa Theatre, Prague 2008 / Directed by
David Radok / Set design Jaromír Vlček and David Radok / Costumes
Zuzana Ježková > Photo Viktor Kronbauer
to size both for the space and for the audiences of this theatre.
Although his plays could not be produced, he kept creating
in his dramatic texts his own imaginary stage, following the
peripeties, the ruptures and the continuity of the development
of both Czech society and his own fate.
Havel’s first plays – that some consider to be the substance
of his contribution to the theatre in general – were “about
bureaucrats, mainly”. That’s how the author through the
mouth of his “alter ego”, the writer Vaněk in Audience, aptly
their totally spineless conformity maintain and propagate the
system of opaque mesh of connections only to gradually dissolve
in them; this perspective is seen through the eyes of an uninvolved
observer, it is the “view from the outside”. And the characters in
an automated world become automatons themselves. – The hero
of The Garden Party (Zahradní slavnost) who enters the play is
already a machine, and a computing machine at that; at the end
of the play he gets completely lost and leaves wanting to try to
find himself. He was “faceless” from the very beginning, only one
8/
of the pieces in a game of chess. Nevertheless, his facelessness
serves to a consistent demonstration of the absurd relationships
both within a family, the smallest social unit, and in the wider
world represented by the Office. The process of bureaucratization
of the modern world that, as became evident, was by a long shot
not limited to our totalitarian society and did not end with it, got
even fuller expression in The Memorandum (Vyrozumění). –
About that time, Havel’s theatre world started to change gradually.
It still remained permanently distant, but opened ever so slightly
to the examination of the attitudes of an individual “hero” who –
starting with The Increased Difficulty of Concentration (Ztížená
možnost soustředění) – step by step takes off the mask of a “type”
and takes on individual, partially autobiographical, features.
In the character of Vaněk in The Audience (Audience), the main
protagonist is not only given Havel’s own name (Vaněk is both
a common Czech surname and a diminutive old Czech variant of
the first name Václav), he also enters (or rather is pulled into) the
confrontation with the “system”; this journey from an “observer”
to confrontation becomes a running theme of the large part of the
plays by Havel that followed. The hero keeps his specificity by
his absence of heroism, his struggle is the fight for the survival of
his own image in which one can alternately be defeated or stand
the test. A small man can prove to be a great man because he
defends, more or less alone and maybe in vain, his image of free
human existence against an anonymous apparatus. He defends it
without making much noise, by standing his ground, like Vaněk
whose eloquent silence is a commentary on the lies around him.
But why are Havel’s play written while he was a dissident, at
least the most interesting ones, Largo Desolato and Temptation
(Pokoušení), the plays about failure?
ÚVáclav Havel, Leaving / Archa Theatre, Prague 2008 / Directed by
David Radok / Set design Jaromír Vlček and David Radok / Costumes
Zuzana Ježková > Photo Viktor Kronbauer
Their central character sometimes, as is the case with
Foustka (= the little Faust), succumbs to the pride of reason,
betrays himself, everybody and everything; and the change is
probably irreversible. At other times, as with Leopold Kopřiva,
he is a dissident, somehow against his will, and we last see him
at the moment just after he’d been close to breaking down but
stood the test. All of Havel’s central male characters also share
a weakness for women, who are an element that is ubiquitous,
distracting, both fortifying and weakening.
Some people had repeatedly written that Havel is a “one play
author”, that all of his characters are similar to each other, that
his theatre is “all the time the same”: they forget that this feature
of his that might appear as a weakness is in fact his strong
point. It is clear nowadays that his is a continuous body of work,
a peculiar theatre world that kept developing with the author.
If – besides the plays “about the bureaucrats” that are generally
highly regarded – we still are remembering the author’s plays
about failing people, the plays with existentialist themes, it is
because their potential to appeal did not disappear with the
former regime. In this way, one can see Leaving as the logical
conclusion of Havel’s theatre. (Sadly, he could not write his new
play, the Sanatorium, as he had promised.)
Havel’s “plays about human failure” can be seen as exorcism
of his own anxieties or “demons”, as a reflexion on temptation
nobody is spared, and we can be thankful to the author for being
also able critically to reflect his own experience of sharing the
power. Leaving, a play about saying goodbye, about the final
failure and deep disappointment is obviously a piece of work best
understood by people of a certain age but first of all of certain
experience. This is the experience that leads to insight into
the hard, universal and last human condition, into a pressing
necessity of the final leaving; but it is also the general experience
of the misery in today’s political world. And also of the need for
cleansing laughter that helps to overcome it over and over again.
The Last Days of Prague Chamber Theatre at Comedy Theatre
/9
The Last Days
of Prague
Chamber Theatre
at Comedy Theatre
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness / Prague Chamber Theatre – Comedy Theatre, 2011 / Direction and set design David Jařab
Costumes Sylva Zimula Hanáková > Photo Viktor Kronbauer
10/
Prague Chamber Theatre (Pražské komorní divadlo), one of the most progressive dramatic ensembles in the
city which since 2002 has operated on the premises of Comedy Theatre (Divadlo Komedie) under the direction
of Dušan Pařízek, is coming to an end. Its outstanding dramaturgy, numerous critics’ awards (in the past
decade it won the Alfréd Radok Award for Theatre of the Year three times, something no other Czech stage has
done), and regular guest engagements abroad were not enough to secure it the financial resources necessary
to fulfil the artistic programme that Pařízek joined Comedy Theatre with. F
rom its first seasons Prague Chamber Theatre managed
to turn Comedy Theatre into one of Prague’s artistically
most exciting stages. Its repertoire focused mostly on
20th-century Czech, Austrian, and German drama (e.g. plays
by Thomas Bernhard, Werner Schwab, George Tabori, Elfriede
Jelinek) and on ‘the search for central European identity’.
The company staged the Czech or world premieres of many
texts and remarkable dramatisations. Its strong, explicit
dramaturgy, outstanding ensemble of distinctive performers,
and its unique directorial style secured the theatre the favour of
audiences and critics, but not the money for its operations. The
company’s work, which engaged the stars of Czech theatre (and
film), was persistently underfunded and subsidies from Prague
city hall were very low compared to what the city spends on
other similarly sized (and often artistically dubious) stages.
City hall didn’t have the courage to give more substantial
support to this artistically unique theatre and unfortunately no
money could be found for Comedy Theatre even within the still
unsettled system of financing Prague’s theatres. In March 2010
Dušan Pařízek announced that Prague Chamber Theatre would
be finishing at Comedy Theatre as of 31 July 2012, and rejected
compromises proposed by city hall: ‘Grants are not suitable for
our project. When bureaucrats say “play this less”, it means do
it worse. And that’s something we cannot accept.’
Eventually city hall opened a competition for a new
company to move into Comedy Theatre (once it realised that
Pařízek’s decision was definitive), but the conditions were
formulated in vague terms, with no concept and most notably
without setting the amount of the subsidy for the new company.
The finalists included several directors from the young generation
who have already established a name for themselves on the
Czech (and some even on the European) stage (Jiří Havelka, Jiří
Adámek, Štěpán Pácl, Daniel Špinar, Flying Theatre / Divadlo
Letí). The competition was won by the least interesting of all
the applicants, an ensemble called Company.cz led by director
Eva Bergerová, which till now had been operating out of one of
the stages in Prague’s outskirts, Strašnice Theatre (Strašnické
divadlo), and whose work to date can be described as decent,
but in no way artistically exceptional. The selection committee
played it safe and chose a company that has experience with
running a theatre and enough productions in its repertoire to
fill Comedy Theatre. Whether it will be able to sustain Comedy
Theatre’s position as an artistically outstanding Prague theatre
centre is a big question.
In the meantime, under the direction of Dušan Pařízek and
David Jařab Prague Chamber Theatre entered its final season,
during which it won the Alfréd Radok Award for Theatre of
the Year 2011, staged world and Czech premieres of five new
productions, and embarked on a number of farewell tours
abroad. There were line ups to get into the final shows and
closing performances of its famous productions at the end of
the season. Reviews of two of them, which rank among the best
work of the theatre’s final period, are presented in these pages.
ÙKarl Kraus, The Last Days of Mankind / Prague Chambre Theatre –
Comedy Theatre, 2011 / Directed by Katharina Schmitt, Thomas Zielinski,
Alexander Riemenschneider / Set design Andrej Ďurik
Costumes Zuzana Přidalová > Photo Kamila Polívková
/11
The Last Days of Mankind:
A Decadent Show .
and the Aesthetics .
of Embarrassment Zuzana Augustová
K
arl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind is the fifth premiere
in Comedy Theatre’s (Divadlo Komedie) Austrian season.
The company bravely reached for a megalomaniacal
project by this figure from fin-deVienna, who was
a journalist, writer, and a distinctively anti-theatre artist. Kraus
began writing his massive, five-hundred page anti-war drama in
1915 (it was published in 1920–1921), but allegedly it was never
meant to be performed in the theatre, solely, as the foreword
states, on Mars.
Three works of the apocalypse
German director, playwright, and graduate of the Theatre
Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, Katharina
Schmitt worked with the actors in the first part. She limited
the number of characters and focused on the propaganda,
journalism, and charitable activities away from the front lines.
The performances are shaped by a kind of uniform gestural
language resembling military exercises, a collective, encoded
ÙKarl Kraus, The Last Days of Mankind / Prague Chambre Theatre – Comedy Theatre, 2011 / Directed by Katharina Schmitt, Thomas Zielinski,
Alexander Riemenschneider / Set design Andrej Ďurik / Costumes Zuzana Přidalová > Photo Kamila Polívková
The production team cut the text to around one-tenth of
its original length. The adaptation focuses almost exclusively
on the work’s criticism of the media: the media’s portrait of
the war, and how its reality as viewed through the media and
propaganda statements is perceived by the soldiers on the
front lines and by the people back at home. The production is
divided into three parts, each of which is directed by someone
else. The stage is designed very simply and effectively. It
allows the stage and audience to be repositioned without
actually changing itself: it comprises a long wooden platform
(and no other furnishings) that bends in two places, one rising
perpendicularly along the backdrop of the stage, and the other
extending at an angle over the auditorium and up to the edge
of the balcony.
language of movement, and Meyerchold’s biomechanics,
combined with suggestions of Nazi salutes. But no deeper
meaning is apparent in these stylised movements. The only
exception is the figure of some kind of state official, who in
the opening is seen admiringly observing his shadow on the
wooden wall as he practises an absurd war speech about the
need for tourism, as he raises the theme of narcissism and
totalitarianism: at home away from the front, where there is no
danger, everyone is a potential little dictator. At the same time
everyone wants to make money off the war: through tourism,
charity, or media images. The production team reduced the
crowds of journalists to just one figure, reporter Schalek (Ivana
Uhlířová), who true to the original story forces the actress
(Gabriela Míčová), returning from imprisonment in Russia, to
12/
×Karl Kraus, The Last Days
of Mankind / Prague Chambre
Theatre – Comedy Theatre, 2011
Directed by Katharina Schmitt,
Thomas Zielinski,
Alexander Riemenschneider
Set design Andrej Ďurik
Costumes Zuzana Přidalová
> Photo Kamila Polívková
adjust the ‘truth’ to satisfy the hunger of readers for sensational
journalism. The first part overall, however, comes across as
rather muted and bland, and even the choreographic numbers
fail to add any liveliness.
Czech-German director Thomas Zielinski took on the second
part and conceived it as a decadent cabaret show. A highspirited drunken party in spectacular evening wear is seated in
the front rows of the balcony. The characters begin performing
their individual acts, songs, and duets on the platform pointing
towards the audience, who are seated on stage. The roles of
the two parts of the theatre space have thus been reversed.
Is this meant to create the impression that we spectators are
participants in and the agents of war? A sense of alienation is
continuously and cumulatively induced also in other ways,
such as Vladimír Franz’s music, which no doubt deliberately
resembles the songs of Brecht’s collaborator Kurt Weill
(referencing is moreover part of the essence of Kraus’s poetics).
Events seem to have been shifted into the era of the Second
World War, and, judging by the style of rendition of some of the
songs, into the milieu of Hollywood’s elite. The musical style
of the final song, sung in English, evokes the image of America
as remoulded in emigration by Brecht in his works. Once again
the war as a media image and this time also as stylised in art.
The journalist in her gauzy evening gown repeatedly asks the
bomber pilot, ‘So how does it feel when you do that?’, while
she sensually presses up against him. So war can be sexy too,
though post-traumatic (pilot) feelings aren’t like that in reality.
The third part, which German director Alexander
Riemenschneider builds out of the aesthetics of embarrassment,
is in theatrical terms the most successful of the three. This time
the spectators are sitting in the balcony and the actors on the
stage below and on the platform put on a school assembly,
during which the curtain is opened and closed again and
again by hand, so that sometimes they are reciting their little
sentimental or euphoric ‘poems’ from behind it, which makes
things all the more amusing. Most of the time, however, the
actors stand perfectly in line, bow, or wait persistently for
applause, which then comes at the wrong time, as it takes the
spectators a moment to realise what’s expected of them. The
recitations are punctuated by cynical ‘grown-up’ comments
about executions of fourteen-year-olds, the presentation of
a ‘nifty’ trench, an advertisement for a pillow intended for
heroes and kneaded dumplings. Meanwhile, from time to time
— and almost at risk to the actors — the War Reporter (Ivana
Uhlířová)and Nörgler (Jiří Černý) pop out from under the edge
of the balcony face to face with the spectators and suggestively
and pointlessly ask: ‘How do you feel?’ This part is evidently
intended to reflect the seemingly ‘innocuous’ but thus all the
more absurd ‘peacemaking’ propaganda from the communist
era.
How to sum up the evening as a whole? It presented a hypedup, rhetorical, artistic yet deliberately primitive, and always
propagandist rehashing of war and that is exactly what Kraus
intended. It took us to the various contexts in which war is born.
It is only then fought on the battlefield.
Karl Kraus: The Last Days of Mankind. Directed by Katharina
Schmitt, Thomas Zielinski, Alexander Riemenschneider,
translation Hanuš Karlach, adaptation Viktorie Knotková,
dramaturgy Viktorie Knotková and Vojtěch Bárta, set design
Andrej Ďurik, costumes Zuzana Přidalová, music Vladimír Franz.
Prague Chamber Theatre – Comedy Theatre, Prague, premiere
22 / 4 / 2011.
Garbage, the City, .
and Death
C
omedy Theatre (Divadlo Komedie), now in its final
season, staged Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s play Garbage,
the City, and Death (Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod), in
a Czech translation by Zuzana Augustová, adapted and directed
by Dušan Pařízek. Even in this latest production Comedy Theatre
has stuck to the course of exploring its ‘special’ themes. Once
again we are presented with a vision of the city as a labyrinth,
where the rawness and brutality of reality meld with the equally
harsh inner world of the individual characters. Death is always
present, as are overt and covert racism, homophobia, and, at
the other end, the neuroses of people who are trying to come to
terms with the reality that surrounds them.
Fassbinder’s controversial play made it onto the screen as
well as the stage when it was written in the 1970s, with a film
/13
Jana Soprová
of scenes and even just monologues Pařízek puts together
a picture of a world in which there truly is nothing to cheer about,
nothing but total alienation and the destruction of the human
soul, the splendour and misery of a society in which success,
but not happiness, is determined by economic prosperity. The
groping search for personal identity and the longing to find
a kindred soul founder on a fatal inability to experience emotion.
Pařízek heightened the forcefulness of the play through its set
design, in which the spectators sit at the same tables as the
characters in a circular cabaret seating arrangement. At first
all we see are flickering candles on a darkened stage, a vision
of a kind of global cemetery. When the lights go up on the
stage we see Romi (Gabriela Míčová) suspended on aerial
silks in the centre of the space. She assails the audience with
ÙRainer Werner Fassbinder, Garbage, the City, and Death / Prague Chambre Theatre – Comedy Theatre, 2011
Direction and set design Dušan David Pařízek / Costumes Kamila Polívková > Photo Kamila Polívková
version titled Shadow of Angels in which the author himself
starred and introduced his cult actress Hanna Schygulla.
The story, which is closely tied up with the time and place in
which it originated and the historically grounded tensions in
the relationship between Germans and Jews, has in Dušan
Pařízek’s adaptation been brought closer to present-day Czech
society it literally cuts to the quick thanks to the addition of some
new monologues. In the character of Romi the prostitute, an
object of lust to her customers, but also a kind of confidant, and
in the other characters, whether it is the successful Jew, aware
of his ambivalent position, the emotionally unstable pimp, or
the homophobic nationalist who makes his living as a cabaret
transvestite, Pařízek seeks to illustrate the wretchedness
involved in trying to survive, wherein everyone, even if through
gritted teeth, sells himself or herself every day. Out of a mosaic
the bitter words of a prostitute who is nothing more than an
object of pleasure for others to use. She is a piece of material, an
inanimate thing slowly gravitating towards the instrument of its
liberation — death. In the next episode we meet Müller (Martin
Pechlát), a proud nationalist who takes the audience off guard
with a populist tirade about the purity of race that with painful
accuracy takes aim at the subconscious of the Czech public.
However ironic the nationalistic call he issues to the Czechs
sounds, it still sends a chill down your spine. Another character
is the Wealthy Jew (Martin Finger), a cold, rational merchant
who uses his unusual position (political correctness allows him
to do business, but does not spare him from being envied and
hated by the others). Oskar (Jiří Černý), his young friend and
minion, possesses a statuesque beauty that has the power to
charm but also aloof coldness that wounds. On the other side
14/
ÙRainer Werner Fassbinder, Garbage, the City, and Death / Prague Chambre Theatre – Comedy Theatre, 2011 / Direction and set design Dušan David
Pařízek / Costumes Kamila Polívková > Photo Kamila Polívková
of the barrier is the emotionally unstable pimp Franz (Stanislav
Majer), who vents his sense of inferiority on Romi with manic
cruelty.
Martin Pechlát as Müller, shapes his character out of the
contrast between his shiny transvestite performances (with
a delightful Shirley Bassey-style execution of the song ‘I Am
What I Am’) and the intolerant, violent backstage behaviour to
which he subjects his disabled wife (Dana Poláková) and his
step-daughter Romi. It is natural that the only being that still has
some feelings left is the one that carries the story of death to its
climax while suspended from the ceiling on white aerial silks,
creating the impression that she is being carried off by angels. As
Romi, Gabriela Míčová gave a bold and psychologically powerful
performance, but beyond that demonstrated her exceptional
physical fitness, courage, and a surprising acrobatic ability.
This forceful production, which paints a chillingly depressing
vision of the present day, will shock many theatregoers with its
theme and language, even to the point of endurance, but it really
is a must see. The spectator will again appreciate the cohesion
of the company that has taken shape under Pařízek’s tenure.
Every acting performance is a perfect and even chameleonic
transformation and fits perfectly with the overall concept of
the production so that as a whole it functions like a well-oiled
machine.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Garbage, the City, and Death.
Adaptation, direction and set design Dušan D. Pařízek, translation
Zuzana Augustová, costumes Kamila Polívková. Prague Chamber
Theatre – Comedy Theatre, Prague, Czech premiere 15 / 12 / 2012.
15 Years
of Theatre
in Dlouhá Street
Kamila Černá
Paul Claudel, The Break of Noon
Theatre in Dlouhá Street, Prague
2011 / Directed by Hana Burešová
Set design Martin Černý / Costumes
Kateřina Štefková > Photo Martin Špelda
16/
15 Years of Theatre in Dlouhá Street
Theatre in Dlouhá Street (Divadlo v Dlouhé) is one of the most popular and most critically praised theatres
in Prague and in late 2011 it marked its fifteenth anniversary. It has something to celebrate even without
this anniversary – The Break of Noon, directed at Dlouhá by Hana Burešová, won the Alfréd Radok Award
for best production of 2011, and polls of critics identified Theatre in Dlouhá Street as one of the three most
successful Czech theatres and ranked three of its productions among the top ten productions of that year.
ÙIrena Dousková, Onegin Was a Russky / Theatre in Dlouhá Street, Prague 2008 / Directed by Jan Borna / Set design Jaroslav Milfajt > Photo Martin Špelda
T
heatre in Dlouhá Street was founded in 1996, when two
acting ensembles joined forces: one came with director
Hana Burešová and dramaturg Štěpán Otčenášek from
Labyrint Theatre (Divadlo Labyrint), the other with director
Jan Borna from Dejvice Theatre (Dejvické divadlo). The newly
established company began performing on the premises
of a former youth and children’s theatre, and it received
a commission from Prague city hall that at least a part of its
repertoire be aimed at young people. And that’s what has
happened – with surprising results: the productions that
Theatre in Dlouhá Street staged for children and youths were
hits also with adult audiences (for example, How I Got Lost /
Jak jsem se ztratil, directed by Borna, or adaptations of Terry
Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters and Maskerade, directed by Hana
Burešová).
Throughout the theatre’s existence Hana Burešová and Jan
Borna have been its key artistic figures. They both started out
working as directors in the second half of the 1980s, and they are
often mentioned in the same breath as members of the generation
who in the 1990s made a strong mark on the Czech stage and
shared a resistance to casual naturalism and bland ‘TV-style’
acting, which these directors challenged by asserting a sharply
defined concept, playfulness, and stylised acting. Borna’s and
Burešová’s directing styles have all this, but they differ from
the most distinctive directors of ‘the 1990s generation’ (Lébl,
Pitínský, Morávek) in how they approach the dramatic material
they work with. Instead of a free, postmodernist treatment of
the text, they typically respect the original and create faithful
interpretations.
Both of these two core directors at Theatre in Dlouhá Street
tap into the musical, singing, and physical talents of the actors
in their work and employ artistic and musical metaphors. Their
productions often go beyond straight drama and move towards
genres like alternative, musical, puppet, or cabaret theatre.
There are two perceptible directions to Hana Burešová’s work.
Besides comedy, in which she likes to use elements of commedia
dell´arte, allusions to theatre’s carnival tradition, and clever
situation humour, she also makes sophisticated, dramaturgically
innovative works a regular focus. In 2007 Burešová staged
Seneca’s Phaedra for the first time in the Czech Republic, and
one year later Calderón’s The Surgeon of His Honour (El médico
de su honra). These productions were reviewed in previous
volumes of Czech Theatre. Her latest work, Paul Claudel’s The
Break of Noon, is the subject of a separate review in this volume
by Jana Patočková. What all these productions have in common
is a directorial interpretation that respects the author but boldly
draws out the text’s potential, as well as excellent performances
from actors given consistent guidance from the director. Helena
Dvořáková, the female lead in The Break of Noon, ‘production
of the year’ in 2011, won all three of the country’s top acting
awards for her performance as Ysé (Alfréd Radok Award, Thalia
Award, Theatre News Award), and the production’s set designer
Martin Černý won the Alfréd Radok Award in the stage design
category.
Jan Borna has mainly become known for his ‘family’
productions that feature a strong musical component. His
‘Christmas musical’ How I Got Lost or a Little Christmas Tale
(Jak jsem se ztratil aneb Malá vánoční povídka, 2000) told the
story of a five-year-old boy who gets lost and wanders through
Prague one Christmas Eve in the mid-1960s. Here Borna used
a children’s story as a backdrop, against which he brilliantly
captured the atmosphere of that time, full of hope, joy, and
music, subsequently cut short by the Soviet invasion.
Borna took a similar approach in a later production, Onegin
Was a Russky (Oněgin byl Rusák, 2008), where he again uses
/17
ÙJess Borgeson – Adam Long – Daniel Singer, The Collected Works of
William Shakespeare (abridged) / Theatre in Dlouhá Street, Prague 2008
Directed by Jan Borna / Set design Jaroslav Milfajt > Photo Martin Špelda
ÚArnošt Goldflam, From Hitler’s Kitchen
Theatre in Dlouhá Street, Prague 2009 / Directed by Jan Borna
Set design Jaroslav Milfajt > Photo Martin Špelda
18/
pop songs and details from the 1980s to evoke the years of harsh
‘normalisation’, which turned people into cowards and buckpassers. This time he looks back on those years through the eyes
of several secondary school students, whose innate resistance
to the official world of adults is mixed with a resistance to the
obtuseness and odiousness of the political regime.
Another big success was the production of The Collected Works
of William Shakespeare (abridged) by Jess Borgeson, Adam
Long and Daniel Singer (2008). In Borna’s production, more
ÙArnošt Goldflam, From Hitler’s Kitchen
Theatre in Dlouhá Street, Prague 2009 / Directed by Jan Borna
Set design Jaroslav Milfajt > Photo Martin Špelda
ÚLadislav Stroupežnický, Our Swaggerers / Theatre in Dlouhá Street,
Prague 2011 / Directed by Jan Borna / Set design Jaroslav Milfajt
> Photo Martin Špelda
important than the amusing ‘fly-by’ given to Shakespeare’s works
was his portrait of the base mechanism of theatre entertainment
pursued by three actors, who take their Shakespearian show
to every possible stop on the road. Especially praiseworthy is
the precisely escalated verbal and situation humour, the fond
detachment of the actors (Jan Vondráček, Miroslav Táborský
and Martin Matějka) and how convincingly and fervently they
maintain their race with time (they genuinely have to manage to
perform 37 Shakespearean plays in two hours). Also remarkable
is the directness with which the protagonists turn to the audience
and incorporate them without coerciveness into the play.
Among Borna’s audience hits in the past five years is his
production of From Hitler’s Kitchen (U Hitlerů v kuchyni, 2009),
a farce by current Czech playwright and theatre artist Arnošt
Goldflam. The text (and its stage rendition) uses humour in
places where it doesn’t usually pay off to do so: it combines
the trivial and the tragic, sentimentality and dark humour,
real historical facts and fiction. We follow the Rise and Fall of
the Third Reich and its Führer literally from the kitchen table.
Characters representing what were once Europe’s movers
and shakers are here transported into the small-town
world of comfortable certitudes, where a piece of cake with
one’s afternoon coffee is an assuring sign that everything is as
it should be – regardless of the fact that millions of people out
there are dying. Nazi celebrities chat in a comically exaggerated,
domestically bourgeois style about baking, knitting and family
life. The director moreover accentuates the sham small-town
idyll depicted in Goldflam’s text by adding operetta melodies
and lets the author himself (who had already worked with Borna
as an actor on several previous productions) offer humorous
commentary on the action from the stage apron several times in
between scenes. Goldflam’s words to the audience point out the
dangerous ease with which it is possible to surrender to the selfsatisfied feeling of domestic warmth and bliss and how easily
an alluring sentiment can become the ‘main stream’, whether
in music, or a worldview. With their risky ‘boundary pushing’
the creators of the production put together great political theatre
that plays amusingly with low genres and combines dark laughs
with harsh comedy. From Hitler’s Kitchen is, however, also
a warning – against the lunacy of Fascism, certainly, but also
perhaps even more so against the inclination to hole up in the
warmth of one’s own kitchen, where we are being driven not
just by the growing number of celebrity cooks, but above all by
our own resignation and complacency.
Resignation and indifference are prominent themes in
/19
comes about, and on more serious issues they powerlessly
throw up their hands in a wordless gesture that says ‘what can
you do?’. Borna’s production is the portrait of an age in which
big, substantial issues are somehow getting lost and almost no
one misses them. The village swaggerers muddle on merrily
through their small-minded world. It is hard to find a single
positive hero in the whorl of colourful village types. An entire
Gogolian world wanders down the slanted stage that serves as
the set, and it is apparent that even the successful resolution to
the conflict will in no way alter the life of the village, and the
local councillors will go on ruffling each other’s feathers and
ÙDennis Kelly, Love and Money / Theatre in Dlouhá Street, Prague 2011 / Directed by Jan Mikulášek / Set design Marek Cpin > Photo Martin Špelda
another of Borna’s productions, Our Swaggerers (Naši furianti)
by Ladislav Stroupežnický (2011), a classic 19th-century
Czech drama. The play’s simple plot follows two villagers
(one honourable and one dishonourable) as they compete for
the job of village watchman, embroiling the entire village and
even the local councillors in the process. The Czech village
portrayed in Borna’s production reflects the moral apathy and
ignorance of the present day and alludes to the oftentimes
grotesque features of Czech political life. Two typical gestures
characterise the villagers: at the slightest offence or petty
incitement they abruptly strip off their shirts and prepare for
a ‘fight’, which ultimately (as they themselves know) never
throwing up their hands as they pass the buck. This too is a way
of looking at Czech reality today and judging by the response
from audiences and critics it is a well-founded way of looking
at it.
Two of the three productions at Theatre in Dlouhá Street
that ended up among the Czech ‘top ten’ of 2011, The Break of
Noon and Our Swaggerers, have already been mentioned in this
article. The third was directed by guest director Jan Mikulášek,
who in recent years has won a reputation as one of the most
promising talents in Czech theatre, and who regularly draws
in stage designer Marek Cpin to collaborate and co-create his
productions. At Theatre in Dlouhá they together staged Dennis
20/
Kelly’s brutal comedy Love and Money (2011), which comprises
several cleverly intertwined stories, and the tale is moreover
told chronologically in reverse. Each episode of the production
radiates a strange tension, generated by the almost overly
stylised characters, whose phony social facades mask their real
worlds inside. The rear wall of the stage is covered with a lineup of illuminated, large-format photographs of the characters in
the play, and in the middle of the performance they are reversed,
at which point their sexy smiles are exchanged for expressions
of frustration. The combination of outstanding performances
and original visual artistry results in a production that touches
on the painful moments in the life of society and each of us. This portrait of Theatre in Dlouhá would not be complete
without mentioning the two festivals that it hosts each year
and its series of stage readings. It organises Children in Dlouhá
for young children, where it presents the most interesting
productions by theatres outside Prague, and since 2007 it has
been the site of a theatre festival for teenagers titled 13+. Over
the eight years they have been held the series of stage readings
at Theatre in Dlouhá has introduced many new, forgotten, or
undiscovered texts. Some of them were created in cooperation
with the periodical World and Theatre (Svět a divadlo) or
specifically with its editor Karel Král as their director (e.g. Stan
Has a Problem / Standa má problém, The Road to Bugulma
/ Cesta do Bugulmy and Communism / Komunismus). An
important portion of these stage readings are Slovak plays and
adaptations in which the performances are by Slovak actors
from Theatre in Dlouhá who otherwise perform in Czech in the
theatre’s regular productions.
All these activities have helped to forge a bond between the
artists and actors at Dlouhá and their audiences. In most of the
productions at Dlouhá it is apparent how in tune the artists
are with each other and how much pleasure they derive from
performing together. Collective input into creating a work and
arriving at its final form should be an essential part of every
good theatre, but rarely is this creative collectiveness and unity
as pleasingly evident as it is here. I firmly hope that at Dlouhá it
endures in the decades to come.
ÙPaul Claudel, The Break of Noon / Theatre in Dlouhá Street, Prague 2011 / Directed by Hana Burešová / Set design Martin Černý
Costumes Kateřina Štefková > Photo Martin Špelda
The Break of Noon
/21
Jana Patočková
D
irector Hana Burešová not only works with a regular
repertoire oriented towards wider audiences, she also
systematically cultivates her own concept of poetic
theatre which speaks to a narrower audience. In the Czech
theatre scene today, where the importance of poetry has been
stifled, staging Paul Claudel’s The Break of Noon (Partage de
midi; Theatre in Dlouhá Street / Divadlo v Dlouhé) is perhaps
even more difficult than were Burešová’s productions of
Seneca’s Phaedra and Calderón’s The Surgeon of His Honour (El
médico de su honra). The director did not try to superficially
modernise the play and left the characters in their turn-of-the20th-century costumes, which she rightly felt was important
given the context of the story. The result is that the analogies
with today in the dialogue stand out more, and we see the
play’s characters as nascent ‘modern’ people.
The production relies on the old theatre arts triad of text, set,
and actor to achieve its effects. Claudel put his four characters
alone ‘in the cosmos’, and the production design accommodated
the demands of this work in a purely theatrical way: by using
the entire space of the theatre as the play’s set (with a set design
by Martin Černý). The spectators are seated in the bosom of
the stage, so there are deliberate limits on their number. They
face the vast space of the auditorium covered with drapery that
is given a plasticity through changes in lighting, movement,
and the use of projections. Intimate scenes are performed on
the apron, close to the spectators. Others are taken out onto
the ground floor or the balcony, indicating the distance of the
characters in outer space.
The production is centred on the actors, who support the
full weight of the task at hand — four actors, deeply focused,
who are so able to master the language, space, and action
that they hold the audience in constant suspense. Gesture is
employed economically, and thus acquires added meaning as
a way of underscoring words or bringing a scene to climax.
Sometimes the gestures are soft intimations, other times grand
and figurative, like the scene in which the lovers consummate
their union. As a result, the raw reality of the bitter life and
death struggle of a man, portrayed in the final scene, is all the
more powerful. Not only do the actors cope brilliantly with the
poet’s thicket of figurative language and its rhythms, which in
itself is rare today, but above all they manage to persuasively
embody his characters. Helena Dvořáková (Ysé), who is the
centre of the action, is able to present a fascinating array of faces.
She gradually unveils from behind her coquetry and ‘femme
fatale’ pose the anxiety of a beautiful woman who’s reached
the ‘noon hour’ in an evaporating life and a strong individual
who with no regrets throws aside everything she has ever
known to satisfy an unconditional passion. Ultimately she
is a spent woman, who avenges betrayal with silence, but
brings about reconciliation in the final vision. Opposite her
22/
is Mesa (Marek Němec), the youthful,
Tristan, resisting
enchantment by adopting an evangelistic pose but is proved
a hypocrite by his physical insecurity. He throws himself into
the arms of Ysé with an awkwardness that reappears later
in his frenzied struggle with a stronger opponent. This kind
of passionate persuasiveness is also found in his hymn-like
confessions. The foursome of main characters is rounded
out by Ysé’s husband, aristocrat De Ciz (Miroslav Táborský),
an engineer and unsuccessful businessman, whose smug
smiling face indicates how abidingly self-delusional he is,
and Amalric (Miroslav Hanuš), that ‘American’ type of manly
lover, a realist, and an adventurous ‘soldier of fortune’. All
the characters are doomed, their death announced at the start
of the voyage. Only those whose death is the price paid for
‘forbidden love’ are given to see and understand the meaning
of sacrifice and to attain reconciliation.
The success of this play by Paul Claudel, who, despite having
been included several times in the repertoire of a theatre,
never secured much lasting popularity with the public, is
testimony to the production’s extraordinary qualities and the
public’s growing interest in the spiritual questions it poses.
Paul Claudel: The Break of Noon. Adaptation Hana Burešová
and Štěpán Otčenášek, directed by Hana Burešová, set design
Martin Černý, costumes Kateřina Štefková. Theatre in Dlouhá
Street, Prague, premiere 12 / 4 / 2011.
15 Years of the Theatre in Dlouhá Street
The Phenomenon of Reduta Theatre in Brno
/23
The Phenomenon
of Reduta Theatre
in Brno
Luboš Mareček – Jitka Nováková
Atrium of Reduta Theatre > Photo Luděk Svítil
24/
Reduta Theatre in Brno has been through big changes in the past decade, not just on the outside – its extensive
and exceptionally well-executed renovations – and but also inside, with a revamping of how the theatre
operates, its method of work, and its repertoire. Reduta, which is one of the three stages of the National
Theatre in Brno (Národní divadlo Brno), has in the past five years become a bold, unique, and indispensable
landmark on Brno’s theatrical and cultural map.
T
he building that Reduta occupies today has a long and
complex history, in particular architecturally, as it was
given frequent renovations and additions over the course
of several centuries. It originated in the first half of the 17th
century out of the fusion of two buildings into one enclosed,
single-story complex, which was already the same size as the
Reduta building today, and which had previously been used to
host important visitors to the city. Theatre productions were
already an occasional event at this site from the 1660s, but it
was only in 1733 that a separate amphitheatre with typical box
seating and a narrowing ‘perspective’ stage was built in the east
wing of the complex. In 1767 Reduta was the site of the first Brno
performance of the Czech-language Enamoured Watchman
(Zamilovaný ponocný), and that same year an eleven-yearold Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart performed a concert here with
his sister Nanerl. (To commemorate this important event, in
2008 a statue of Mozart, created by top Czech sculptor Kurt
Gebauer, was unveiled in front of the theatre.) This era of the
theatre’s history is also associated with the name of Emanuel
Schikaneder, the librettist of Mozart’s The Magic Flute and
director of the theatre from 1807 to 1809.
In 1785 and 1786 the building was damaged by fire. It was
restored, and was then laid waste again during the Napoleonic
Wars and in the so-called Fourth French-Austrian War. Many
prominent contemporary architects and artists had a hand in the
reconstructions that followed, among them Lorenzo, Vincenzo
and Antonio Sacchetti, members of a renowned Italian family of
painters, decorators, and scenic artists.
After another fire in 1870 the theatre hall was not restored,
ÙAuditorium of Reduta Theatre > Photo archives
/25
and in the 20th century theatre performances took place in the
former dance hall in the west section of the building. Until 1919
Reduta was used by the German theatre in Brno, after which
time it regularly alternated performance days with the Czech
National Theatre. Reduta became especially popular with the
Czech public after the end of the Second World War, from which
time and up until it was condemned and closed in 1993 it was
used by the operetta company of the National Theatre in Brno
(Národní divadlo Brno, NDB). In 2005 operetta was added to the
programme of Brno City Theatre and after extensive renovations
Reduta reopened that same year and was intended to become
a kind of laboratory for studio projects of the NDB’s three
companies (drama, opera, and ballet).
Reduta’s current architectural design is the work of the Brnobased architectural studio D.R.N.H., v.o.s., and was created by
a team made up of Antonín Novák, Petr Valenta, Radovan Smejkal
and Eduard Štěrbák, with contributions from Klára Michálková
and Karel Spáčil and collaboration on the theatre area from
Miroslav Melena. The renovation work, which was carried
out between 2002 and 2005, sensitively integrated modern
elements with the surviving original architecture, returned the
theatre hall to the east wing, and restored the theatre’s social
and representative functions. One major architectural change
was the addition of a steel and glass roof structure over the
original courtyard arcades and the introduction of two lifts
and their equipment into the inner atrium. A restaurant and
a café were opened on the ground floor. The crowning piece of
renovation work is the decorative painting on the walls of the
Mozart Hall, the vaulted ceilings of the café, and the artistically
designed terrazzo in the atrium created by Petr Kvíčala. Modern
architecture and design thus lie behind the surviving baroque
mantle. The building is open all day; people come in for theatre,
but also for art, refreshments, or to attend various kinds of
social events, which are organised in the theatre hall and the
ceremonial Mozart Hall as well as in the cellar stages and the
gallery.
All of the NDB’s companies still stage productions in
the building, but since 2007 Reduta has had its own artistic
management. Artistic director Petr Štědroň and dramaturg Dora
Viceníková have worked determinedly and steadily to build
Reduta’s new image, basing it not just on the exceptional history
and tradition of the building, but also on progressive dramaturgy.
Štědroň has transformed Reduta into something quite
different from what it was before; into something that reflects
contemporary theatre in a unique way, either through its own
productions, the modern dramaturgy and aesthetic qualities
of which are on a European level, or by hosting outstanding
theatre productions from other theatres in the Czech Republic.
‘My objective was to bring in innovative techniques – but also
to steer clear of self-serving experiments, arbitrary decisions,
posturing. An important part of my artistic management is
creative autonomy, the possibility for contrast and a progressive
equivalent to the “permanent” -drama, ballet, and opera
productions of the NDB, is how Štědroň summed it up.
And under Štědroň’s leadership Reduta is truly becoming
a vibrant island on the cultural map of Brno. Few established
domestic theatre houses can boast a repertoire made up solely
of Czech premieres and first-time productions of texts and
librettos. Theatre events originate here that go on to collect arts
awards and travel around the country and even abroad. None of
this is customary for Bohemian and Moravian theatre artists. The
company also regularly does guest performances at prestigious
Prague theatres such as the New Stage of the National Theatre
(Nová scéna Národního divadla), Theatre in Dlouhá Street
(Divadlo v Dlouhé), and Švanda Theatre (Švandovo Divadlo).
In recent years it has taken part in all the Czech international
theatre showcases, such as the Pilsen Theatre Festival (Festival
Divadlo), the Theatre of European Regions (Divadlo evropských
regionů) in Hradec Králové, Encounters (Setkání/Stretnutie) in
Zlín, and the Without Borders Festival (Festival Bez Hranic) in
Český Těšín. It has also performed abroad (Stuttgart, Brussels,
Vienna, Bratislava, Cieszyn).
ÙBuilding of Reduta Theatre > Photo Jana Hallová
ÙAuditorium of Reduta Theatre > Photo archives
26/
Today Reduta genuinely does serve as a notional antipode to
the two large theatre houses in Brno, namely Janáček Theatre
(Janáčkovo divadlo) and Mahen Theatre (Mahenovo divadlo),
which use the traditional operational structure of a theatre with
permanent drama, opera, and ballet companies. Reduta has
no permanent acting ensemble and no permanent director, yet
despite this Petr Štědroň and Dora Viceníková are trying to chart
their own course. And it’s working; the artistic management
initiates Czech premieres of stage adaptations of exceptional
film and literary works or original creative projects. They bring
a staging of the famous Houellebecq novel Les Particules
élémentaires (see the review in Czech Theatre 26), staged in Brno
as the Czech premiere. Mikulášek reworked this philosophical
novel by one of France’s most controversial writers of the past
two decades into a chilling production that demonstrated onstage and in an understated manner the utter obliteration of basic
social values and human relations and the gratuitous worship
of sex. The production was dominated by the performances of
Václav Vašák and Jiří Vyorálek as life- and sex-weary brothers
Michel and Bruno.
ÙMichel Houellebecq, Elementary Particles / National Theatre Brno – Reduta Theatre 2010 / Directed by Jan Mikulášek
Set design and costumes Marek Cpin > Photo Jana Hallová
in bold directors who either are already established figures in
Czech theatre or have the reputation of being newcomers with
a distinctive creative aesthetic approach to theatre and the
text. Four years ago the aforementioned duo of Štědroň and
Viceníková regarded one such director to be Jan Mikulášek, and
now they coddle him at Reduta and have branded him one of
its ‘core artists’. Mikulášek’s work has won enormous respect
and recognition from both critics and the general public. Other
directors who have worked here in the past decade include
Daniel Špinar, J. A. Pitínský and Jiří Pokorný.
In 2010 one of Reduta’s most remarkable productions was
At the end of the same year Reduta gambled on an original
title of its own and was right to do so. Mikulášek’s production
of V+W: Letters (Korespondence V+W; Czech premiere
5 November 2010) made a victory tour around the country and
won unprecedented accolades for its home stage, one of the
most important signs of which was its placing second among
nominees for the 2010 Alfréd Radok Award for production of
the year. This extraordinary stage project, composed out of the
letters exchanged between the interwar comic duo Jan Werich
and Jiří Voskovec (the script was written by Reduta’s dramaturg
Dora Viceníková), was a remarkable spectacle that utilised the
movement, dance, and at times even acrobatic abilities of the
actors. The director managed in a relaxed but effective way to
resurrect and reference the playful, Dadaistic environment of
the early years of the Liberated Theatre (Osvobozené divadlo),
where the two famous clowns started out. The production also
came across as a bitter reminder of a bipolar world divided by
the Iron Curtain, and ultimately also as a raw but extraordinary
examination of the difficult lives of two men whom fate had
separated but who could not live apart. The production also
drew on the complex and subtly nuanced performances of
/27
with stories, data, information, and trivia. Set in a strange
scientific conference, with a repulsive visual reference to the
onset of normalisation in Czechoslovakia in the early 1970s,
the production turned into a fascinating spectacle, even though
the original book has de facto no theatrical potential. While
in Europeana Mikulášek did not achieve the kind of stylistic
seamlessness or emotiveness as in V+W: Letters, the production
was still an interesting and legitimate mastery of material that
others would have cut their teeth on.
Reduta never ceases to seek new dramaturgical and directorial
ÙJiří Voskovec – Jan Werich – Dora Viceníková, V+W: Letters / National Theatre Brno – Reduta Theatre 2010 / Directed by Jan Mikulášek
Set design Svatopluk Sládeček / Costumes Marek Cpin > Photo Viktor Kronbauer
the superbly guided actors: slender and elegant Václav Vašák
as Voskovec, Jiří Vyorálek, with a visibly padded paunch, as
Werich, and Gabriela Mikulková as Werich’s solicitous but
unstable wife Zdenička. The forenamed gentlemen are among
the performers at Reduta who are helping build its theatre
reputation.
Mikulášek scored again with his production Europeana
(Czech premiere 9 June 2011), inspired by Patrik Ouředník’s book
of the same title. In his production Mikulášek created an ironic,
searing commentary on 20th-century history while retaining
the peculiar kaleidoscopic style of Ouředník’s work, overflowing
ideas. Talented director Daniel Špinar staged his own adaptation
of Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses under the title
Valmont (premiere 4 November 2011). His ‘miniature’ version,
in which there are only three characters, is an almost formalistic
example of modern theatre. Špinar and Mikulášek will also be
directing work at Reduta in the coming season, which will again
be offering exclusively original, novel projects. In November
2012 Špinar’s Kafka Cabaret (Kabaret Kafka) will be devoted to
the work of the famous German-language writer from Prague.
A collage of short stories, numerous fragments, excerpts from
three unfinished novels, diaries, and correspondence will be
28/
freely combined with the themes that the outstanding writer
dealt with most often. Premiering in early April 2013 is The
Golden Sixties or the Melancholy of Pavel J. (Zlatá šedesátá
aneb Melancholie Pavla J.), in which director Jan Mikulášek
will focus on a key figure in Czech film of the 1960s, director,
screenwriter, and signatory of Charter 77, Pavel Juráček. His
diaries were voted Book of the Year in 2004 in a poll in Lidové
noviny newspaper and won the Litera 2004 publishing prize.
Mikulášek’s fascination with Czech literature and key figures of
Czech culture thus continues. June 2013 will see the premiere
of Gourmets (Gurmáni), a work created by Mikulášek and
Viceníková and directed by Mikulášek that will explore from
various angles the themes of food, drinking, dining, and gaining
weight.
Reduta’s strategy has been to vary the stage formats in its
programme. Traditional performances alternate with the
unique talk show of Tomáš Matonoha, and its annual events
include a masquerade ball, combining music, theatre, dance,
and singing, as well as wigs, masks, and white stockings
reminiscent of Mozart’s time. (One meaning of the word
‘reduta’ is masquerade ball or building with a dance hall.)
Reduta Theatre also serves as an exhibition space. The regular
exhibition activities on every floor of the building focus on
works by exciting contemporary artists and especially students.
Reduta exhibits the graduation work of students from the art
academies in Brno, Prague, and Bratislava and from the fields of
painting, sculpture, graphic arts, video, and multimedia. It also
thinks about its potential future audiences with performances
aimed at children.
Every year Reduta organises the Redfest festival, inviting into
Reduta exceptional drama projects from around the country and
neighbouring states.
The rich variety of Reduta’s here-named activities inside and
outside the sphere of theatre all come together to make up its
artistic programme, which refuses to follow a mainstream path:
a dramaturgically interesting repertoire, new original works and
Czech premieres, often provocative themes that force audiences
to take part in the performance and take in more sophisticated
forms of communication. What from a marketing perspective
might have seemed imprudent or even self-destructive has after
several years of conceptual work at Reduta been positively
received not just by critics but also by a growing part of the
public. If Reduta continues in its tireless pursuit of outstanding
dramaturgy and sophisticated productions, even despite the
inauspicious economic conditions that exist today, it will be able
to secure itself also in the future a special place on the cultural
map of (not just) the City of Brno.
ÚPatrik Ouředník, Europeana / National Theatre Brno – Reduta Theatre 2011 / Directed by Jan Mikulášek / Set design and costumes Marek Cpin
> Photo KIVA
Europeana – Laughter from Hell
/29
Richard Erml
ÙPatrik Ouředník, Europeana / National Theatre Brno – Reduta Theatre 2011 / Directed by Jan Mikulášek / Set design and costumes Marek Cpin
> Photo KIVA
A
t Reduta Theatre (Divadlo Reduta) resident dramaturg
Dora Viceníková and director Jan Mikulášek have
been attempting the impossible, staging Houllebecq
(Les Particules élémentaires), the intimate letters exchanged
between two clowns (V+W: Letters / Korespondence V+W),
and the post-modern prose of Patrik Ouředník, Europeana.
Where they found the courage to embark on this bold path is
astounding, but with each new production they go further and
further.
The resulting stage rendition here has little in common with
traditional dramatisations or adaptations of a literary text. In
the case of Europeana one can speak of quality made larger,
like what we find in a masterful musical rendition of a work
of poetry or in a ballet choreographed to a well-known piece
of music. In his book Patrik Ouředník attempts to compose
a history of the 20th century in a way that makes some sense
out of it. He tosses statistics, contemporary quotations, bits of
stories, historical facts, ironic ingredients, and a few ice cubes of
paradox into a large shaker, and then mixes up this monstrous
cocktail of illusions, ideas, and crimes with a devilishly cynical
smile that is not without sadness.
Mikulášek has audiences sip from this cocktail, subtly at first,
in small swigs. When the production starts there are three female
and five male actors in attendance at an imaginary conference
about the 20th century in the middle of a mathaler-like lavish
set, and with their mouths they create the illusion of a train in
motion. Immediately what comes to your mind is the oppressive
image of trains headed towards the front or the transports to
30/
ÙPatrik Ouředník, Europeana / National Theatre Brno – Reduta Theatre 2011 / Directed by Jan Mikulášek / Set design and costumes Marek Cpin
> Photo KIVA
concentration camps, but you don’t know why. Perhaps there is
that kind of gloom in the actors’ expressions? Or perhaps every
even slightly sensitive participant in the previous century carries
some awareness of its horrors, so it is enough just to tap the
surface and the visions unfold on top of each other? The director
works masterfully with that portion of human memory that,
like an iceberg, lies below the surface, using elements ranging
from sounds and musical themes to sketches and expressive
physical actions. He sparks the imagination of the viewer using
the method of association. While it is not always possible to
decipher these associations with certainty (e.g. a speaker who
for laughing and crying is unable to say a single word), the
effects are always emotive. Ouředník’s text, mostly filled with
horrifying information (the number of fallen soldiers calculated
in kilometres: 15,508 km at an average cadaver length of 172 cm),
is recited by the actors with steely calm, and as a result the text
evokes a feeling of chilling laughter from the hell that people
prepared for themselves while they were alive.
The actors form a strange mercurial mass, which either splatters
out into anonymous individuals or quickly locks together to
form a single cluster of bodies that is either furiously leaping or
masturbating. To describe the individual performances would
be misleading, as their fascinating strength comes from these
collective variations; and also from the sensitivity with which they
together with the director are able to create emotionally escalating
images. The image of bodies falling and collapsing onto the floor
over and over and over again is a suggestive metaphor for the
hopeless madness and ruination that humanity has willingly and
repeatedly given in to – and not just during wartime. No one can put
together the meaning of the 20th century, but this Brno production
has at least hinted at the futility of our attempts to understand it.
Patrik Ouředník: Europeana. Dramatisation by Dora Viceníková
and Jan Mikulášek, director Jan Mikulášek, set design and
costumes Marek Cpin, musical arrangement Jan Mikulášek.
National Theatre Brno – Reduta Theatre, premiere 9 / 6 / 2011.
/31
Ostrava – an Oasis
of Theatre That
Refuses to Pander
Jan Kerbr
ÙTomáš Vůjtek, With Hope or Without It / Arena Studio Space, Ostrava 2012 / Directed by Ivan Krejčí / Set design Milan David > Photo Roman Polášek
32/
O
strava is a large industrial town in the northeast of the
Czech Republic that has a rather lively theatre scene.
The National Moravian-Silesian Theatre (Národní
divadlo moravskoslezské) is one of the few multi-company
theatres in the country, comprising four: straight drama,
opera, operetta and musical, and ballet. There are two other
professional drama theatres in Ostrava: the Petr Bezruč Theatre
(Divadlo Petra Bezruče) and the Arena Studio Space (Komorní
scéna Aréna). And to complete the list there is also the local
Theatre of Puppets (Divadlo loutek). The comparatively harsh
social environment in Ostrava (many local jobs have been in
the mining and metallurgy industries) has always to at least
some degree been reflected in the repertoires of local theatres,
and the harshness and refusal to pander persisted even beyond
the revolution in 1989, when the entire country experienced
often have their premiere on one of the stages in this very city.
Since 1997, each year local theatres participate in a severalday theatre review (called Ost-ra-var), where they present their
annual ‘crop’ of work to journalists and theatre arts students and
teachers from all over the country. The now annual domestic
theatre event originated in auspicious circumstances, before
the theatre calendar had become overly crammed with festivals.
Several days in Ostrava quickly became a professional must, in
the positive sense, for anyone in Prague, Brno, Olomouc (and
even Bratislava in Slovakia) who is interested in the theatre.
One nice feature of the local theatre scene in Ostrava is its
chummy sense of community. Directors and actors will sometimes leave their home stage and hop over to a neighbouring
theatre, so as I name some prominent figures in local theatres,
it doesn’t mean they are strictly and solely associated with that
ÙVenedikt Yerofeyev, Moscow–Petushki / The National Moravian–Silesian Theatre, Ostrava 2011 / Directed by Tomáš Jirman / Set design David Bazika
> Photo Radovan Šťastný
occupational restructuring and the unemployment rate in
Ostrava began to soar. Stage ‘entertainment’ comes in the form
of musicals and operettas, and occasionally a comedy by the
biggest local drama company, but most of the local repertoire
is made up of works that are modern (sometimes even locally
based) and disquieting, and both domestic and foreign plays
one given theatre. Among the directors who have shaped the dramatic profile of the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre in recent
years Juraj Deák and Radovan Lipus especially warrant mention, both of whom now are no longer based in Ostrava. Deák
made a rather successful stab at bringing some classic titles to
the big stage (Hamlet 2003, Romeo and Juliet 1998, Cyrano de
/33
ÙFranz Kafka, The Trial / Arena Studio Space, Ostrava 2011 / Directed by Ivan Rajmont / Set design Martin Černý / Costumes Marta Roszkopfová
> Photo Roman Polášek
Bergerac 1998), and several musicals. His most outstanding production was that of George Tabori’s Mein Kampf (2004), which
with some poetic licence depicts a scene from Hitler’s youth.
Lipus did well with several unorthodox projects: in 1994 the
‘regional’ satirical cabaret Ongoing Blood Poisoning (Průběžná
O(s)trava krve; the title of this festival is a play on words, as
‘otrava’, which means ‘poisoning’, differs by just one letter from
the city’s name Ostrava), which however was staged with the
company that operates out of the Arena Studio Space; and in
1998 an inventive stage adaptation of František Hrubín’s narrative poem Romance for Bugle (Romance pro křídlovku) and
an affectionately parodic version of Alois Jirásek’s Lantern
(Lucerna), which is a classic dramatic fairytale and one of the
most frequently performed Czech plays. The National Moravian-Silesian Theatre also gave Ukraine-born director Oxana
Meleškinová-Smilková, now domesticated in the Czech Republic, the opportunity to stage a very unconventional production
of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (1998).
One important artist with long ties to the Ostrava theatre scene
is Janusz Klimsza, who studied acting in Poland and learned
the director’s trade at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of
Performing Arts in Prague. He divides his work between all three
drama theatres in Ostrava, and he was even the head of drama
at the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre for several years. He
first brought his unmistakeable directorial style into the Arena
with Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Prophet Ilya (2000) and Tomáš
Vůjtek’s Brenpartie (Brenpartija 2009); both productions are
set in the tough Silesian-Polish border region and have a strong
social theme. Klimsza staged Słavomir Mrożek’s demanding
and multi-layered play Love in the Crimea (Miłość na Krymie
2000; to date the only staging of this play in the Czech Republic)
at the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre, and he also created
a production of Sam Shepard’s dark drama Buried Child (2007).
Jan Mikulášek, one of the most distinctive figures in the young
generation of Czech theatre directors, got his start in Ostrava.
People began talking about him after his production of Albert
Camus’s Caligula (2003) at the National Moravian-Silesian
Theatre and his Three Sisters (2007), with its normalisationera kitchen set, at Petr Bezruč Theatre, where he later was also
briefly artistic director. There he also put on an outstanding
34/
ÙNaomi Wallace, One Flea Spare / Petr Bezruč Theatre, Ostrava 2011 / Directed by Peter Gábor / Stage design Katarína Holková > Photo Roman Tomášek
ÙIsrael Horowitz, Lebensraum / Theatre of Puppets, Ostrava 2011
Directed by Marián Pecko / Puppets and costumes Pavol Andraško
> Photo archives
ÙThomas Vinterberg – Mogens Rukov – Bo Hansen, The Celebration
Petr Bezruč Theatre, Ostrava 2011 / Directed by Martin Františák
Set design Jan Štěpánek / Costumes Marek Cpin > Photo archives
adaptation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (2009), which was one of
the most remarkable theatre events in the country, grounded in
strongly stylised acting, featuring inventive background music
composed by the director himself, and with a subtly artistic
visual form designed by one of the great young hopes of Czech
theatre arts, stage designer Marek Cpin. Mikulášek then gave
Ostrava another artistically stylised production, Ibsen’s Hedda
Gabler (National Moravian-Silesian Theatre 2008), and last
year he hit home on the current problems in the region and in
the country as a whole with his adaptation of Polish journalist
Mariusz Szczygieł’s novel Gottland (2011), which examines the
paroxysmal moments of late socialism and new ‘post-Velvet’
development in the Czech Republic. A production of somewhat
Marthaleresque style, in a collective swirl it unfurls the stories
of several well-known figures whose fates were dramatically
shaped by the historical changes of recent decades.
The current head of Petr Bezruč Theatre is Martin Františák,
who also works with some amateur companies and whose
roots, even as an author, are firmly anchored in the Moravia-
Silesia Region. His play At Home (Doma) was staged by
Michal Dočekal at the National Theatre (Národní divadlo) in
Prague. In 2010 at his home stage Františák put on his own
play The Bride (Nevěsta), and the intimate subject of the text
and the production is woven into the harsh social ferment of
the Silesian-Slovak borderland. Other important productions
followed at Petr Bezruč Theatre, such as an adaptation of Joseph
Roth’s novel Job (2008), his direction of thematically kindred
author Jiří Pokorný’s play Daddy Shoots Goals (Taťka střílí
góly 2009), and, above all, his dynamic take – with impeccably
cultivated performances – on the famous Dogma 95 film The
Celebration (2011). This story about the birthday celebration of
a paedophile father who abused his children many years ago
serves as the dramatic underpinning for an indirect parable on
guilt, social decorum, indifference, and revolt.
Ivan Krejčí is the artistic director of the Arena Studio Space,
where he has staged both classics (Hamlet 2010, The Cherry
Orchard 2009) and contemporary works (Tabori’s Goldberg
Variations 2008). His most recent production is a highly political
ÙEmily
/35
, Wuthering Heights / Petr Bezruč Theatre, Ostrava 2012 / Directed by Jan Mikulášek / Set design Marek Cpin > Photo Tomáš Ruta
work that takes on the difficult era of communist dictatorship in
the 1950s (a period not often visited in art). Tomáš Vůjtek’s play
With Hope or Without It (S nadějí, i bez ní 2012) is based on the
memoirs of Josefa Slánská, the widow of an executed, former
high-ranking communist functionary, who during his trial was
herself imprisoned in harsh conditions. For Czech theatre this
is an unusually penetrating look inside a communist prison and
bears witness to an arduous struggle to maintain human dignity.
A production that has garnered significant attention in
Ostrava (and not just there) in recent months is a coarse drunken
ballad based on the famous Russian prose work by Venedikt
Yerofeyev Moscow-Petushki (2011). The production is staged
in the bar of the theatre club at the National Moravian-Silesian
Theatre and is directed by one of the company’s actors, Tomáš
Jirman, who steps in as director from time to time – and always
rather successfully. Janusz Klimsza created an adaptation
of Ivan Landsmann’s novel, Variegated Layers (Pestré vrstvy
2011), a true account of what it was like to work in a mine
during the state-socialist period, and he staged it in a now
inoperative mine. This production is a project of Petr Bezruč
Theatre, and it too makes references to the previous regime and
to the other side of ‘building up socialism’, as under that regime
Ostrava was propagandistically known as the ‘steel heart of the
republic’, a strange phrase that was more than just an allusion
to the city as a base of mining and metallurgy. The site-specific
performance space adds a strong element of authenticity to the
project.
In recent months Arena Studio Space has presented some
unnerving productions, such as a staging of Franz Kafka’s The
Trial (2011), directed by Ivan Rajmont, and, in its Czech
premiere, the American playwright Naomi Wallace’s One Flea
Spare, directed by Peter Gábor (2011). The latter play is an
intimate drama about four people in a closed space, and the
situation is modelled on the 17th-century plague that hit London
and the associated quarantine arrangements that were set up.
Humanity’s extreme forms are exposed in the first of these two
productions by the absurdity of bureaucratic machinery and in
the second by the fatefulness of the deadly epidemic.
The Ostrava Theatre of Puppets put on a sophisticated
production for audiences at the last Ost-ra-var. Israel
36/
ÙTomáš Vůjtek, With Hope or Without It / Arena Studio Space, Ostrava 2012 / Directed by Ivan Krejčí / Set design Milan David > Photo Roman Polášek
Horowitz’s Lebensraum (directed by Slovak Marián Pecko,
2011) presents a fantastical vision of post-war Germany, in
which, as reparation for the Holocaust, the German chancellor
offers six million Jews a life in Germany (needless to say, this
cannot turn out well).
The high quality of the theatre in Ostrava is naturally also
the result of its excellent actors, some of whom sometimes
make their way to the capital. Recent young talents that warrant
mention include Lucie Žáčková and Jan Hájek, who perform,
respectively, at the prestigious National Theatre and the Drama
Club.
After Prague and Brno, Ostrava is the Czech Republic’s third
theatre hub. There is a seamless quality to the poetics of the
local stages, and there is no mistaking their specific styles for
those of productions in Prague and Brno.
Theatre with a Passion for New Plays
/37
Theatre
with a Passion
for New
Plays
Jan Jiřík
ÙMark Ravenhill, Pool / No Water
Flying Theatre, Prague 2009 / Directed by
Martina Schlegelová / Set design and costumes
Jana Špalová > Photo Petr Krejčí
38/
T
he Flying Theatre (Divadlo Letí) emerged in 2005 as
a loose grouping of at that time fresh graduates from
the Department of Alternative and Puppet Theatre at the
Theatre Faculty in Prague. As a group that shared a clear vision
about theatre, its members had as students the year before made
a mark for themselves on the stage of the school’s DISK Theatre
(Divadlo DISK), where, among the four graduate productions
they staged, three were Czech premieres of contemporary
Russian drama (Vassily Sigarev: Plasticine, Ivan Vyrypayev:
Oxygen, Xenia Dragunskaya: Feeling Beards – all of which
premiered in 2004). The production with which the Flying
Theatre officially launched itself and from where it also took
its name was Olga Muchina’s play Flying (premiere 8 October
2005 at Dejvice Theatre / Dejvické divadlo, directed by Marián
Amsler). The theatre’s founding figures included dramaturg
Daniel Přibyl (now dramaturg at the New Stage of the National
Theatre in Prague / Nová scéna Národního divadla v Praze) and
director Marián Amsler (a graduate of the directing programme
of study at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava and
now artistic head of Brno’s HaDivadlo). Director Martina
Schlegelová and dramaturg Marie Špalová are the current
artistic heads of the Flying Theatre.
In the Czech theatre arts, the Flying Theatre’s dramaturgical
focus is unique – it only stages new plays. All the productions
ÙThomas Artz, Grillenparz / Flying Theatre, Prague 2011
Directed by Martina Schlegelová / Set design and costumes Jana Špalová
> Photo Alexandr Hudeček
and projects for the stage that the Flying Theatre has put on in
its more than six-year existence have been Czech premieres
of local or foreign plays. Stages of this kind have long existed
abroad (London’s Royal Court Theatre, Paris’s Ouvert,
and Laboratorium Dramatu in Warsaw, to name a few), and
the Prague version of a writers’ theatre has clearly been much
inspired by their work. But the Flying Theatre differs from the
above-named stages abroad in at least two specific respects.
While the aforementioned theatres abroad and their activities
(playwright residencies, competitions of productions of
contemporary work, etc.) are already fully institutionalised (and
often supported by the state), the Flying Theatre is still in the
process of building such a network from the ground up through
its activities. The second distinguishing feature of this theatre is
that it involves a single generation of theatre artists. The Flying
Theatre is led mainly by the generation in its thirties, who all
became practising theatre artists in a specific period. While
the UK was experiencing the wave of in-yer-face theatre and
western Europe was absorbing related influences, Czech theatre
was dominated by director-centred theatre, which focused on
interpretations of classics and well-established works from the
second half of the 20th century. For the artists at the head of
the Flying Theatre, in-yer-face theatre was in many ways where
they got their start. Like British theatre artists in the 1990s,
they refused to seek new statements in old texts and decided to
describe the world exclusively through new drama.
Projects for the stage
The Flying Theatre devotes itself to showcasing contemporary
drama on several levels. In terms of the number of plays put
on the biggest is its production project 8@8, wherein Czech
or foreign productions of eight new texts are put on as stage
readings over a single theatre season. The main aim of the
project is to try out new drama right on stage and introduce it
to the professional community and the general public. Since
/39
productions that this Prague company has created to date are
diverse in directorial approach and often in terms of genre and
include plays by Mark Ravenhill (Mother Clap’s Molly House in
2008 directed by Daniel Špinar; Pool / No Water in 2009 directed
by Martina Schlegelová), Dennis Kelly (Osama the Hero in 2006
directed by Tomáš Svoboda), and Thomas Arzt (Grillenparz
in 2011 directed by Martina Schlegelová). The diversity of the
Flying Theatre’s productions stems in part from the fact that
the theatre has managed to maintain an openness towards the
directors and actors invited in to work on a specific production
(even if they are mainly theatre artists from the same generation),
and in part from the fact that almost every production has
been created in a different venue, as the Flying Theatre has no
permanent workspace. Most of the company’s productions have
been put on at Švanda Theatre (Švandovo divadlo), Theatre
on the Ballustrade (Divadlo Na zábradlí), or Comedy Theatre
ÙMark O‘Rowe, Terminus / Flying Theatre, Prague 2010 / Directed by Martina Schlegelová / Set design and costumes Jana Špalová > Photo Tomáš Bořil
2005, when the Flying Theatre embarked on this project, several
dozen plays have been given a single staged reading (there are
no repeat readings), and some of them later appeared in the
repertoires of other Czech theatres.
In addition to these staged readings the Flying Theatre also
undertakes ‘full-fledged’ productions. The precisely twenty
(Divadlo Komedie). With Heaven’s Closed (Nebe nepřijímá),
comprising five short plays written especially for the Flying
Theatre by David Drábek, David Gieselmann, Viliam Klimáček,
Joe Penhall, and Falk Richter, the theatre also experimented
with working in a non-theatre space, premiering this work in
the departure hall of Prague airport; subsequent performances
40/
ØRoman Sikora, The Confession of a Masochist / Flying Theatre, Prague
2011 / Directed by Martina Schlegelová / Set design Jana Špalová
Costumes Aneta Grňáková > Photo Ivana Tačíková
ÙMark Ravenhill in the Mark Ravenhill Fur > Photo Alexandr Hudeček
were added to the repertoire of Theatre on the Balustrade. The
company has prepared a production of David Gieselmann’s play
The Farm (Die Plantage), to be directed by Martina Schlegelová,
which the author adapted into a musical for the Flying Theatre.
At the premiere one of the roles was played by Mark Ravenhill.
Among the productions for which the Flying Theatre has
recently drawn attention, here we will describe two, both of
them directed by Martina Schlegelová.
Joe Penhall’s Terminus premiered on 13 March 2010 in the
Studio space located in the cellar of Švanda Theatre, and this
minimalist production used the atmosphere of this place to
effect. The visual component of Terminus is very simple. There
are three mobile iron constructions from where the characters
in Penhall’s play deliver their monologues. A large projection
screen onto which animations illustrating events are shown
closes off the rear of the stage. The animations are created
right before the eyes of the audience by two animators standing
on one side of the stage and using a device that resembles an
overhead projector to wield their artistic magic. This ‘spare’
concept enables Schlegelová to point up the performances
(Richard Fiala, Marcela Holubcová and Pavlína Štorková) but
above all the play’s difficult language.
Another production is Roman Sikora’s The Confession of
a Masochist (Zpověď masochisty), which premiered on 26
January 2011, again in the Studio space of Švanda Theatre
in Smíchov. The play originated during the first year of an
artistic residence at the theatre. Sikora’s grotesque satire tells
the story of Mr M., a man whose desire it is to suffer and
who, having been unable to satisfy that desire, becomes an
advocate of contemporary Czech government policy, whose
reform cuts into social and economic security are what finally
gives him the masochistic pleasure he’s been looking for. In
his play Sikora works expressively with language, which
parodies itself, is filled with verbal pollution, media jargon,
word games, and garbled words. Martina Schlegelová set the
production in a circus environment, evidenced by the choice
of music and the arc of coloured light-bulbs suspended from
the ceiling. This setting helped the director to tie together
the kaleidoscopic structure of Sikora’s play. With this
exception the director again applied a minimalist approach,
concentrating fully on each of the playwright’s words and
on the actors’ interpretations of each of the characters. The
production is embellished by Tomáš Kobr’s performance as
Mr M. At the start of the play, Kobr, who never leaves the
stage throughout the ninety-minute show, approaches the
story of Mr M. as a kind of protest song, and by the end has
transformed into a crafty enticer trying to lure the audience
into his world, which is actually not that bad.
The Confession of a Masochist is to date one of the most
successful of the Flying Theatre’s undertakings. It won first
prize and the Young for Young theatre festival in Most. In
September 2011 the play was presented as a staged reading in
the Stückemarkt (Play Market) at Berlin’s Theatertreffen: New
European Drama, and in December of the same year it was
read at
Ouvert in Paris. It has been translated into four
languages (English, French, German, and Polish).
Centre for Contemporary
Drama
In 2010 the Flying Theatre broadened its activities
with the creation of the Centre for Contemporary Drama
(Centrum současné dramatiky / CSD), which aims to support
contemporary Czech drama by offering an author-in-residence
programme. This programme is changing the way new drama is
being created in Czech theatres. Previously new work emerged
in one of two ways: new texts were created within a specific
theatre company whose poetics could not usually be transferred
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42/
to other theatres; or new Czech plays were written outside the
theatre, often won an Alfréd Radok Award for new plays, and
rarely or even never made it onto the stage. Besides the Flying
Theatre, the projects of the CSD involve the participation of
other theatres and institutions, such as HaDivadlo, Theatre
on the Balustrade, and the Arts and Theatre Institute. The first
year of the programme was run in cooperation with Švanda
Theatre in Smíchov and the theme of the residency was to write
a political play set in the present day.
The CSD is also the institution behind the Mark Ravenhill
Award, which is intended for the best Czech production of
a contemporary play. The winning production is selected
by a jury made up of dramaturgs and theatre critics, and
the top prize, the Mark Ravenhill Fur, is awarded to the
production’s creators by Mark Ravenhill himself.
Comedy Theatre
In the autumn of 2011 the Flying Theatre bid in the
competition to select a new theatre to move into Comedy
Theatre, which was vacated at the end of June 2012 by its
current tenants, the Prague Chamber Theatre (Pražské komorní
divadlo). The Flying Theatre’s project envisioned a continuation
of its current work and turning Comedy Theatre into a centre
genuinely focused on contemporary drama and contemporary
art (it planned cooperation with top art cinemas and with DOX
Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague).
Ultimately the competition was won by an ordinary directorcentred theatre from the district of Strašnice in Prague. However,
the selection procedure revealed an interesting phenomenon in
Prague theatre today. Besides the Flying Theatre, the other four
finalists included strong theatre figures from the thirty-something
generation (e.g. Jiří Adámek, Daniel Špinar, and Štěpán Pácl)
who, like the Flying Theatre, do not have a permanent space
and with their own companies are creating distinctive theatre
outside the official network. A paradoxical situation has arisen in
Prague theatre today, where on the one hand there is a relatively
rich network of institutional theatres that are doing work that is
beginning to make them look more and more alike, and on the
other hand there are the aforementioned artistically based theatre
groups. There is no mutual cooperation, continuous turnover, or
even steady development in Prague theatre. It is obvious that such
a situation is especially inauspicious for this art form. A share of
the blame for this situation of course lies on both sides. It is as
though a generation gap has emerged in Prague theatre in the
new millennium, with each side retreating within its own safe
enclaves. As for the Flying Theatre, it is a question how long
this kind of artistically ambitious theatre can survive in its given
itinerant conditions and how long it will be possible for it to
preserve its innovative vigour and not come to a standstill.
Les enfants
terribles
Lenka Šaldová
ÙPhilip Glass – Susan Marshall, Les enfants terribles / National Theatre, Prague 2011
Directed by Alice Nellis / Set design Matěj Cibulka / Costumes Kateřina Štefková > Photo Hana Smejkalová
44/
Les enfants terribles
×ØPhilip Glass – Susan Marshall, Les enfants terribles / National Theatre,
Prague 2011 / Directed by Alice Nellis / Set design Matěj Cibulka
Costumes Kateřina Štefková > Photo Hana Smejkalová
G
lass’s minimalist opera Les enfants terribles was staged
in June 2011 by the National Theatre as part of the
Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space,
an international exhibition that this year included a number of
site-specific projects. For her opera debut, Alice Nellis, director
of this production, found a site on the grounds of the psychiatric
hospital in Bohnice. While the grounds of this hospital have
already been hosting theatre performances for years in the
annual Mezi ploty music and theatre festival, which marked its
twentieth anniversary in May 2011, unlike that festival the Les
enfants terribles project was not intended to bring audiences and
hospital patients together in order to fight prejudice and break
down barriers. When the audience entered into the hospital
gardens shortly before 9 pm for the performance, there was
not a single patient around anywhere. As audience members
passed through what used to be the hospital’s central kitchen
they encountered individuals swaying autistically or giggling
childishly, but these ‘patients’, watching the audience arrive,
were played by extras. Hospital reality and all its related themes
served as nothing more than a descriptive framework for a work
in which the characters hover on the edge of normality and
more often stray beyond it. Ultimately it was not the context
of the hospital that was significant for how the story of Paul
and Lise was viewed, but the actual space of the performance,
which itself is very inspiring: a cold, clinical room with vaulted
ceilings, stained walls, chipped tiles and dingy glass doors;
a grim, bleak environment, very appropriate for the depressive
story of two siblings enclosed within their own world and
unnaturally dependent on each other.
Glass’s opera, like the original work it is based on (Jean
Cocteau’s novelette, or Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1950 film of the
same name), offers just clues to but no explication of Paul and
Lise’s world: we learn from the narrator that the two siblings
are playing some kind of strange game together – but what is
it actually about? They bicker and hurt each other, and then
immediately snuggle up together in close cahoots. Incest?
Probably, but Nellis does not paint a direct picture of the siblings’
relationship, she too just hints at something. Paul and Lise are
young and at first glance seem no different from anyone else.
The ostentatiously proud Agathe, by contrast, is the outlandish
figure, being played as she is by countertenor Jan Mikušek (but
in a restrained and elegant manner, and without any excessive
mannerisms). Lise (Alžběta Poláčková) is the dominant female,
a strong figure, who makes a great show of being the lady of the
house, around whom everything revolves: she is after all caring
for her dying mother and slightly hypochondriac brother. Dour
in her house dress and apron, after her mother’s death she finds
a job and is transformed into a beautiful young lady, strutting
the catwalk – but even then she is really still just an ordinary
girl. Paul (Pavel Hájek) is a submissive blond, physically weak,
as though sapped of the will to live (especially after receiving
a curious injury, treacherously inflicted on him early on in the
action during a snowball fight by a boy he adores), wrapped up
in a robe and choked by a scarf. He sinks easily into melancholy
and even apathy, he seems as though he constantly needs to lean
on something or someone. Are they deranged? Perhaps they’re
just insane with love; or from the excessive bond that they are
unable and ultimately even unwilling to break. She tries to
leave, but her husband is killed while driving and with that her
zest for a new life evaporates. He falls in love with Agathe (and
she with him), but he is unable to profess his love. And Lise,
whose new life has collapsed, will no longer allow Paul to go
away with Agathe and leave her. Better that the siblings should
die together. There is a disarming tenderness in the way they
are lying next to each other in the end. A relationship equally as
fateful as it is perverse, both hostile and tender at the same time.
What director Alice Nellis and designer Matěj Cibulka
brought most to this production is how they used the specific
performance stage in their interpretation of Glass’s opera.
They emphasised the reality of the former hospital kitchen
with iron hospital beds and small tables and table lamps. They
played up all the hopelessness and oppressive bleakness of
the place. But then in a flash they were able to transform that
into a magical space, reflecting the inner world of Paul and
Lise. Glass wrote Les enfants terribles for singers and dancers.
Perhaps the dancers were supposed to offer a peek inside the
characters’ souls? Nellis scrapped the dancers and made do
with somewhat hallucinogenic colourful lighting and nondescriptive, imaginative projections on the walls, ceiling, and
glass doors. Flames, static faces, shots of Lise under water. The
real space was transformed into a dreamlike place, with snow
fluttering down from the ceiling, silhouettes visible through the
glass doors or the cloth partition, a red shadow reflecting off the
floor tiles…
In the second part of the production the creators added a red
sports car to the stark space and put portraits with gigantic frames
in the gallery. Luxury invades the lives of Paul and Lise, but still
/45
46/
ÙPhilip Glass – Susan Marshall, Les enfants terribles / National Theatre, Prague 2011 / Directed by Alice Nellis / Set design Matěj Cibulka
Costumes Kateřina Štefková > Photo Hana Smejkalová
nothing changes for those two. The car is moreover a constant
reminder of the tragedy that sent Lise running back to Paul and of
her futile attempt to escape into the real world somewhere outside.
The meaning is clear, and the contrast between expensive toys
and the hopeless space is striking. An intermission was required
however in order to convert the space and that ultimately
detracted from the overall impression of the evening.
Regardless, Les enfants terribles offered a unique theatre
experience and was one of the best productions in Czech opera
theatre last season. Considerable credit for this should go to the
conductor Petr Kofroň, who once again managed to reveal how
much tension, emotion, and energy there lies in minimalist
music. And to the technically and expressively perfect singers
(among the others named above also Ljubomir Popović as
Gérard, Lise’s suitor and, as a result of Lise’s machinations,
later Agathe’s husband). Superb singers and excellent actors!
A production put on as part of the biggest international exhibition
of stage design, this was a truly inspirational contribution to the
focus on performance space.
Philip Glass – Susan Marshall: Les enfants terribles, conducted
by Petr Kofroň, directed by Alice Nellis, stage and lighting design
Matěj Cibulka, costumes Kateřina Štefková, choreographic
collaboration Klára Lidová, National Theatre, Prague, premiere
17 / 6 / 2011 in the former kitchen of the psychiatric hospital in
Bohnice.
les enfants terribles
kaleidoscope
48/
kaleidoscope
A Play Just Oozing .
with Vulgarities
Jana Machalická
The stage adaptation of the stories from Irvine Welsh’s Acid
House put on at Dejvice Theatre (Dejvické divadlo) is a brilliant
piece of work. The author’s anti-heroes, who do everything they
can to vanquish the emptiness of their lives, have lost nothing
of their sharply contoured features, and what’s more, they seem
to have acquired that congenial obtuseness so familiar from
the Czech pub environment. This seedy pub with its grubby
windows and the choicest local idiots lolling about inside can
be found in any Czech village or urban periphery.
The Dejvice Theatre production was staged by a Slovak
team – director Michal Vajdička, dramaturg and author of the
adaptation Daniel Majling, and set designer Pavol Andraško
– and it is astonishing how smoothly they slid right into the
specific and distinctive style of environment the Dejvice stage
offers. The combination of the unique poetics of Dejvice Theatre
and Vajdička’s creative input gave rise to an extraordinary
production, supported by the kind of brilliant interplay between
the actors that we have already admired, for instance, in Patrick
Marber’s Dealer’s Choice. However, A Blockage in the System is
more refined and more ambiguous in meaning. Thematically
this title is a good fit with Dejvice Theatre’s overall dramaturgical
style; once again the subject is a bunch of hopeless existences
who long ago lost the strength to make anything happen and are
wallowing in their decline.
Majling managed exceedingly well to meld Welsh’s stories
into a compact whole. He uncovered their dramatic potential
by a simple method: intuitively pinpointing their shared theme
– the desperate inability of people to find any meaning in life
and break through the crust of crudeness and resignation that
surrounds them. He gathered all the characters in one location –
a pub – and arranged them so that side by side their stories could
play out almost in parallel and at the right moments naturally
intersect. The seams between them are nearly invisible, so
the audience watches unfold a dark grotesque with climactic
situations and twists and surprising resolutions.
The adaptation is titled A Blockage in the System and based on
a story about a bunch of plumbers who haven’t the ability to fix
anything let alone clogged drains. This was the source of some
of the motifs and a framework was created for the production as
a whole. It is a framework that is a little too faecal though, when
we see one of the pub’s patrons (Ivan Trojan) arriving caked in
excrement after the clogged drain exploded through the toilet bowl
all over the flat. Thus coated in shit, he sits by the stove reading
Nietzsche – and in the conclusion he turns out to be God, who is
as fed up with humanity and its incompetence and indolence as
he is with himself. The scatological atmosphere is inadvertently
reminiscent of Werner Schwab and his metaphysical Die
Präsidentinnen, though here the message is conveyed in a rawer,
more direct manner. Ivan Trojan as the omniscient God in soiled
pyjamas is unbearably stubborn and sarcastic and he has the ability
to unsettle the intended target of his vengeance with just one look.
The target here is dingbat Boab (Václav Neužil), a creature living
out a pointless existence in the conditions that he finds himself in.
In Neužil’s interpretation, he alternates between verbose feebleminded analyses and weepy aggrievedness.
> Photo Hynek Glos
Boab’s father is played by Miroslav Krobot, with his typically
down-to-earth and authentic manner, which he also employs
when his character discloses his feelings and erotic longings
for waitress Marge (Jana Holcová). Especially well done is the
scene where two university professors burst in on this domain
(Martin Pechlát and Martin Myšička), and then very quickly
adapt (albeit initially under coercion) and end up in a bloody
fistfight with each other.
Brilliantly incorporated into the plot is the character of
Johnny, who in the book (in the story ‘A Soft Touch’) engages
in a wounded soliloquy over his fate. He allows himself to be
literally dragged around by his former girlfriend Catriona, who
runs off, leaves him with their baby and sleeps with his friend.
They then rob him, and she has him regularly beaten up by her
brothers. Even so, in the conclusion Catriona (Klára Melíšková)
just has to wiggle her finger and Johnny comes crawling to her
like a beaten but happy dog. Jaroslav Plesl as Johnny spends
most of the production with his back turned to the audience as
he’s immersed in playing a gambling machine. His back and his
whiney mutterings are expressive, as is the baby strapped across
his belly, which is the source of small, subtle, but fantastic gags
– as now and then someone caresses the baby’s head and it gets
comically caught up in the middle of the fights and skirmishes.
Language, packed with vulgarities, styles this production.
And how! Here foul words are spewed out and stacked up with
the naturalness of breathing. Showing an exceptional virtuosity
the actors are able to express almost everything using a handful
of vulgar words and create a kind of metalanguage that cannot
be beaten for its ability to get a message across.
Director Vajdička has created for the stage a showcase
of curious figures, moral deviants who use aggression to
solve everything and have no idea that another kind of
world can exist. A Blockage in the System is an extremely
depressing production, but it is a serious statement, even if
kaleidoscope
this statement is deliberately and sophisticatedly covered in
layers of comedy and hyperbole. In terms of the performances
the production is simply outstanding, and the company at
Dejvice Theatre gets onstage teamwork better than anyone
else out there today.
Irvine Welsh: A Blockage in the System. Adaptation by Daniel
Majling, translation by Olga Bártová, director Michal Vajdička,
dramaturgy Daniel Majling and Eva Suková, set design Pavol
Andraško, music Marián Čekovský. Dejvice Theatre, Prague,
premiere 20 / 2 / 2012.
KalibA’s Crime
Petra Ježková
Director Jan Antonín Pitínský, an expert at adapting classic
novels and novellas for the theatre, has staged a version of Karel
Václav Rais’s novel Kaliba’s Crime (Kalibův zločin) at Slovácko
Theatre (Slovácké divadlo) in Uherské Hradiště. In the late
19th century, Rais wrote what is now still a gripping tale set
in the harsh environment of the piedmont region of the Giant
Mountains, where human relations and interaction are devoid of
any soft social cushioning. The opening of the novel and one of
the first scenes of the stage production immediately set the tone:
two surviving daughters in the house of their deceased mother
are haggling over clothing, dishes, and other pieces of their
small inheritance. Vojta, the only son, taciturn, and still single
despite his mature age, lives in the house alone with his father,
and with no woman to look after the home. Vojta’s brotherin-law takes the initiative and plays matchmaker, and by his
efforts a bride soon arrives in the home, but she comes with
a mother-in-law and — as it turns out in the end — ‘a bun in
the oven’. Simple and naive Vojta is gradually and ever more
painfully dispirited and even psychologically tortured by his
unloving wife Karla, who married him only to save herself from
the shame of becoming a single mother. The machinations of
the miserly, grasping mother-in-law are largely responsible for
the insufferable situation in the family. The women gradually
tighten the noose around their victim’s neck and he has no
means of escape. Anguished and emotionally bound to his wife
and child, Vojta commits murder in a paroxysm of jealous rage
when, after returning home unannounced, he finds his wife
with the child’s real father. He has a seizure and dies.
The novel, a powerfully dramatic tale, penned largely
in dialogue, employing colourful, distinctive language
and vernacular elements, begs to be brought to the stage.
Pitínský’s production represents the first professional on-stage
rendition of Rais’s novel and confirms the work’s extraordinary
stage potential.
The director took advantage of the musical talent of the
Hradiště theatre’s ensemble of actors, weaving a powerful and
brilliantly performed polyphony through the story that adds
a balladic undertone to Rais’s raw tale. Tomáš Jeřábek’s stage
/49
music artfully fuses folkloric motifs with modern performance
and makes many of the scenes more powerful (it adds more
dynamism, for example, to the sleigh ride scene, in which
a happy Vojta brings home his bride; it transforms the village
dance into an intoxicatingly wild reel, in which, after pushing
her awkward husband aside, Karla swings from one arm to
the next). Pitínský’s fingerprints are all over the directorial
concept, and of course it’s not a realistic take. The white painted
faces of the actors, the stylised acting (though not with all the
characters), the imaginative associations, and the grotesque
hyperbole. Working with artist Jana Hauskrechtová, Pitínský
set the production in almost featureless sets that only loosely
suggest a village home. The light, airy interior of the home,
lined with whitewashed panelling, is more reminiscent of
Northern, evangelical surroundings. The avaricious nature of
the mother-in-law, squirreling away possessions on the farm
while burying Vojta deeper and deeper in debt, is illustrated
> Photo Jan Karásek
through the accrual of duvets that fill up almost the entire
space of the interior during the second act. The set has two
levels; the second floor, above the panelled interior, is where
the premonitions appear (a soldier — the child’s real father; the
menacing effect of this scene is unfortunately diminished by its
overuse); another omen shines through the window curtain like
a watermark. (This is how Karla’s mother’s husband, driven
off in the past, appears as a portent of Vojta’s fate, and when
he dies in poverty the curtain is torn down and his silhouette,
in a chair seen through a window, rocks back and forth in
a dead, mechanical, metronomic automatism.) The two-tier
stage facilitates quick and smooth transitions: with the arrival
of spring the entire ‘bottom floor’ that represents the inside of
the home rises to reveal a dazzling horizon with a breath-taking
mountain backdrop. Grotesque hyperbole also characterises the
visual concept. The showy costumes, which distort the actors’
figures with the amplified contours of traditional folk attire, use
traditional village clothing only as inspiration and from there
they are then creatively and effectively reshaped.
Outstanding performances are given by the two central
figures, Jitka Josková as the temperamental, childishly
capricious, and eventually viscerally female Karla, intolerant to
the point of repulsion, and Tomáš Šulaj as the taciturn Vojta
50/
kaleidoscope
whose slightly exaggerated, tight-lipped mumbling balances
between poignancy and affable parody.
Pitínský’s production is a remarkable, imaginative, associative, and opulent scenic collage. It could, however, benefit from
a shortening of the text (despite how incredibly vivid, descriptive, and colourful it is linguistically), from fewer musical interludes, and from a greater focus on the dramatic escalation of the
intense, desperate situation.
Karel Václav Rais: Kaliba’s Crime. Adaptation by Iva Šulajová
and Jan Antonín Pitínský, based on an dramatization by
Bedřich Vrbský and additional themes by Hubert Krejčí, directed
by Jan Antonín Pitínský, dramaturgy Iva Šulajová, set design
Jana Hauskrechtová, costumes Eva Jiřikovská, music, lyrics,
musical arrangement Tomáš Jeřábek. Slovácko Theatre, Uherské
Hradiště, premiere 4 / 3 / 2012.
Janáček, Uhde, Morávek,
and All These Women
Jana Machalická
Some men might be traumatised by the idea of all the women
in their life coming together and demanding their rights. This
kind of disturbing vision is behind Milan Uhde’s new play Leoš,
or Most Faithfully Yours (Leoš aneb Tvá nejvěrnější), in which
the famous Moravian composer Leoš Janáček has to answer for
his eventful emotional and sexual life.
This play about Janáček brings the successful creative duo
of Milan Uhde and Miloš Štědroň back after several years to
Brno’s Goose on a String Theatre (Divadlo Husa na provázku).
Uhde’s text is well crafted and open to creative theatrical
adaptation. It grasps the subject of a great composer with its
many paradoxes and facets, with requisite ambivalence, and,
ultimately, even with humour.
The text even fits well with the play’s musical format
(for which its author, Miloš Štědroň, won an Alfréd Radok
Award), both the newly penned variations and the excerpts
from Leoš Janáček’s compositions. Music plays constantly,
which, surprisingly, is not a bad thing; it sustains the
production’s emotional tension, and it proves that musicality is
still a tradition at Goose on a String and not just an empty word.
Through Janáček’s despotic relationship towards women
Uhde managed by simple and dramatically bracing means
to put his finger on the composer’s complex nature, extreme
sensitivity, and personal fears and insecurities. To some degree
he uses a collage technique, disassembling well-known facts and
putting them back together again. However, a problem arises in
the first half as the message is drowned out by Morávek’s lavish
directorial style, which, as usual, chases more rabbits than is
prudent.
First of all, the choice of setting, a conference on Janáček
where musicologists and other scholars argue over the
composer’s true nature and over whether it is fitting to divulge
ugly things about the private life of a genius, is not the best idea.
The characters are constantly shouting over each other and
clamouring to the point, it could be said, of unseemly distraction,
and they spoil scenes that are otherwise interestingly set up.
As a form of defamiliarisation it is rather unnecessary and
unwise. Morávek has added a demonic, black-clad violinist, Ms
S. (Gabriela Vermelho), who repeatedly enters the action and
comments on it musically. The audience comes away from the
first half mainly with a sense of total chaos and of having fatally
lost hold of the subject. They aren’t helped either by the sound,
which has been amped up too high. However the director has
done this deliberately, and even the solo performances exceed
the bearable decibel level.
The actors perform in an open space at the centre of the
audience, but also move among the spectators, which creates
generally a dynamic effect and helps maintain a good rapport
with those watching. Among other things it unobtrusively
serves to highlight the performers’ detachment from their roles.
Ladislav Vlna’s set consists of several tables covered in layers
of leaves and all kinds of props, from books to dishes; Janáček
is then extricated out from under these piles in between the
library, the kitchen, and the bedroom. The illusion of reality
> Photo Jakub Jíra
is augmented by large statues of buxom women, each with
her hand raised in an erotic gesture, the identifying hand sign
of Janáček’s lovers. Including the Cunning Little Vixen, who
occasionally walks among the spectators with the Fox. A giant
mythical Pegasus hangs upside down from the ceiling.
A surprising calm sets in during the second half. The scholars
move into the background, the firm contours of the production
finally break through, and the actors get to say more, most
notably the charismatic Martin Havelka, who plays the composer
in his mature years. Obstinate, insufferable, inconsistent,
internally divided, constantly succumbing to flights of emotion.
An ever suffering and passionate temperament, driven again
and again into a terrible state by his egocentric notions of what
is or is not permitted within the scope of love. Havelka gives
a concentrated performance that overrides all the superfluous
noise. He is emotionally spellbinding and makes easy use
of comical self-deprecation in various positions, ranging
kaleidoscope
from a young, exuberant lover to an old man on his last legs
whingingly demanding sex. Perhaps he could tone down the
exaggerated Ostrava dialect as in places it needlessly borders on
the edge of parody.
The scenes that work best with the grotesquely sarcastic
spirit in which Janáček’s love escapades take place and which
is brilliantly evoked by Morávek are those where the composer
is trying to persuade Kamila to become his lover (Kamila:
‘Maestro, you are mistaken in your notions about me, I prefer
operetta.’). Shining with similar humour and even greater irony
are his absurd efforts to woo the opera diva Gabriela Horváthová,
whom Eva Vrbková (who is also the Cunning Little Vixen) plays
with the magnificently exalted and lofty manner of a dramatic
artist, who always has to have the tiara from Verdi’s on
her head whenever she speaks with the maestro. Another of
the other female characters who stands out is Janáček’s wife
Zdenka, convincingly infused with bitterness and anger by
Anička Duchaňová.
Cuts in the action allow Morávek to merge or reverse
timelines and thus create different interpretative parallels right
up until the production reaches its tragicomic conclusion, where
Janáček, the petrified master, is brought back to life, and his
plaster bust, the garnish on every household piano, ultimately
begins to show a few cracks. It is just a pity that there has to be
so much crushing ballast in the first half.
/51
The production, with the subtitle The Stolen Diaries of
a Phantom of Erotic Photography, uses a field collection of
memories and other biographical material, and that means the
relatively well-known sources, motives and facts still in living
memory (Miroslav Tichý died last year and his life and work
were discussed in great detail in print in the Czech Republic at
the time). The production captures its audience mainly thanks
to the brilliant performance by Ivana Hloužková in the role of
Tichý and to the set design that brings some of the elements of
the photographer’s own poetics onto the stage.
Ivana Hloužková plays Tichý so convincingly that the
audience soon stops wondering why he is actually being
performed by a woman. Hloužková starts from a realistic image
of an old man with all his physical features (hunched posture,
unstable body attitude). She also took inspiration from the
photographer’s real life gestures and voice inflections, overdoing
them slightly (in the same way, the local dialect is somewhat
Milan Uhde, Miloš Štědroň: Leoš, or Most Faithfully Yours.
Direction and adaptation by Vladimír Morávek, dramaturgy
Miroslav Oščatka, set design Ladislav Vlna, costumes Eva
Morávková, music Miloš Štědroň. Goose on a String Theatre,
Brno, premiere 11 / 11 / 2011.
> Photo archives
A Portrait of the
Phantom of Erotic
Photography
Kateřina Slámová Bartošová
An eccentric and a voyeur. A man looking like a foolish
homeless in a coat bizarrely patched together. A maker of
visual objects that, surprisingly enough, can be used to take
photographs. Before 1989 (the pre-Velvet Revolution time),
a persona non grata that was regularly moved out of way during
the Folklore Festival in Kyjov in Moravia from the town to a lunatic
asylum. A painter, a DIY man and the author of photographs
that won the galleries world-wide by storm in the last decade
– in fact against their author’s wish. An exceptionally original
and talented artist. A product of successful manipulation by
the curators. Whatever. In any way you take it, a man of a great
obsession. The photographer Miroslav Tichý from Kyjov can
be considered through a prism of all of these perspectives; he
also is the subject of the production The Quiet Tarzan (Tichý
Tarzan) by the director Anna Petrželková.
exaggerated in the production). The result is a fine caricature
of an old man endowed with both humour and a dimension
of a real personality. By casting a woman in the lead, the
production team strived to suppress the motive of voyeurism
and tune down a possible superficial, obvious, “downstage
centre” interpretation of Tichý as a sexual outcast.
There is also a similar slight grotesque shift in the presentation
of the other characters: the pair of girls who are the object of
Tichý’s attention (Anička Duchaňová, Anežka Kubátová), the
female neighbour looking after the artist (Gabriela Štefanová),
Kyjov’s swimming-pool playboy (Robert Mikluš), Tichý’s father
(Vladimír Hauser) and others. The performers successfully keep
the production in the pleasantly rollicking mood that probably has
the basis in the photographer’s ironic and detached view of the
everyday world, always somewhat laughable with all its private
views and vain glorifications. The leitmotif of the obtrusive, sniffing
mice that the characters are changing into stresses the grotesque
tone of the production even further. These mice are devouring the
photos that had been carelessly thrown around the house, but they
also represent mice sponging on Tichý’s personality.
The basis of the stage design is a Perspex wall smeared
with white colour that lends both the onstage action and the
images behind it the same patina that features prominently in
52/
kaleidoscope
the artist’s own underexposed, overexposed, half-destroyed
photographs or blurred memories. It is both simple and
efficient.
The photographer’s reminiscing has a linear character; it
runs through his life and closes at the moment of the unwanted
glory that contrasts ironically with the visual artist’s own
self-assessment: “If you want to be famous, you have to do
something in such a stupid way nobody else would be able to
do it as stupidly.” In a way, the production is a sort of theatre
docudrama profile of an idiosyncratic personality; some might
see it as perhaps too romantic a portrayal of an artist resisting
the demands and customs of his society. Nevertheless, this
portrayal features excellent acting performances and very
pleasant humour.
values and certainties of the age that is already moving away,
and in their festering existential confusion they are attempting
(sometimes using literary quotations or paraphrasing arts
movements manifestos) to define the ideals, transformations
and uncertainties of the times to come. This upcoming era
enters the stage with the hasty rhythm of engines, with the
Simona Petrů, Petr Jan Kryštof: The Quiet Tarzan. Director
Anna Petrželková, dramaturgy Josef Kovalčuk, set design and
costumes Lucie Labajová, music Petr Hromádka. Goose on
a String Theatre – The Cellar Stage, Brno, premiere 13 / 1 / 2012.
> Photo Jáchym Kliment
A Sound Chronicle .
of the Beginning .
of the Modern Time
Kamila Černá
taking-off of a hot-air balloon, with the first drive in a car.
With the sound vibrations, throbbing, murmuring, amplified
whispering, onomatopoeia. The progress, technology, sports,
expressed through the exactly dosed words, tone of voice,
gestures, movements… And the upcoming political changes
also get their due – the Revolution is waving its red fan at the
protagonists during their imagined journey to Russia, wittily
presented in “basic Russian” – their vain belief in a better, more
just world has not been contaminated by the practice yet. That
will only happen after a “big, prolonged war” whose turmoil,
shooting and explosions conclude Adámek’s sound chronicle.
Although the Boca Loca Lab productions programmatically
avoid plots based on a classical story, the Fire has a more
distinctive storyline compared to the previous productions;
its scenario features deftly and unobtrusively inserted ministories about the couples, a lover one and a married one. The
dialogues catching the spirit of the era are composed cleverly,
originally and with humour; only exceptionally the occasional
weakness of Adámek’s productions appears – some of the
scenes being either too long or too monotone.
There is an obvious parallel with our own times where the eras
are breaking and the structure of the world is changing on both
sound and idea level. As it was the case a hundred years ago, the
values and the authorities of the previous era are disappearing,
both the uncomfortable garments and unfashionable ideas are
being taken off. One only has to hope that the sound history
of the upcoming era will not be started, as the previous one
according to Adámek’s production, with explosions and the
hurly-burly of the war.
The Boca Loca Lab Theatre Company, established in 2007 by
the director Jiří Adámek, is among the few Czech theatres that
keep getting invitations from the international festivals and that
are often better known abroad than at home. Adámek’s original
method of directing mixes theatre and music, works with
musically composed production structure giving the text
specific rhythms and playing with speech onomatopoeia.
His productions often react to socially and politically urgent
current affairs taking inspiration from the most banal media
clichés and news headlines (The Europeans / Evropané),
from the mechanism that changes people into politicians
(Tics Tics Politics / Tiká, tiká politika), or from the web pages
created by people obsessed with wanting to change the world
(Changemakers, a production prepared in 2011 at the Berlin
Neuköllner Oper Theatre House). They use fragments, quotes,
tunes and sounds of the world that happen to be around us and
that we stopped to take in.
The latest Adámek’s production with Boca Loca Lab, Fire
(Požár), is a story of European society and its transformation
at the turn of the 19th and 20th Century. There are two
timescales that meet and clash on the stage, as it were.
The first of them has a sedate rhythm, rippled only by the
disputations on arts, nature and existence conducted by Jiří Adámek: Fire. Directed by Jiří Adámek, dramaturgy Martina
a small group seated for “a breakfast on the grass” around the Musilová, set design Ivana Kanhäuserová, music Jakub Kudláč.
isles of fake greenery. The participants are brought up on the Boca Loca Lab, premiere 21 / 11 / 2011.
kaleidoscope
Gloriana Is Above All a Magnificent Sight
Radmila Hrdinová
/53
and impressive spectacle that never bores the audience.
He is aided in this by conductor Zbyněk Müller’s musical
arrangement, which accents the colourfulness of Britten’s instrumentation, the dynamic and expressional nuancing of intimate scenes and the chorus scenes, and the wit of the period
references and influences. An excellent performance is given
by the choirs rigorously guided by choirmasters Pavel Vaněk
and Jiří Chvála (Kühn’s Children’s Choir).
German soprano Gun-Brit Barkmin is perfect in the role of
Elizabeth, not just because of the sovereign and emotive sound
of her voice, but above all for her extraordinary physical skill
and acting ability, including a feeling for the grotesque. Her
Elizabeth dominates the production as a truly animate and
tragic figure and a unique human being.
‘Gloriana’ is the name the poet Edmund Spenser gave to
Queen Elizabeth in the poem he wrote in her praise in the
1590s. This moniker became a generally well-known synonym
for the ‘virgin queen’ who ruled England from 1559 to 1604.
In name and length of reign she is recalled in the current British
monarch Queen Elizabeth II, for whose coronation in 1953 Benjamin
Britten composed the opera Gloriana. The Czech premiere of the
opera was at the National Theatre (Národní divadlo). It was directed
by the former head of the opera company Jiří Heřman, who initiated Benjamin Britten: Gloriana. Directed by Jiří Heřman, conductor
Zbyněk Müller, set design Pavel Svoboda, costumes Alexandra
the project to have it brought to the Czech stage.
Heřman had already made plain his deep affinity with Britten Grusková. National Theatre, Prague, premiere 3 / 3 / 2012.
when he directed the latter’s Curlew River seven years ago in the
atrium of the Czech Museum of Music (České muzeum hudby).
And he’s demonstrating it again with Gloriana, an opera with
Animals on the Kitchen
CounteR
Jan Kerbr
> Photo Hana Smejkalová
a somewhat comlicated structure that is tied together here by
Heřman’s figurative form of direction full of visual symbols.
Britten tried to overcome the static nature of a coronation
opera by taking up the theme of the inner conflict between
ruler and woman, for which he found material in Lytton
Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History, but his opera
remained nonetheless formally and musically split between the
spheres of exaltation and intimacy. The story of Elizabeth’s secret
love for ‘Robin’, the Earl of Essex, is interspersed with illustrative
images of tribute to the sovereign, including masques, a 16thcentury English stage genre.
Heřman, however, managed to cope with the splintered
structure of the opera by emphasising the symbolic level,
represented, among other things, by a giant crown that descends
upon the queen like a cinch around her desire and freedom as
a woman. In conjunction with choreographer Jan Kodet he
imaginatively sets the simple but functional stage alight with
the choruses, dancers and soloists to create a stylistically pure
Stuffed toys are the main (and only) heroes of Amberville,
a production staged by Pilsen’s Alfa Theatre (Divadlo Alfa),
based on Tim Davys’s novel of the same name. But this is no
theatre for children. The soft fluffy ‘toys’ star here in a tough
detective thriller.
In his novel Tim Davys created an artificial civilisation of
stuffed animals that have their own laws, religion (their god is
named Magnus), medicine (including plastic surgery), police,
and criminals. The inhabitants of this world form families, but
they also indulge in kinky sex (with alternating partners, like the
sadomasochist gazelle Sam). They are not however subject to
the cycle of life; the Cub List and the Death List determine when
they’re born and die. Interference with these lists and the search
to find out who has hold of them form the basic plot of the story.
Alfa Theatre sets Davys’s story on a kitchen counter, which
the stuffed animals move around on. The animals are handled
by actors. We can see their hands, their black shirts and lightcoloured neckties, and we can sometimes see the bottom half
of their faces (but not their eyes) whenever ‘on behalf’ of the
animals the actors eat hot dogs or smoke.
Intrigue, sexual escapades, murder, and arrests all take
place on the kitchen-counter stage. Director Radovan Lipus
inserted some Czech elements into Davys’s fluffy civilisation:
the head of a criminal organisation is the Little Mole, a popular
Czech cartoon figure, and pop songs by the Czech band Buty
underscore the dynamics of the plot.
The actors artfully manipulate the animals to create a bizarre
fusion of a toy with the flexibility of the human hand. Equally
bizarre is the parallel between the animals’ fates and our real
54/
kaleidoscope
> Photo Pavel Křivánek
world. The tough ‘toy’ morality explores the boundaries between
good and evil, how the two intertwine, and the impossibility
of using one to the advantage of the other. Despite the relative
complexity of the fable, Alfa Theatre’s production of Amberville
managed in a humorous and original way and through the fates
of stuffed animals to call attention to the rot and artifice that we
people inject into our lives.
Tim Davys, Marek Pivovar: Amberville, or the Tough Town of
Soft Toys. Translated by Robert Novotný, directed by Radovan
Lipus, set design David Bazika, dramaturgy Pavel Vašíček. Alfa
Theatre Pilsen, world premiere 27 / 5 / 2011.
Cross fingers for Bullerbyn
Petra Ježková
Recent graduates of the Department of Alternative Theatre at
the Theatre Faculty of Academy of Performing Arts (DAMU) got
together to form their own independent theatre society called
Športniki. They created an unostentatious, playful show charged
with energy called Back to Bullerbyn. From the cult children
book by Astrid Lindgren, they only kept the main characters and
the compelling mood within the group of children, with their
first loves, their boyish and girlish “deadly confidential” secrets,
their group competition in spitting and so on. Starting with the
moment the pack of children decide to set up a music band, the
story leaves the book that inspired the production and goes on
to follow the genesis and the peripeties of the relations within
the Swedish legendary pop group ABBA. The second part of the
production then becomes a satire on the show business and its
traps that often destroy both friendship and human relations.
Yet rather than for its storyline, the production is remarkable
for its authentic, captivating spirit that the actors are conjuring
with a minimum of sparely used means of expression. The show is
performed with six small finger puppets representing Lisa, Bosse,
Anna, Lasse, Olle and Britta on an empty table, in the air, on the
puppeteers own bodies. Through their simplicity, the “Swedish”-
style yellow-and-blue knitted puppets are reminiscent of the results
of the school handicraft lessons or of DIY crocheted toys. That’s all
that is needed. Plenty of use is made of the exceptional musical
skills of the actors; the whole show is accompanied by the live
acoustic guitar onstage playing by the production’s director Jakub
Vašíček together with the most musically endowed of the actresses,
Johana Vaňousová, who plays her flute with bravura. It is during
the songs with solid polyphony arrangements that are woven into
the production structure (the most impressive of them are the
Swedish language songs about Bullerbyn written and composed by
the author duo Vaňousová – Vašíček) that the possibilities offered
by hand puppets are shown in the most effective way: they prank
in imaginative choreographies, transcending human limitations,
they create aerial images and ornaments remindful of musical clips
effects (those usually made using film tricks and special effects).
During the applause, there is a witty encore: the actors
perform “a scenic manifest” for puppet theatre: they try to
recreate the same choreography that had been brilliantly
performed by the finger puppets; but in the physical version
it becomes a worn out, noisy and clumsy piece of gymnastics.
Unobtrusive wit, infectious passion and authenticity are all the
main features radiating from the performance as a whole.
The production attracted attention in November 2011 at
the One Flew over the Puppeteer‘s Nest festival where it was
awarded the main prize, the so-called Erik Award, as the most
inspiring Czech puppet show of the past season. Both the
exceptional reception the production was met with and the clear
closeness and teamwork of the interprets led to a logical promise
of the follow-up life of the Športniki Company. This young adhoc group – created in January 2011 in Maribor during the
preparations for the production of Why? (Zakaj?) at the Maribor
Puppet Theatre Studio (Lutkovno gledaliště Maribor) where
the authors thought up and rehearsed Back to Bullerbyn – is
> Photo Boštjan Lah
going to continue its work featuring the same people. The next
premiere by this enthusiastic and pleasantly unobtrusive theatre
workshop will open in June 2012 with the authorial production
of Gagarin! (current information at http://www.sportniki.cz/).
Astrid Lindgren and Športniki: Back to Bullerbyn. Director Jakub
Vašíček, dramaturgy Tomáš Jarkovský, puppets and costumes
Tereza Venclová, music arrangement Športniki. Športniki,
performed at Maribor Puppet Theatre Studio, premiere 8 / 3 / 2011.
NOTEBOOK
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notebook
Theatre Awards 2011
l Theatre Alfréd Radok Awards
2) The Alfréd Radok Awards, awarded by the Alfréd Radok
Foundation, are based on the results of a survey carried out by
the magazine The World and Theatre (Svět a divadlo), were 3) awarded for 2011 in following categories:
Production of the Year
1)
2)
3)
Paul Claudel: The Break of Noon (Polední úděl), Theatre
in Dlouhá Street (Divadlo v Dlouhé), Prague, directed by
Hana Burešová, adapted by Hana Burešová and Štěpán
Otčenášek
Patrik Ouředník, Dora Viceníková, Jan Mikulášek:
Europeana, National Theatre in Brno – Reduta Theatre
(Divadlo Reduta – Národní Divadlo Brno), directed by
Jan Mikulášek
Philip Glass: Les enfants terribles, National Theatre
(Národní divadlo), Prague, directed by Alice Nellis
Best Actress
Helena Dvořáková – Ysé in the production of Hana
Burešová The Break of Noon (Polední úděl), Theatre in
Dlouhá Street (Divadlo v Dlouhé), Prague
Miroslav Bambušek: Czech War (Česká válka), Theatre
on the Ballustrade (Divadlo Na zábradlí), Prague,
directed by Martin Glaser Petr Zelenka: Endangered Species (Ohrožené druhy),
National Theatre (Národní divadlo), Prague, directed by
Petr Zelenka
Best Set Design
Martin Černý – set design for the production The Break
of Noon (Polední úděl) by Paul Claudel, Theatre in
Dlouhá Street (Divadlo v Dlouhé), Prague
2-3) Marek Cpin – set design for the production Embarrasing
Torture (Trapná muka) by Karel Čapek and Jan
Mikulášek, Goose on a String Theatre (Divadlo Husa na
provázku), Brno
2-3) Jan Nebeský and Jana Preková – set design for
the production King Lear (Král Lear) by William
Shakespeare, National Theatre (Národní divadlo), Prague
1) Best Music
Miloš Štědroň – music for the play Leoš, or Most
Faithfully Yours (Leoš aneb Tvá nejvěrnější), Goose on
a String Theatre (Divadlo Husa na provázku), Brno
2) Aleš Březina – music for the play King Lear (Král Lear)
Best Actor
by William Shakespeare, National Theatre (Národní
Martin Pechlát – Andreas Karták in the production of David
divadlo), Prague
Jařab The Legend of the Holy Drinker (Legenda o svatém
3-4) David Babka – music for the play Wanted Welzl by Karel
pijanovi), Prague Chamber Theatre – Comedy Theatre
František Tománek, Dejvice Theatre (Dejvické divadlo),
(Pražské komorní divadlo – Divadlo Komedie), Prague
Prague
Xindl X (Ondřej Ládek), Dalibor Cidlinský jr. – music for
the play Cyrano!! Cyrano!! Cyrano!! by Edmond Rostand,
Theatre of the Year
Pavel Kohout, Xindl X, Theatre in Vinohrady (Divadlo na
1) Prague Chamber Theatre – Comedy Theatre (Pražské
Vinohradech), Prague
komorní divadlo – Divadlo Komedie), Prague
2) National Theatre in Brno – Reduta Theatre (Divadlo
Talent of the Year
Reduta – Národní Divadlo Brno), Brno
Michal Isteník, actor
3-4) Buranteatr, Brno
3-4) Theatre in Dlouhá Street (Divadlo v Dlouhé), Prague
1) Playwright’s Competition
Best Czech Play in Repertory
1) David Drábek: Chocolate Eaters (Jedlíci čokolády),
Klicpera Theatre (Klicperovo divadlo), Hradec Králové,
directed by David Drábek
1) 2) 3) Jan Kratochvíl: Vladimir’s Slut (Vladimirova děvka)
Nenad Djapić: Vienna Sin (Vídeňský hřích)
Iva Procházková: Gross (Brutto)
56/
NOTEBOOK
a century with loutkář
ÙA drawing by Marek Zákostelecký dedicated to Loutkář magazine on its 100th anniversary
T
he Loutkář (Puppeteer Magazine) is the oldest
continuously published Czech theatre magazine and the
oldest theatre magazine in the world specialising in the
art of puppetry and alternative theatre. With 6 issues a year,
the magazine regularly brings news, reviews and interviews
with some of the world’s leading puppeteers, information and
articles about puppetry festivals around the world, theoretical
and historical studies, puppet plays and news from UNIMA.
The first volume of Loutkář was published in 1912 and the
first editor-in-chief became dr. Jindřich Veselý. Veselý recruited
several key collaborators – playwrights, visual artists, active
puppeteers, teachers and promoters of puppetry who together
with him managed to cover a wide range of topics. Loutkář
was writing about the importance of puppet theatre, new
puppet plays, the work of theatre groups from various towns
and villages and their experience, as well as about puppetry
abroad. As supplements, the magazine published full texts of
puppetry plays and occasionally also remarkable art drawings.
The magazine was naturally also writing about history. In May
1929, when a Congress of Puppeteers and a great puppetry
exhibition took place in Prague and UNIMA was founded here,
Loutkář as its official journal became known internationally.
In the thirties, several young personalities enter the scene:
Jan Malík, Erik Kolár, Vladimír Šmejkal, Vladimír Matoušek,
Karel Baroch, Zdeněk Vyskočil and others. Of this group of
young and upcoming puppetry directors, Jan Malík was among
the most prominent, not only as a director but also through
his many other activities, including journalism. Like Veselý,
Jan Malík was a good organiser, knowledgeable about theatre
history and with extensive knowledge of puppetry activities
in Czechoslovakia and abroad that he applied in the articles
written for Loutkář. Already Malík’s first articles in Loutkář
focused on issues of set design and technology, it is important
to note, however, that all the questions he was asking were
primarily seen from the perspective of a director, from which he
was also evaluating their importance and means of solving them
– a brand new perspective that was very significant in its time.
After the Nazi occupation, when the magazine was stopped
for several years, the first issue of Loutkář (renewed under
the title Loutková scéna) was published already on 15 October
NOTEBOOK
/57
1945 with the same cover, and with Dr. Jan Malík as editor. In
1951, the magazine was renamed to Československý loutkář
(Czechoslovak Puppeteer).
Since the end of the sixties more fundamental theoretical
studies start appearing, written by Erik Kolár, Miroslav Česal
and later also Jan Císař, Karel Makonj, Petr Pavlovský, Henryk
Jurkowski and others. Although the magazine was unable
to resist the pressure of the period known as Normalisation
(particularly in the editorials, some party-dictated material
and the evaluations of politically committed plays and shows,
as well as in a slight reorientation back towards the East), it
still maintained the same level of quality in theory as well as
in criticism where it published even ostracised authors. It
started focusing more consistently on the topic of “Children
and puppets”, previewing the later enormous development of
dramatic education.
In 1980 Eva Hanžlíková–Křížková, who had already
demonstrated her unusual talent for journalism and criticism
many times in the magazine, became editor-in-chief of
Loutkář. Under her leadership the magazine was successfully
broadening the horizons of puppetry, placing puppet theatre in
the context of other theatre activities (studio theatres) and art
in general, and discovering fields where they overlap. Names
of new young authors start appearing in the index; more plays
are published, Czech as well as foreign ones, accompanied by
a dramaturg’s note.
Despite that, a certain ennui started setting in after 1990,
and the magazine was slowly losing its core concept. This
situation crystallised at a meeting of the Association of
Professional Puppeteers at the Skupa Plzeň festival in 1992
with an almost unanimous call for a change. On 1 May 1993,
after long negotiations, the magazine (renamed to Loutkář due
to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia) was taken over by new
editors: Pavel Vašíček as the editor–in–chief and Nina Malíková.
In 1993, the publishing of the magazine was taken over by the
Theatre Institute, where its office has been located ever since
under the heading of the Association for the Publishing of the
Loutkář Magazine. On 1 January 2000, the leadership of the
magazine changed one more time to current editor–in–chief
Nina Malíková.
ÙOne of the first issues of Loutkář magazine
ÙLoutkář as it looks today
58/
NOTEBOOK
Twenty Years of the Kylián Foundation in Prague
ÙGala performance of Different Shores at the New Stage of the National Theatre, Prague 2011
T
he Kylián Foundation was established in 1988 in The
Hague, Netherlands, by the Czech dancer, choreographer,
and long-time director of the Nederlands Dans Theater,
Jiří Kylián. Its objective has been to support new dance activities,
help young performers and choreographers with their start into
professional life, and encourage them in their creative work.
After the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, Jiří
Kylián began thinking about how he could contribute to his
native country and help it overcome forty years of isolation
from the developments in modern dance to the west of the
country’s borders. He decided to establish a branch of his
foundation in Prague. In May 1991 Jiří Kylián brought the
Nederlands Dans Theater to Prague to perform at the Prague
Spring Festival. On this occasion and in the presence of Jiří
Kylián personally the Kylián Foundation in Prague was
established at the Theatre Institute.
Given the motives that led Kylián to open this foundation it is
obvious that it differed in character from other such foundations
that were operating in Czechoslovakia. The foundation was not
about giving direct financial support for individuals or projects,
but about educational activities and the provision of practical
and moral assistance from the Dutch side, represented by the
Kylián Foundation in The Hague and by the Dance Institute in
Amsterdam. Within the scope of these activities exchanges and
study visits were organised for dance teachers, choreographers,
and performers between the Netherlands and the Czech
Republic.
In 1998 cooperation between the Theatre Institute and
the Kylián Foundation in Prague entered a new phase. In the
years that had passed the Czech dance scene had changed
substantially; it became unnecessary to put Czech artists
in touch with contacts abroad. The foundation therefore
turned its attention to activities geared towards education and
consultation. In connection with this change the foundation
assumed a new name, the Kylián Videotheque. Its work began
to revolve around its extensive collection of video recordings,
which currently contains more than 2100 recordings of Czech
and foreign productions, documentaries on the history and
present of dance, profiles of particular figures, recordings of
theatre events and seminars. All this encompasses not just
dance and ballet, but also non-verbal theatre, alternative
groups, scenic dance, and movement theatre. These collections
are accessible to the public on the premises of the videotheque
based at the Arts and Theatre Institute (items in the collection
are non-circulating).
In 2011 the transfer of the video collections from the
Netherlands was definitively completed. The remaining items
in Jiří Kylián’s personal and artistic archive were also relocated
to the Prague branch, including documents relating to his
work for various dance companies around the world, reviews,
interviews, and press responses in different languages. The
Kylián Videotheque is thus currently the only institution in
which researchers have access to archive materials about Jiří
Kylián. The collection also contains written materials relating
to the development of some of his choreographic works, theatre
programmes, theatre posters, personal correspondence, prizes
awarded to Kylián’s work, and so on.
The Kylián Videotheque organises seminars and screenings
in various towns in the Czech Republic. Since 1998 it has
cooperated closely with NIPOS-ARTAMA on the continuing
education of choreographers in the field of stage dance and
of teachers working at such places as basic schools for the
arts and youth centres, and it has worked with the dance
festivals Na třikrát (Brno), SIRAEX (Klášterec nad Ohří)
and a summer school for actors (Šumperk). In the past two
years, in cooperation with Zóna dance association (Taneční
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sdružení Zóna), the Kylián Videotheque has organised
regular seminars and video screenings in Ostrava and Nový
Jičín.
In November 2011 the Kylián Foundation celebrated its
twentieth anniversary and marked two decades of cooperation
with the Theatre Institute in Prague (now the Arts and Theatre
Institute). As part of celebrations of this anniversary a number
of workshops, seminars, and screenings were organised,
culminating in the gala performance of Different Shores (Různé
břehy) at the New Stage of the National Theatre in Prague. The
celebrations were organised by the Arts and Theatre Institute
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in cooperation with the dance group 420PEOPLE, the Jiří
Kylián Foundation in The Hague, the New Stage of the National
Theatre, the Institute of Lighting Design, the National Theatre
Ballet, with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech
Republic, the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in
Prague, the Embassy of the United States in Prague, Fondation
BNP Paribas, the Czech-German Fund for the Future, and media
partners. This event was also the occasion of the christening
of the new book Different Shores – Choreographer Jiří Kylián
between The Hague and Prague (Různé břehy – choreograf Jiří
Kylián mezi Haagem a Prahou).
Czech Theatres in Numbers
In 2011 a total of 151 theatres and permanent groups of
artists regularly and consistently participated in theatre life in
the Czech Republic.
There are 49 repertoire theatres, each with its own company/
companies of various genres (13 of them have more than one
company, the usual model being based on three companies:
opera, drama and ballet). These theatres receive regular
grants from local and regional budgets (44 theatres) and from
the national budget (2 theatres and 3 theatre schools). There
are other 39 permanent stages without their own company,
financed from public funds (local budgets).
All the Czech theatres presented a total of 1 700 titles and 2 632
productions. 693 premieres were presented. A total of 27 866
performances took place in the Czech Republic which were
seen by more than 5,7 million theatre goers (average attendance
78  %). The Czech companies gave 808 performances abroad.
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l Věra Ptáčková, Barbora Příhodová,
Simona Rybáková:
Czech Theatre Costume (CZ / ENG)
(Český divadelní kostým)
This is the first ever book on theatre costumes in the Czech
lands, accompanied by a key text by Věra Ptáčková, the author
of the legendary tome Czech Stage Design of the Twentieth
Century, and with notes on the contemporary use of theatre
costume written by Barbora Příhodová and insights into Czech
costume written by the designer Simona Rybáková. It contains
approximately 400 illustrations, most of them drawn from the
abundant archives of the Arts and Theatre Institute in Prague
(Department of Collections and Archive and the Photographic
Collection).
Arts and Theatre Institute and Pražská scéna, Prague 2011,
263 pp., ISBN 978-80-7008-258-4 (ATI)
ISBN 978-80-86102-71-9 (Pražská scéna)
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l Isabelle Lanzová, Dorota Gremlicová,
Elvíra Němečková, Roman Vašek:
Different Shores: Jiří Kylián between The
Hague and Prague (CZ)
(Různé břehy. Choreograf Jiří Kylián mezi Haagem
a Prahou)
Different Shores: Jiří Kylián between The Hague and Prague
is the most in-depth monograph devoted to Jiří Kylián to date,
divided into three sections and spread over 301 glossy pages.
The first section traces Kylián’s work chronologically and looks
at its development at Nederlands Dans Theater up until 1995.
The core chapter in this section is the translation of a text by
Dutch dance critic Isabelle Lanz titled ‘A Garden of Dance’.
The section also includes a chapter by Dorota Gremlicová and
Elvíra Němečková on Kylián’s work between 1995 and 2010, and
a chapter by Dorota Gremlicová examining the characteristic
features of Kylián’s choreographic style and the changes it has
undergone in the first decade of the third millennium. The
second section focuses on the ties between Jiří Kylián and first
Czechoslovakia and now the Czech Republic. Elvíra Němečková
explores Kylián’s early years in dance in Czechoslovakia in the
1960s, and Roman Vašek describes how Kylián’s work made its
way into Czechoslovakia in the normalisation period after 1968
and then Kylián’s return to the Czech Republic after 1989. The
third section contains several lists (e.g. a list of recordings of
Kylián’s choreographic works stored in the Kylián Videotheque
in Prague) and an annotated bibliography. The numerous
illustrations convey to readers the atmosphere of Kylián’s dance
world, and the book even includes an English summary.
Arts and Theatre Institute, Prague 2011, 301 pp.
ISBN 978-80-7008-267-6
l Eva Uhlířová: The Creative Will (CZ)
(Vůle k tvorbě)
Czech Theatre Editions
– Essays, Criticism, Analyses Series
Eva Uhlířová (1933–1969) was a scholar of Romance
languages, a theatre arts teacher, and a translator, who in 1957–
1968, when she was publishing her theatre studies and reviews,
very quickly developed into one of the most noteworthy young
theatre critics and journalists. She ended her life at the close
of the 1960s. Her writings on theatre are an ideal example
of intellectual emancipation from the mandatory politicalaesthetic directives imposed in the 1950s. They show the
growth of one member of the generation of critics and theorists
born in the 1930s, whose names are still well-known (Jaroslav
Vostrý, Leoš Suchařípa, Jan Císař, Milan Lukeš, Zdeněk
Hořínek, Jindřich Černý), and who became the most productive
thinkers in the theatre arts in their day. Eva Uhlířová was
a member of this generation and one of its most talented figures,
exceptional in her gifts and her fate. She was a person of high
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standards and deep erudition, firm in character and extremely
conscientious. This selection of her studies and critical writings
on the playwrights and phenomena in the theatre of that period
(Ionesco, Genet, Dürrenmatt, Topol, Havel) constitutes a rich
addition to this publishing series devoted to Czech theatre
criticism and theory. The book also includes a study by Jana
Patočková, the book’s editor, a complete bibliography, notes,
and an index.
ISBN 978-80-7008-281-2
l Ivo Svetina (ed.): Occupying Spaces.
Experimental Theatre in Central Europe
1950–2010 (ENG)
This English-language publication presents for the first
time in history a comprehensive overview of the development
of experimental theatre in the countries of central Europe.
The publication is part of the outcome of the project “Theatre
Architecture in Central Europe” and on almost 600 pages it
presents texts by 16 authors from the Czech Republic, Hungary,
Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. The texts are accompanied by
150 black-and-white and colour photographs and there is an
index of names at the end of the book.
ISBN 978-961-6860-01-7
l Arnold Aronson (ed.):
The Disappearing Stage: Reflections on
the 2011 Prague Quadrennial (ENG)
The Disappearing Stage is a book of reflections on the recent
12th edition of the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design
and Space. The authors include both domestic and foreign
theorists and artists: Marvin Carlson (USA), Christopher Baugh
(UK), Thea Brejzek (DE), Beth Weinstein (USA), Guy Gutman
(IL) and Barbora Příhodová (CZ). The publication’s editor
as well as author of last essay is American theatre theorist
Arnold Aronson. The book’s essays look at various projects or
aspects of the 2011 Prague Quadrennial, but many of which
serve as a starting point for a deeper theoretical evaluation of
contemporary theatre and scenography.
ISBN 78-80-7008-283-6
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l Bohumil Nekolný, Eva Žáková and col.:
Study of the Contemporary State of the
Support for the Arts, Volume II (CZ)
(Studie současného stavu podpory umění – Svazek II)
Volume II of the Study of the Contemporary State
of Support for the Arts is the working output of the Study of
the State, Structure, Conditions, and Funding of the Arts in the
Czech Republic project, supported by the Ministry of Culture
of the Czech Republic, and realized by the Arts Institute from
2006 to 2011. This publication follows Volume I published in
2009. The basic subject of the both volumes is the situation of
professional arts in the fields of the so called live arts (i.e. theatre,
dance, music, visual arts, literature, film) since 1989. Volume
I elaborates on the definition and specification of the particular
domains, their history until 1989, the transformation of their
institutional base after 1989, the historical, theoretical, and
critical reflection, and the issue of education and research.
Volume II deals with the issues of funding, legislature, social
matters, addressees of works of arts and performances,
international cooperation, and state of the fields of arts as of
2010. The conclusion brings Miroslav Petříček’s reflection on
the role of our arts and culture in the European context.
ISBN 978-80-7008-266-9
l Martina Černá, Jitka Sloupová,
Marie Špalová (eds.): GAME’S NOT
OVER – New Czech Plays (not only)
for Your Tablet / E-Reader (ENG)
The electronic book GAME’S NOT OVER – New Czech Plays
(not only) for Your Tablet / E-Reader brings you recent plays
by Czech authors. Though the publication includes a broad
spectrum of playwrights – beginning with the youngest
generation aged 35 and under (Radmila Adamová, Magdaléna
Frydrych Gregorová, Petr Kolečko, Kateřina Rudčenková),
middle-aged authors (David Drábek, Roman Sikora, Petr
Zelenka), right through to the mature doyens of the Czech
cultural scene (Arnošt Goldflam, Václav Havel, Milan Uhde)
– all authors included are currently active figures who have
participated in contemporary Czech theatre not only in the
roles of playwrights and authors but also as literary managers,
directors or artistic directors. Two Slovak authors – Vladislava
Fekete and Viliam Klimáček – are included as a special bonus in
the publication. The book is published by the Arts and Theatre
Institute in cooperation with the agencies Aura-Pont and DILIA.
Free download at www.theatre.cz, 702 pp.
ISBN 978-80-7008-265-2
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l Martina Černá (ed.):
Czech Theatre Guide (ENG)
This English-language guide to the Czech theatre is
a handbook that provides clear and easy orientation in the goings
on in Czech theatre. The publication is divided into two parts.
The introductory texts offer a brief excursion into the contexts
of individual areas of theatre life (funding, the theatre network,
festivals, historical context, etc.), the second part contains
a directory of Czech theatres, theatre organisations, festivals,
venues, schools, periodicals and publishers. The publication is
intended for both professionals and lay people with an interest
in Czech theatre.
ISBN 978-80-7008-275-1
l Jana Návratová (ed.): Czech Dance
Guide (ENG)
The Czech Dance Guide presents profiles of Czech dance
companies, personalities, venues, schools and other subjects
who operate in the field of contemporary and classical dance.
The publication also contains a short historical overview of
Czech professional dance.
ISBN 978-80-7008-280-5
l Viktor Debnár and Jaroslav Balvín (eds.):
Czech Literature Guide (ENG)
The Czech Literature Guide presents a panorama of the
contemporary life of Czech literature with a short historical
overview. It is designed for anyone with an interest, whether
layperson or professional, in Czech literary culture and its
milieu.
ISBN 978-80-7008-272-0
l Lenka Dohnalová (ed.): Czech Music
Guide (ENG)
The Czech Music Guide presents an up-to-date panorama
of Czech music life with a short historical overview for
everyone with an interest, whether layperson or professional,
in understanding Czech music culture and its milieu.
Contents: About the Czech Republic, A Short History of Music,
Contemporary Music Life, Current Culture Policy, Music
Institutions, The Music Education System, Archives, Science
and Research Centres, Journals, Information Centres, Regional
Panorama, Links.
ISBN 978-80-7008-269-0
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l Marie Jirásková and Pavel Jirásek:
Puppets and Modernism (CZ)
(Loutka a moderna)
Layout: Klára Kvízová, Petr Krejzek
Puppets and Modernism: The Visual Quality of Czech Puppetry
of Family, Group Theatres and Arts Stages in the First Half of the
20th Century as a Distinctive Reflection of the Avant-garde and
Modernist Ventures of Czech Fine Artists (Loutka a moderna
– vizualita českého loutkového rodinného divadla, spolkového
divadla a uměleckých scén v první polovině 20. století jako
osobitý odraz avantgardních a modernistických snah českých
výtvarných umělců) is a scenographer’s look at a half century
of development of puppetry set design during a time when this
art form experienced an extraordinary boom in the Czech lands.
The publication examines the connections between artists and
specifically the top Czech figures behind various styles and fields
– designers, woodcutters, painters, and scenographers – and the
development of avant-garde and modernist work in European art.
It describes the changes in the puppetry stage over time, from
historicism, Art Nouveau and Symbolism, to Impressionist and
Expressionist influences, to Cubism and Art Deco, and finally
fundamental and brightly coloured Functionalism or the shiny
stage-show stylisations. The book contains 750 illustrations
including period photographs of puppetry performances, stage,
costume, and puppet designs, photographs of puppets, posters,
programmes, drawings, ex libris, caricatures, visual images of
puppetry periodicals, and a collection of new colour photographs
showcasing unique items in the most important Czech public
and private puppetry collections. The publication serves as
a comprehensive and systematic guide to puppetry scenography
of the first half of the 20th century.
The book came in first in the contest for Most Beautiful
Book of the Year 2011 in the category of scholarly and scientific
publications.
Arbor vitae and Janáčkova akademie múzických umění,
Brno 2011, 456 pp., ISBN: 978-80-87164-85-3
l Christian M. Billing and Pavel Drábek
(eds.): Czech Stage Art and Stage Design (ENG)
Special Issue of Theatralia / Yorick 2011/1
This volume is a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal
Theatralia/Yorick, devoted to new historical and theoretical
studies of Czech Stage Art and Stage Design – both diachronically
and as an investigation of synchronic practices specific to
a number of key historical periods, individual artists and important
theoreticians. The essays in this volume include several studies
of discrete historical phenomena: medieval stage practice and
its scenographic elements (Petr Uličný and Kateřina Vršecká);
the costuming and scenic practices of central European Baroque
theatres (Jana Spáčilová and Sylva Marková); the scenographic
legacy of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Czech family
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marionette theatres (Jaroslav Blecha); the invention and early
performance programmes of the Laterna Magika of Josef Svoboda
and Alfréd Radok (Eva Stehlíková); and a study examining the
radical disruption of stage space undertaken in Moravian and
Silesian theatre from 1960 to 1989 (Tatjana Lazorčákova). Other
essays focus in detail on selected aspects of the work of important
Czech practitioners: the ballet scenography of František Zelenka
(Lada Bartošová); the scenic designs of Karel Zmrzlý (Lucie
Pelikánová); the paintings and set designs of Jaroslav Malina
(Joseph E. Brandesky). Also contained are two important studies
evaluating Czech articulations of the significance of scenography
as a discrete sub‑discipline of theoretical inquiry within the
wider field of Theatre and Performance Studies: an account of the
project of the Czech Scenographic Encyclopaedia and the series of
journal issues it advanced – the Prolegomena (Šárka Havlíčková
Kysová); and an evaluation of early Czech contributions to the
theorisation of scenography (Barbora Příhodová). Finally, there
are two important appendices: one giving a detailed account of
the extensive Czech collections held in the Theatre Research
Institute of Ohio State University (Nena Couch); and a second
providing a detailed explanation of the creative design process
that led to a recent Czech production at the National Theatre Brno
of The Excursion of Mr Brouček to the Moon (Výlet pana Broučka
do Měsíce) by Leoš Janáček (Pamela Howard).
Masaryk University, Brno 2011, 308 pp., ISSN 1803-845X
l Petr Kolaj: The Landscape of a Life.
A portrait of Professor Ivan Vyskočil (CZ,
with english subtitles)
(Krajina osudu – portrét profesora Ivana Vyskočila)
The film takes us into the landscape of fateful places and
moments of creation of the writter, dramatist, actor and pedagogue
Ivan Vyskočil (born 1929). The actual enviroment acts out real
motifs from his stories and plays for us. We are witness to meetings
with his colleagues and friends (like actor Leoš Suchařípa, theatre
maker Jiří Suchý, and dramatist Václav Havel). We also look at
his work with students at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of
Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU), at the classes of his original
authorial discipline, Inter(acting) With the Inner Partner. In the
film you will also hear Vyskočil’s recollections of his creative and
personal relationships with Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt
and Czech philosopher Jan Patočka. Accompanied by the singing
of Vyskočil’s close friend Eva Olmerová, we continuously return
to the monument of the unfinished bridge, which becomes the
leitmotiv of the entire film.
Film with english subtitles, Academy of Performing Arts
and Arts and Theatre Institute, Prague 2011
l Czech Performance Collection (ENG)
catalogue + DVD
A collection of Czech theatre productions that are creating
innovative and interesting work accessible to international
audiences and currently available for touring activities. The
catalogue contains information on productions divided into the
genres of theatre, opera, dance, puppet theatre and physical/
visual/experimental theatre. The catalogue contains a brochure
with information on individual productions (authors, summaries
of productions, information about the company, photographs,
technical requirements, and other practical information for
potential guest engagements) and a DVD with excerpts from all
the productions. Czech Performance Collection is also available
in electronic form on the Information Website about Czech
Theatre www.theatre.cz/performance-in-profile.
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New Czech Plays in Repertory
Alfréd Radok Awards 2011
Playwright’s Competition
l Jan Kratochvíl: Vladimir’s Slut
(Vladimirova děvka)
7 men, 3 women
The play is extraordinarily built on the ground plan of an
absurd drama. The repeated motives and situations (the pub
landlord who serves in a remote Scandinavian village, Olaf, the
regular, bottles of alcohol, an unnecessary killing of a mare, etc.),
flashbacks when in framework of Olaf’s repeated story many
more village people appear and shape the cruel story: a slut had
arrived into the village with her bastard son and was accepted
into a house (that of Vladimir) and died soon afterwards. The
bastard son (eventually we find out it’s Olaf himself, the main
teller of the story) obviously slept with Vladimir’s wife and is
killed by him as a consequence. At the end, the text hints at Olaf
killing the landlord. The other characters become the ghosts of
the past, coming to the pub as regulars and then leaving Olaf
with the Landlord alone.
The storyline is constantly questioned (“people keep saying
that”) and make even Olaf insecure: he wants to put the story
together again (he’s probably already dead) but the landlord
is only doing his job not helping Olaf with his story – on the
contrary, he lets Olaf bring in the characters from the past and
construct an insecure storyline that can only be one of the
possible interpretations of what really happened.
The winning entry in Alfréd Radok Playwright's Competition
for 2011.
l Nenad Djapić: Vienna Sin
(Vídeňský hřích)
2 men, 1 woman
In the subtitle, the author of the play taking place in
Vienna’s police card index department, says it is a “scenic
historical-criminological, almost musicological time slice image
of the 1801.” In fact, it is post-pseudo-baroque, almost postpseudo-neo-baroque dialogue mesh with unsure ending: it also
deals with the issue of coffee grains prophecy (the coffee finely
ground) and cooked goat’s head, and also the phenomenon
of Czech surnames in Vienna’s phonebook. The main duo of
protagonists, the Czech servant Růžena Čížková and a young
police inspector Hautschrubber, is complemented by a mute role
of a police officer sent sometimes by the inspector to get things.
The main storyline, interrogation of Růžena in connection
of her husband’s death (did he drink the potash lye himself
while drunk, or did she have a hand in it?) and in connection
of her illegal profession as a midwife reminds of Cimrman-like
mystification humour in many ways, but it is only a bare skeleton
on which Růžena‘s lines, full of black humour, resembling
both Švejk and Hrabal, sometimes almost surreal, spiced with
dialect, religious superstitions and human interest stories
about the forced abortions of Czech maids in Vienna after “the
landlord mistook their rooms for toilet”, about local criminal
underworld or absurd visions of future through the means of
prophecy from coffee grains and cooked goat’s head. On the
other hand, the inspector wants Růžena to tell him whether he
will become famous for solving Mozart’s murder – did Salieri
kill him, or not? But the street-wise Růžena only sees anything
in the future (for instance Oscar for Amadeus by Miloš Forman
and the eponymous play by P. Shaffer): the play is open-ended
and, as in its beginning, the inspector uses remote control to
make the two barrel organs play music by Mozart and Salieri…
The play won the second place in Alfréd Radok Playwright's
Competition for 2011.
l Iva Procházková: Gross
(Brutto)
9 men, 6 women
A dramatic collage
The author calls her play “a dramatic collage with a fixed
axis for the story and mosaic structure of the storyline. The
production presumes the division of the set into parallel ‘islands’
of life that can repeatedly shift from the periphery of attention
into its centre; everything is latently present, it can be activated
at any time but the island can also suddenly, unexpectedly go
under and disappear from our section of perception.” Great
stress is being put onto the imagery (projection, unexpected
images) and sound/music components of the text.
From the fragments of individual characters’ fates, an
extraordinary story of a gay man in the contemporary postCommunist Czech society emerges.
The play won the third place in Alfréd Radok Playwright's
l David Drábek: Chocolate Eaters
(Jedlíci čokolády)
4 men, 4 women
The Heavenly Love comes to Bohemia. A story of three sisters
trying to get back on their feet after their father had died aged
sixty, while taking a driving lesson. The youngest of the sisters,
Valérie suffers from agoraphobia and didn’t leave the house
since his death, the oldest one, Róza, ate herself to two hundred
kilograms of weight, and the middle sister, Helena, is the only
one earning her living and keeping the suburban house working.
In his last will, the father bequeathed Valérie his pink Superman
costume he was using during his life to save anonymously the
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life’s losers. Will it help his own children now?
Then three men get into the three sisters’ way: a dog walker
Jan wearing a flat cap on his head and an addiction in his heart,
the dedicated Ludvík with a broken grocery van, and Samuel,
with his John Lennon imitations and suicidal tendencies. Who
will be putting on the pink Superman costume in the end? And
who will save whom in the end?
The play won the second place in Alfréd Radok Playwright's
l Arnošt Goldflam: Wobbly Boards
(Vratká prkna)
5 men, 3 women
A comedy from the theatre world – nevertheless, a bit sad.
The splendours and miseries of the theatre, seen through
a perspective both ironic and self-ironic, both the outside and
the inside view. The boards that represent the world – as they
are called in the Czech theatre – are indeed very wobbly though,
at the same time, very attractive.
These boards are a world where reality morphs into fantasy
and dreams. The actors perform, sometimes consciously,
sometimes involuntarily, as much on the stage as they do
backstage and in their personal lives. But that does not mean
they are not living it all through. On the contrary, they transfer
their exacerbated, often hyperbolized feelings from theatre into
everyday life.
It’s exactly this life-long schizophrenia Arnošt Goldflam tells
about with relish in his play. The actor Radek, his wife Eva with
her lover of the moment, a young actor called Vlasta, form a love
triangle surrounded by other characters of people linked to the
theatre – including very sceptical Jaruška, eternally waiting for
the success that never comes, a and sexy Liduška, a stage
manager with an unfulfilled desire to get a role and finding selfrealisation in a transvestite show, and a Napoleon-like director
oscillating between attacks of creativity and powerless rage.
The play ends at the party following a successful premiere,
with the usual social interactions featuring wine, women and
singing. The situations from the play are intermeshed with
personal relationships, and alcohol causes both unexpected
conjunctions and notoriously well known situations linked
to characters’ self-obsessions, compulsive desire to confirm
one’s own talent, ability to charm the others and soul-searching
monologues.
l Lenka Lagronová: From the Stardust
(Z prachu hvězd)
4 women
Three daughters are living together with their mother in an
abandoned house. Táňa and Dáša are remembering their former
shared love, a man they were linked to more by a very intensive
friendship that never transcended into a sexual relationship;
and, despite or because of that fact, they are unable to get over
his death. On the other hand, the youngest of them, slightly
retarded Kája uses a flash lamp and a transistor radio trying to
“send signals” to the extra-terrestrials – this is the “legacy” of
their father who told them everything about conquering space.
The only “reasonable” person left in the family is the Mother,
but behind her hard pragmatism and down-to-earth attitude one
can feel the very same loneliness and desire for love and hope
her daughters have. The closing “theatre of the universe”, the
apparition of many celestial phenomena, could offer a feeling of
a happy end, i.e. the answer to the sisters’ call, but everything
stays open.
The play was awarded the second place in the competition for
the best play in Czech or Slovak language DRÁMA 2010.
l Karel Steigerwald: My Remote Country
(Má vzdálená vlast)
6 men, 5 women
Dagmar Šimková spent fifteen years in a Communist jail. She
described her experience there very truthfully, in a suggestive
way and with unexpected literary beauty in her book, We were
there, too. The extraordinarily strong description of what the
Communist regime was able to do was the inspiration for the
play, set in our times, called My remote country. The theme of the
play is not the cruelty of the 1950s regime but the way the Czech
society is nowadays unable to deal with it. Our failure to see the
past openly and to have an opinion produces only one thing –
hiding the past and keeping silent about it. The protagonist tries,
unsuccessfully, to get a legal rehabilitation, and sees the vanity
and comic side to her current efforts. She survived the fifteen
years in a jail fighting a clearly defined enemy. Nowadays the
enemy is blurred, without decisively defined borders or clarity.
The goal of our society nowadays is to create a past with
which we could live easily and without problems. The play
is reflecting on this tragicomically, looking both at the Czech
efforts to deal with the past and at the impossibility and vanity to
put a fat black line behind it with irony; at the lamentable form
of Czech way of farewell to Communism.
68/
NOTEBOOK
l Pavel Trtílek: Artists’ Night Out
l Petr Zelenka: Endangered Species
4 men 3 women
A satire portraying the contemporary artists’ world and
our reality’s shallowness. Monika and Radek just moved into
a new house somewhere in the suburbs. For the house-warming
party they invited some of their friends from the somewhat
questionable “artistic circles” to show them their bizarre world
full of hypocrisy. Those invited include a female weather
forecast dramaturg, an amateur photographer, a debutant writer
and a movie director. Both Monika, a PR person for a ballet
ensemble, and her husband Radek, an unsuccessful actor, also
think of themselves as artists. Gee! A snowstorm prevents the
guests from leaving thus disrupting the housewarming party.
Gee! The reality of the housewarming mixes with dreams where
the characters become quite different people! Gee! Anxiety,
cakes, embarrassment, nostalgia, wine, grief, desire for both
a Saab car and discovery of one’s own soul, for salvation, for the
end, for a new beginning, and, in fact, for everything… “Gee,
what will the guests say!”
The play won the Third Prize in the Goose on the String
Theatre Konstantin Treplev Award literary competition.
4 men, 2 women
The play from contemporary Prague shows the world of
advertisement and business of pharmaceutical giant companies.
The world-wide renowned photographer and past exile, known
as Jeremy (60), is lately out of luck. Only the efforts to find better
care for his father-in-law who suffers from Alzheimer make him
accept a lucrative offer to work with an advertisement agency Pitch
Productions on a campaign for Cogitamin, a medicine produced
by Delete Company. The man who decides about the campaign is
Jeremys former classmate, a homosexual Jan Šustr. Jeremys wife
Jana shows specialist interest in Cogitamin. According to her
the drug is suspect for dangerous side-effects that could lead
to outbreak of some brain illnesses, but Jan keeps referring to
successful tests. Pitch productions finally lose the tender anyway
and Jeremy, despite Jana’s protests (in the meantime, she got
a position with Delete), starts fighting the corporation on the level
of a professional campaign. Jeremy beats the company by bringing
Jana’s father in a wheelchair to his press conference to demonstrate
possible consequences of the medicine. This misuse of a member
of her family makes Jana decide to leave Jeremy.
Cogitamin is taken off free sale. Although Jana admits Jeremy
was right, she refuses to return to him and instead is taking care
of Jan who is recovering from his personal crash. Jeremy is
offered a high position at another multinational pharmaceutical
company which he accepts.
(Večer umělců)
l Milan Uhde / Miloš Štědroň:
Leoš, or Most Faithfully Yours
(Leoš aneb Tvá nejvěrnější)
variable casting, doubling (for instance, 8 men, 7 women)
Three visions of the composer Leoš Janáček (as a boy, as
a young man and as an adult) and six women (Marička, Amálie
W., Mrs Sch., Zdenka, Gabriela H., Kamila St.) on the ground
plan of notebooks of very laughable loves are discovering their
hearts, longings and disappointments… The direct commission
from the Goose on the String Theatre in Brno and a collaboration
by the composer Miloš Štědroň and Milan Uhde led to this
musical and dramatic production about Leoš Janáček’s life in
the specific poetics of the famous experimental theatre in Brno
that opened on November 11, 2011.
From the well-known and less well-known historical facts,
the authors create the image of the genius’ private life framed
by the tragicomical and fateful ascent by the composer to the
hill in Hukvaldy side by side with his young Muse Kamila.
The dramatic scenes mapping Janáček’s private troubles, his
laughable loves are set against the fragments of his genius
music.
The third level of the text is a “scientific” argument by two
academics about the place love played in Leoš Janáček’s music…
(Ohrožené druhy)
l Buranteatr (after the original
by Moli re): The Misanthropist
(Misantrop)
5 men, 3 women
This adaptation of
’s famous tragicomedy was
created out of group improvisations on scenes from the original
work that acquired a fixed form over the course of rehearsals.
tale is taken from its noble Roccoco parlour and resituated in a teambuilding weekend of an advertising agency,
to which successful photographer Alcest has come to see his
girlfriend Celimena after having been charged for releasing
photographs of a corrupt meeting that took place between
an important politician and a prominent lobbyist. Although
thoroughly transported into the present day, the play respects
plot and characters — and tragicomic climax, when
humiliated before everyone, Celimena refuses to give up her
career, and instead of going to live with Alcest ‘away from
civilisation’ prefers to make a pathetic apology to everyone.
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beyond everydayness
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Warsaw, Grand Theatre - National Opera
´TACE is not just an overview of history, but a journey
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from the region of central europe
The book presents detailed information
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Gustaw Holoubek Dramatic Theatre of the City of Warsaw ´The singular role that theatre played during the fall of the
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Buy the book through the e-shop PROSPERO at http://prospero.divadlo.cz or order it from the Arts and Theatre Institute
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