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Czech Theatre 18
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Czech
THEATRE
Contents
Marie Reslová
Uncertain Theatre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Viktor Kronbauer
Richard III, through the Lens of Viktor Kronbauer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Ivan Žáček
The Simpleton and The Wall, Radok’s Study of Fear . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Milan Lukeš, Karel Král
Marlowe’s Dr Faustus Underground . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Jana Patočková
Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Karel Král
In-yer-face but Gently . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Jan Kolář, Marie Reslová, Jitka Sloupová
Return not only to the Desert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Jan Kerbr
Dejvice Theatre in Celebration… and Still an Inspiration… . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Josef Mlejnek
Theatre U stolu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Radmila Hrdinová
The Revival of Opera in the Czech Lands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Nina Malíková
Puppets in Bohemia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Notebook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
CZECH THEATRE 18
Issued by Theatre Institute Prague
Director / Ondřej Černý
Responsible editor / Marie Reslová
Editors / Kamila Patková, Jana Patočková, Jitka Sloupová
Translation / Barbara Day
Cover and graphical layout / Egon L. Tobiáš
Technical realization / DTP Studio Hamlet
Printed by / Tiskárna FLORA, Kř ižíkova 30, Praha 8
August 2002
Editors’ e-mail: editio@divadlo. cz
Subscription: Divadelní ústav, Celetná 17, 110 00 Praha 1, Czech Republic
fax: 00420 22481 1452, e-mail: books@divadlo. cz
©2002 Divadelní ústav Praha
ISSN 0862-9380
William Shakespeare, Richard III / Globe Theatre, Prague 2001 / Directed by Vladimír Morávek
Set design Milan David / Costumes Sylva Hanáková >Photo Viktor Kronbauer
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UncertainT
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UNCERTAIN THEATRE
Theatre
Ten years after the transformation of our social system –
which for the Czech theatre meant a change from state control
(but also relatively generous funding) of the theatre network to
a free (but of course only partially free and unfortunately
somewhat accidentally and injudiciously funded) theatre
structure – theatre workers are still learning to live and work in
the new conditions. There have been only attempts to transform
the system of subsidies into a more flexible form and to
transform theatres subordinated to the binding prescriptions of
planning units in independent economic institutions. There is
here even an attempt to make the grant system of the Ministry
of Culture more transparent – the amount of money at its
disposal dramatically decreased in 2002. And wealthy sponsors
finance, with ever more difficulty, only demonstrably
commercial projects, almost exclusively musicals. The basic
running of the theatres and the way it is organised and funded
is still to a large measure a determining and limiting factor for
most theatre companies in the Czech Republic. It may influence
the choice of the repertoire, the stage design, composition of
acting companies, length of rehearsal time or investment into
desperately antiquated stage equipment. Naturally, outstanding
talents can make their way even under totalitarian management
and have equally survived in the jungle of commercial theatre
projects and, over time, diminished budgets for culture.
However, we do not have so many dynamic personalities in the
contemporary Czech theatre.
This fact emerged most evidently in the straight theatre
roughly two years ago, when the Board of the National Theatre
began an intensive search for a Head of Drama at the National
Theatre in Prague. All at once there was no one whom the
informed public (be it only behind the scenes) wanted to see in
this prestigious post. The only person who would have been
acceptable to everyone (in spite of the controversial nature of
his productions) and who in the second half of the 1990s had
proved himself by turning the small Divadlo Na zábradlí
(Theatre on the Balustrades) into the premier Czech stage was
Petr Lébl (b. 1965). At the end of 1999 Lébl took his own life.
Egon Tobiáš, Jan Nebeský, Martin Dohnal, JE SUiS
Divadlo Na zábradlí, Praha 2001 / Directed by Jan Nebeský
Set design and costumes Jana Preková >Photo Bohdan Holomíček
/3
Marie Reslová
It was not until after his death that it became clear how much
his visually meaningful and intellectually challenging
directorial style (for the last time in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya)
had created the language and style of Czech theatre.
There are a few other directors, each of whom in their own
way has proved themselves able to stir the stagnant waters of
Czech theatre production, but none of them has combined to
that measure talent and consistency in the realisation of their
visions. Jan Antonín Pitínský (b. 1955), dramatist and director,
like Lébl first worked in the amateur theatre movement at the
end of the 1980s. He established himself on the stage of the
National Theatre with Jaroslav Durych’s Wandering
(dramatisation of the voluminous novel published in English as
The Descend of the Idol), Alois and Vilém Mrštík’s Maryša and
Vladislav Vančura’s Markéta Lazarová, but at the same time
showed that the lyrical and poetic staging of prose, the daring
rhythmatised and somewhat abstractly stylised acting for which
he was famous, to some extent became, in the environment into
which they were merely implanted, mannerised. Two years ago
Jan Nebeský (b. 1953), a director of esoteric spiritual depths,
crowned a series of productions of Ibsen and Strindberg with
The Master Builder. He persuaded the actors into a permanent
dialogue between the character and their own selves, between
reality and stage fiction. His “Beckettian” triptych, Endgame,
Terezka, Marta (Mal d’or) and the production JE SUiS on motifs
of Bernanos’s novels form a concentrated theatrical dispute
about the basic matters of life, about love, faith and death.
Nebeský examines the borderline possibilities of theatre, which
sentences him to an existence on the fringe of the theatrical
spectrum. Vladimír Morávek (b. 1965) is primarily a director of
clear theatrical visions on classical motifs – his “naive”,
vigorously theatrical interpretations of Shakespeare (Hamlet,
Richard III) and Chekhov (Three Sisters, The Seagull) are
simplified, highly tragi-grotesque, provocatively sincere and
impossible to ignore. In the Klicpera Theatre in Hradec Králové
he created one of the most multi-faceted acting companies in
Bohemia. Michal Dočekal (b. 1965) was at one time, together
with Lébl, the youngest head of a theatre in Bohemia (the
Divadlo Komedie [Comedy Theatre]). He is informed about
contemporary trends in the theatre, an inventive director
tending more towards an attractive, originally conceived form
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UNCERTAIN THEATRE
than towards spiritual depths (Shakespeare’s Midsummer
Night’s Dream and Taming of the Shrew, Marlowe’s Dr Faustus).
He has been named the new Head of Drama of the National
Theatre as from September 2002. Jiří Pokorný (b. 1967),
dramatist and director, a daring and generous propagator of
contemporary dramatic work, provoking actors to clear
stylisation and raw authenticity, is the artistic chief of the
HaDivadlo (HaTheatre) in Brno.
To a certain measure these directors represent the basic
artistic tendencies of contemporary straight theatre in the
Czech Republic. Of course, possibly more than 90% of the
repertoire of Czech theatres is made up of day-to-day
productions of greater or lesser professional quality.
In some companies there is a clear tendency towards
a renaissance in the art of acting as a counterweight to heavyhanded directorial concepts (Činoherní klub [Drama club],
Spolek Kašpar [Kašpar Association], Dejvické divadlo [Dejvice
Theatre], Divadlo u stolu [Theatre at the Table]). Attempts at
finding a congruent scenic shape for contemporary dramatic
work appear all the more frequently, whether international
(Thomas Bernhard, Werner Schwab, Bernard-Marie Koltès,
Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane, Patrick Marber, Martin
McDonagh) or Czech (Luboš Balák, Zdeněk Jecelín, Jiří
Pokorný, Markéta Bláhová, Egon L. Tobiáš). The Činoherní
studio (Drama Studio) of Ústí nad Labem, HaTheatre and
Divadlo Husa na provázku (Goose on a String Theatre) in
particular have focused consistently on original drama. The
most highly-regarded new Czech play of recent years has been
the debut by the screen-writer and director Petr Zelenka, Tales
of Common Insanity, staged by the Dejvice Theatre. The
attempt by a number of theatres (especially the Dejvice
Theatre, the Klicpera Theatre in Hradec Králové, the Divadlo v
Dlouhé [Theatre in Dlouhá Street] and the Komedie Theatre) to
confront a market and consumer oriented society by sticking to
an elementary human and professional ethic of consistent
theatrical work is sympathetic and worthy of note. It is a longterm effort, unnoticed by the media, but it has brought results
in the form of productions whose strength is not only
a theatrical strength but also a strength of human community.
The straight theatre in the Czech Republic today has an
uncertain existence, but in many respects also insufficient selfconfidence. There has been no unexpected explosion in the
last three seasons of any bright new theatrical star. The Czech
dramatic theatre has not for the time being penetrated any of
the great European festivals. As far as its high points are
concerned however it does have enough vitality, audience
base, invention and particular qualities to take its place
alongside the culture of other European countries.
UncertainTheatre
005-008 RICHARD III
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Richard III
This cycle of photographs by Viktor Kronbauer of the production of Shakespeare’s Richard III (directed by
Vladimír Morávek) in the Globe Theatre in Prague won the Silver Medal at this years Triennial in Novi Sad.
through the Lens of
Viktor Kronbauer
005-008 RICHARD III
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RICHARD III – INTRIGUES
Intrigues
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005-008 RICHARD III
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RICHARD III – MURDERS
/7
Murders
005-008 RICHARD III
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for a Horse
RICHARD III – KINGDOM FOR A HORSE
Kingdom
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The Simpleton
009-013/Wozzeck
and
th
e Wall
Radok’s S
tudy of Fear
Ivan Žáček
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a
Alban Berg, Georg Büchner, Wozzeck / Národní divadlo, Praha 2001 / Directed by David Radok / Conducted by Elgar Howarth
Set design Lars-Åke.Thessman / Costumes Ann-Mari Anttila >Photo Viktor Kronbauer
David Radok’s production of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck
brought him for the second time the Prize for the Best
Theatre Production of the Year named after his father,
the renowned Czech director Alfréd Radok.
Wozzeck is anguish transformed into music. Along with all
its daring and immensely pondered Constructivism, the driving
force of this opera is pure, naked, utterly unadorned fear.
Nameless, inexpressible fear such as we sense from the
paintings of Edvard Munch.
Alban Berg was the most lyrical of the three composers of
the Second Viennese school; as he said himself in 1921, his
imagination was more than generously saturated with personal
experience of the Great War (as yet numberless). He succeeded
in putting to music human misery in all its existential exigency
– all those eerie states full of anguish and confusion – with an
immeasurably suggestive power which stuns us even now.
Berg’s musical language – open-ended, essentially already
atonal, though still derived from Mahler’s late symphonies –
was in style and expression clearly the ideal medium not only
for its capacity to put Wozzeck’s terrified vision to music: “Der
Platz ist verflucht!”, but directly to experience it, its endeavour
to in-tone the psychological unease of that moment. In
Berg’s music the tonal centrum securitatis becomes lost in the
same way as the ground gradually disappears beneath the feet
of the desperate Wozzeck.
Whereas other opera composers might have used music to
throw light on the story more dramatically, thus giving it
sharper contours, in Wozzeck (even more so later in Lulu) Berg
throws light through the story, right to its marrow. His musical
irradiation pierces like X-rays and his Wozzeck, even though
a figure of flesh and blood, appears before us as a phantom,
a skeleton. Every slightest melodic and rhythmic pattern, every
molecule of musical fabric, every apparently meaningless
intonation has no other function in the musico-dramatic
structure than to analyse the most volatile tremors of the
human psyche, the most internal twists and turns of the soul. It
is the musical dramaturgy of Wozzeck which has to be admired
much more for its simple lack of precedent than for its
compositional and technical skill. For the first time in history
a composer used absolute form in setting to music a syncretic
work, a form often taken over from musical history long past.
David Radok’s production comes to Prague’s National
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and the Wall
n
THE SIMPLETON AND THE WALL
Theatre essentially unchanged after three years at the Göteborg
opera, most the leading roles still sung by Swedish singers.
This analysis concentrates primarily on the directing, design
and musical staging, not so much the score itself.
This production is an example of a confident and mature
directorial reading, confirming considerable experience in
modern opera together with a particularly individual mannerist
style. What are the constants of Radok’s productions of opera?
A well-considered formulation of spatial relationships (the
directions of the movements – especially the key movements at
the ends of the acts – always have their own clear dramatic
logic); a largely liberated but always very clean scene design;
distinctive work with colour; an almost critically sharp mintage
of characters (their logic is, at least in individual readings,
transparently intelligible even to the gallery); an unusual
“musicality” of direction, which – with humility, sensitivity and
knowledge – listens to the score from which it takes its
inspiration, often wisely coming to terms with the fact that the
first and main director was the composer himself who not only
expressively interpreted every movement on the stage – an
achievement reserved only for the best – but above all gave it
an obligatory time dimension – in principle made by everyone).
The most expressive attribute of Radok’s reading is a mature
symbolic vocabulary, a tendency towards a ubiquitous, allpenetrating space, without partial punctuation in the sense of
classical internal-external articulation. It was here in Wozzeck
that this tendency achieved its impressive best. No standard
measure can be made of the time and space deployment of
figures; they inter-penetrate, often in dialectic contradiction –
the closest may be dramatically the most remote and vice versa
– thus replenishing the whole production line of the story.
In Wozzeck that is somehow played out everywhere and
nowhere, in an abstract, impersonal, grey space where stage
properties move quite freely, even wilfully, from one space to
another when required, according to the immediate dramatic
(albeit “Radokian”) need. The main carrier of the meaning is
the permanent, even obtrusive, presence of the title character.
One can say that the silent, motionless simpleton becomes just
an attribute of the staging, standing with shockingly inactive
apathy against the mass of impersonal, desolate, grey wall. The
oppression of the surroundings and of the situation contained
within them is difficult to credit. To achieve this concentration
of desperation, Radok even gets rid of the experience of the
countryside, usually staged – in harmony with Berg’s text – as
a striking contrast to the greyness of the barracks. The most
effective slices of the expressionistically distorted perspectives
are Wozzeck’s kneeling legs under the almost completely
lowered curtain (3rd act, 1st-2nd scene) – so near and so far is
Wozzeck from his Marie! – the marching jackboots (1st act, 3rd
scene), and the coldly alienating scene in the barracks with the
heads of the sleeping soldiers in a blue dawn. The murder
scene is also a suggestive image. Marie, felled like a sacrificial
lamb, does not even defend herself. Wozzeck rises and, aghast,
steps away from the fallen corpse in the way murderers do. He
flees, from himself more than anything, to a bar where he
/11
wants to forget the deed he has committed, having left his knife
beside Marie. Even the brutally jeering polka brings no peace to
his tortured soul. Wozzeck catches hold of Margaret in
a desperate effort to drown out his demons. She however
discovers the blood on his hand. He flees from the
threateningly gathering chorus to the place of his action,
throwing himself in sorrow on the lifeless body of Marie.
Finding the knife, he throws it into the water. A red moon rises.
In a desire to wash the blood off himself he steps into the lake
– Radok makes it the watery metaphor of Marie’s body.
Wozzeck embraces it more and more, submerging himself in its
treacherous depths until with horror he realises he is washing
in blood welling up in a red geyser, the ever-open gash which
emerged in Marie’s neck after his caress with steel. In the
moment he is completely covered in her blood, his body
merges with hers. He dies.
The unusually austere visual poetic of the staging (set: LarsÅke Thessman; costumes: Ann-Mari Antilla; lighting: Torkel
Blomkvist) is essentially very similar to Radok’s production of
Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, but even cleaner and
simpler. Again, a key role is played by an iron bedstead,
understood metaphorically, like everything else in Wozzeck.
(We would be well advised not to draw any down-to-earth logic
from some of the spatial arrangements. According to this the
bedstead, which is a symbol of privacy, of habitation, should
not find itself in the street, which it does in the 3rd scene of the
2nd act. The direction is even at odds with the text at this
moment. [“Hat er da gestanden?” asks Wozzeck, leaning on the
bed, to which Marie replies evasively: “Ich kann den Leuten die
Gasse nicht verbieten.”]. ) The scene arises from the frame of
reference of grey walls shifted vertically and horizontally,
connoting the gruelling context of the barracks, the dreariness
and the vicious circle of the military machine. The movement
of the sombre surfaces suggestively focuses our attention to the
individual slices of the action, seen internally as though
through the eyes of the bullied simpleton Wozzeck. However,
in spite of this the whole context of the scene works through an
impression of impersonalised, inert objectivity, thanks to the
mass of chill, grey walls. This particular subject-object tension,
a characteristic mark of the production, culminates in the
conclusion when Wozzeck, drowned in Marie’s blood, slowly
wades through the surface of the water. It is only here that he
escapes the cynical desperation of this world; after the bloody
redness of his act, he steps through to a kind of blue epicentre
– an up-to-now unanticipated space, impressively deep, spreads
out before him and us, leading him on and on, right up to his
Marie, who sits somewhere on the horizon. In particular in
connection with the indifferently playing children, the
mysticism of this conclusion, the basic interpretational
lynchpin of the production, is very striking. I am only afraid
that the pathos of this mysterious place where Wozzeck and
Marie again set eyes on each other could, by its essentially
religious nature, cause an atheist some difficulties. I would say
that a person might feel a little betrayed, as in Vladimír
Morávek’s production of Tosca in the National Theatre’s same
009-013/Wozzeck
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a
season, which likewise takes the age-old deus ex machina
almost too literally, in too biased a way for “its” explanation for
the world. For if someone attends a performance, he has come
to a theatre and not a church.
As can be seen, I have expended most praise on how the
production has been shaped by the director and designer. The
musical interpretation, although very praiseworthy and
remarkably active, does not achieve the standard of the
direction. The responsibility for this does not seem to lie with
the concept of Elgar Howarth, an experienced interpreter of
modern opera, but rather the inadequacies of the Prague
production, primarily the National Theatre orchestra. The
basic conceptual plan is good, healthy and convincing – but not
fully realised in its original intentions. The orchestra plays
above its usual average, but even so there are a number of
passages performed only in its usual, approximate way. The
Czech singers settle well into the supporting roles and keep up
with their Swedish colleagues. One cannot however hold any
stricter measure to the details of the musical production.
The most distinctive vocal quality is that of Marcus Jupither
in the title role. His pliable, gently sounding baritone is capable
in principle of covering the broad expressive register of the role
from quiet, resigned situations up to states of pathologically
destroyed delirious fantasy. He plays his simpleton with a heavy
head, pursued by visions, with a stylised, austere gestic and
mimic expression. He is especially successful at catching
Wozzeck’s endless misery, the humiliated, impoverished,
human degradation (“Wir arme Leut!”). In type he is ideally
suited to the role, as is his partner playing Marie, Irma
Mellergard. Her Marie, slender and well-proportioned, sensuous
in gesture and voice, presents a prototype of the deceitful
woman. It is a striking study of infidelity, vanity and coquetry;
but also loving, tragic motherhood. Her vocal material, albeit
sometimes very raw, is richly coloured and expressively
shadowed, capable of dramatic transformation from lyrical
prayer to the explosion of an awakened bad conscience.
Ingemar Andersson and Anders Lorentzson’s performances
as the Hauptmann and the Doctor are of a very high standard.
They both create bizarre, expressionistically succinct
caricatures, full of eerie grotesque elements, spasms and
depersonalisation.
One can say with certainty that the movement and acting of
all the singers surpassed their specific vocal quality, except
possibly for Jupither, who did convince. This Wozzeck is based
on a particular robustness which is often close to a straight
theatre performance. This would not matter too much in the
case of Wozzeck, as evidence of a certain naturalist
expressiveness – but of course it is not ideal. This is the main
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and the Wall
n
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problem of the title role: Berg precisely fixed the greater part of
the music at a certain pitch, yet it is also necessary to animate
the “pure singing” dramatically by speech components, for
example in the closing scene. It should however always remain
primarily singing, albeit through the folded urgency of the
actor’s delivery.
Even in the predominantly reliable vocal delivery, managed
on a good professional level, one can uncover places marked by
haste and competent but superficial study, even in the case of
the Swedish singers. The sung phrase sometimes did not come
out naturally, in speech cadence and the specific quality of the
requirements of Sprechgesang. It sounded as though lacking an
immediate, deep expressive adoption, lacking experience.
My only essential reproach of the concept as a whole is the
uninterrupted flow of 15 scenes in an hour and forty minutes.
However much one understands a need for one uninterrupted
gradation unfolding through the evening, Berg himself certainly
did not conceive the opera like this. The three-act construction
relies on intervals. Berg based the individual acts on contrast,
and lay exceptional demands on everyone’s concentration, both
performers and audiences. So, thanks to these (interrupted)
transitions, the climaxes of the first and second acts did not
succeed in the way they were originally conceived.
In Radok’s production – sensitively, prudently and
consequently working with the chosen symbolism – the
conclusion of the opera is powerful. The main reason is that
Berg already made it exceptionally powerful, himself relying on
Büchner’s fascinating dramatic vision. However, this does not
diminish Radok’s contribution. We have above all to appreciate
how well all the lines of motif are thought through at the
conclusion of the opera; motifs which at the start are vaguely
ambiguous, finally led to their final clarification.
Alban Berg, Georg Büchner: Wozzeck, directed by David Radok,
conducted by Elgar Howarth, set design by Lars-Åke Thessman,
costumes Ann-Mari Anttila, National Theatre Prague and Göteborg
Opera, première in Prague 11. 3. 2001
014-018/Gorlice
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s
u
t
s
u
a
F
r
D
s
’
Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Dr Faustus / Divadlo Komedie (Vyšehrad – Gorlice), Praha 2001 / Directed by Michal Dočekal
Set design Petr Matásek / Costumes Zuzana Krejzková >Photo Martin Špelda
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MARLOWE’S DR FAUSTUS UNDERGROUND
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d
n
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o
r
g
r
e
Und
Milan Lukeš, Karel Král
Last summer Prague’s Komedie Theatre under
the direction of artistic director Michal Dočekal,
performed Christopher Marlowe’s Tragical History
of Dr Faustus in the Vyšehrad dungeons in Prague.
The production won the Divadelní noviny Award;
Petr Matásek the Alfréd Radok Award for stage
design; and David Prachař in the title role the
Alfréd Radok Award for best actor.
The origins of Marlowe’s texts are in some respects even
more ambiguous than Shakespeare’s. In the case of Dr Faustus
in particular it is difficult to know whether it came early or late
in Marlowe’s career. Expert opinion inclines towards the view
that Marlowe wrote Dr Faustus around 1588-1589, but even so
it is difficult to explain how he came to know this story, which
had scarcely come out in popular literature in Germany and
was not published in English until 1592. With even greater
admiration, we wonder how a youth of no more than twentyfive handled this ur-thriller with such dexterity as the first to
identify and outline one of the archetypes of European
literature.
The qualities of comedy, grotesque and even burlesque were
a part of the Faust archetype right from the start; in this lies its
individuality and the proof of its origin. From the very
beginning of its stage history, Dr Faustus was famous alike for
its sinister quality and for its facetiousness. Only the Middle
Ages knew such turnarounds, and Marlowe did actually handle
the story of Dr Faustus in a medieval spirit, with academic
disputations and clowns all thrown together. It is a comedians’
comedy, coarse-grained, drastic, and indeed – in the
Elizabethan sense – commonplace.
Marlowe’s Dr Faustus does not – even in the text derived
from the two surviving versions closest to Marlowe from which
years ago Alois Bejblík wisely created a Czech version – have
any definitive integrity. All that someone staging a production
today can do is to put together their own version from the few
brief scenes of contestable origin (even contestable
sequencing). And so in Dočekal’s version many of the historical
and anecdotal scenes have been abandoned: the seven deadly
sins, the Pope and cardinals, the Emperor and knights, the
Duke and Duchess. It is Dr. Faustus’s situation which is
foregrounded, in itself hellishly serious. Much of the text has
disappeared; as far as the serious parts are concerned, only
fragments of the Good and Evil Angels remain, and for the
comic side, a new construct by the name of Kašpárek (Punch).
In giving a name to this new figure, however contestable we
may think it, the adaptation makes known one of the
unmistakable intentions of the whole production: even the
subsequent development of the Faust archetype and myth is, as
though by reciprocal agreement, symbolically added to the
early Marlowe which absorbed the (medieval) past. There are
reminders of Goethe’s Faust scattered around this production,
as well as of puppet and film Fausts. The idea has its own
raison d’être: all of these are at home here in central Europe;
and the whole of the Faustian archetype and myth which
followed Marlowe, who was the first to imbue it with the genius
of literature and philosophy, returns back here.
There is a philosophical discourse going on in Marlowe’s Dr
Faustus, a discourse with moments so penetrating you are
astonished by their modern quality. But alongside this
discursive Faustus and grotesque Faustus, the text still holds
the possibility for a spectacular Faustus. Even this aspect is not
neglected in Dočekal’s shortened version; it is actually more
striking and meaningful than the grotesque. In this case the
stimulus to the spectacular is the very environment in which
the production of Dr Faustus is played: the Vyšehrad dungeon
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MARLOWE’S DR FAUSTUS UNDERGROUND
Marlowe’s Dr Faustus
Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Dr Faustus / Divadlo
Komedie (Vyšehrad – Gorlice), Praha 2001 / Directed by Michal Dočekal
Set design Petr Matásek / Costumes Zuzana Krejzková >Photo Martin Špelda
with a constant temperature of 15 degrees centigrade; an
extensive underground hall of the baroque citadel, in whose
gloom cower the originals of the statues from Charles Bridge,
enabling them at the end of the performance to step out from
dark anonymity in all their glory. The magic of the place is
such that this dramatic environment – shared by audience and
actors, figures of a real and of a virtual world – becomes so to
speak the protagonist of the whole production. It would in fact
be fitting to speak of this production of Dr Faustus as the
Vyšehrad Faust: the baroque environment, in itself highly
theatrical, determines the nature of the lighting, inspires the
creators of the set, costumes and music, and sensitively takes
into consideration the impulses of all seven actors (magic
number!) who perform as though it came naturally: David
Prachař, Jan Dolanský (alternating with Jan Bárta), Martin
Učík, David Matásek, Zdeněk Vencl, Viktorie Čermáková and
Petra Lustigová.
In the Divadlo Komedie’s production of Dr Faustus in Gorlice
on Vyšehrad, an artificial and artistic image blends with one
which is real. The space is actually false, an artificially created
underground. Nevertheless, it feels as though you are
descending into the depths. Thanks to the image (the
imagination) it is easier to understand that Mephistopheles did
not have to leave hell to guide Faustus through the world,
because hell is here. And more: statues and puppets, artificial
people and saints, scaffolding, the building of the theatre as an
artificial level of the world, and sounds which although
artificially created sound very credible (for example, the
limping step of the devil) which also merge into music, or stand
as equivalent with the music… And the symbols: a real chain
(to which Faustus is also shackled to hell and on which he is
drawn up) and cross (which rises from the water in a stone
vessel in the centre of the acting space and on which the knell
is tolled); real water which can even be amniotic fluid in which
the “newly-born” Faustus is rejuvenated; real earth which
clings to the body like “wrinkles”, the first traces of the
approaching grave; real fire which, Mephistopheles uses as the
fires of hell, to warm up Faustus’s heart’s blood… And
furthermore: maybe that heart and blood itself. Faustus,
wrapped in a transparent plastic girdle, wears his heart right on
his chest. It is both an image of a heart and a real heart
(probably a pig’s) which Mephistopheles then tears out of
Faustus’s chest and replaces with an alarm clock – in place of
feeling, a mechanism; in place of the heart-beat of time an
agreed, measured beat. Before the hellish travelling salesman
takes possession of it, before it ceases to beat in his hands,
before he puts it in a suitcase, the blood from the warmed-up
heart really “gushes pure”. The devil and the director Dočekal
know whether we should become aware that the bodily
ingredient is adulterated by its cultural, artificial form – red ink.
The characters are clearly also both artificial and real. As
usual; and at the same time unusually. Those ingredients,
various scents, the artificial incense of joss sticks and the real
smell of blood, the touch of the muscles of the borrowed heart
on your own body, and above all the cold and the chill of the
water in which Faustus is submerged (whilst the audience
huddles under blankets in the cold air of Gorlice), David
Prachař is “saturated” with all this in his “magical realisation”.
Prachař presents sudden movements of thought as examples
of virtuoso technique. Even more than in his Hamlet he
31.7.2002 14:34
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Underground
014-018/Gorlice
Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Dr Faustus / Divadlo Komedie (Vyšehrad – Gorlice), Praha 2001
Directed by Michal Dočekal / Set design Petr Matásek / Costumes Zuzana Krejzková >Photo Martin Špelda
31.7.2002 14:34
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Marlowe’s Dr Faustus
Underground
014-018/Gorlice
Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Dr Faustus / Divadlo Komedie (Vyšehrad – Gorlice), Praha 2001
Directed by Michal Dočekal / Set design Petr Matásek / Costumes Zuzana Krejzková >Photo Martin Špelda
abandons the traditional form in which the character is created
“naturally” and fluently. On the contrary, he deviates sharply
from the “normal”, but always carefully controlled position: he
croaks, speaks toothlessly, sulks like a child, flirts like a cabaret
performer, staggers drunkenly… At first glance it gives the
impression of failures in the presentation of a serious role, pure
exhibitionism.
The exhibitionism in the acting does not however lead to the
traditional “Czech” alienation, to a commentator stepping out
of role. The effect of Prachař’s outbursts is precisely opposite:
the actor and the character merge into one. Through this the
theatre becomes transparent. And beyond it some sort of
“black mass” is being played out.
Prachař’s Faustus is the play’s protagonist, its victim.
Because he is the one who fools around, David Matásek’s
Mephistopheles has no reason to produce the ridiculous: he is
serious, dignified, only very unobtrusively miraculous (on his
forehead sticking plasters hiding the wounds of little horns; the
stump of a wing protruding from his back; and the multifingered glove he wears). The priests celebrating the mass are
Kašpárek (Punch) with the acolyte Wagner (Zdeněk Vencl).
They make comic appearances; such are especially the
numbers of the Theatre Cooperative Marionette, when in a
pornographic puppet-play with a long bread roll and a small
bun they demonstrate a “hot” (the roll is burning) “whore”.
Their humour lacks charm; it is rough, devilish. The acting
scale of the performers, Učík’s Kašpárek creating one pole and
Matásek’s Mephistopheles the other, mirrors the scale of
Prachař’s Faustus with its poles of grotesque outbursts
following others intensively and probably even painfully
experienced. To perform like this may not be a matter of life
and death, but it certainly affects one’s health.
This Faustus is not a “mere” modern man of the Goethe and
Enlightenment type, who sacrifices his soul for superhuman
knowledge. He is more of a medieval or post-modern man who,
when it comes to it, resolutely tempts fate. There is something
German about him. Now I am thinking of the acting style: the
manifest and bravura technique, remote from Czech
“approximation” (in the worst case) or “improvisation” (in the
better); the existence on stage during which the actor is led into
dangerous situations in which he is exposed to genuinely
authentic physical experience and pain (as in productions by
the Germans Frank Castorf and Johann Kresnik). And I have in
mind – whether or not it may be an audacious assertion – that
German soul which on the one hand inclines towards the
rational, even to military discipline, to strict exactness; on the
other to the “irrational”, romantically poetic, in spite of
everything serious (but also comic) mystery of life (or death, as
the case may be). This Faustus, so to speak, carries
Mephistopheles within himself; a spirit which fools around in
the name of self-destruction.
(An edited version of the articles by Milan Lukeš, “Local
Colours” and Karel Král, “Hell is below Vyšehrad” published in
Svět a divadlo (World and Theatre) 5/2001. )
Christopher Marlowe: The Tragical History of Dr Faustus,
translated by Alois Bejblík, directed by Michal Dočekal, set design Petr
Matásek, costumes Zuzana Krejzková, musical cooperation DJ Blue,
production Jana Burianová, Divadlo Komedie (Vyšehrad – Gorlice),
première 27, 28 June 2001.
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Portrait of the Artist
as an
Old Man
Jana Patočková
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PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS AN OLD MAN
In November 2001 the theatre director Otomar
Krejča celebrated his eightieth birthday with a new
production for the Theatre of the Estates, the
drama stage of the National Theatre in Prague. He
worked here as actor and director from 1951 to
1965, before leaving to found his own company, the
Divadlo Za branou (Theatre Beyond the Gate). The
period from 1956 to 1961, when he was head of the
National Theatre, is considered to be the most
important post-war period of this company.
Otomar Krejča chose as his eighty-first production a work by
the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard: Minetti – Portrait of the
Artist as an Old Man. In this production the sub-title became
the main title; the director read into the author’s text his own
experience as an “old artist”. However, Krejča’s personal
engagement never in any way indicates narcissistic selfprojection or manneristic deformation of the author’s text;
everything arises out of love and respect for the poet’s work,
out of a striving for precision and factuality in the reading.
Otomar Krejča, who began his theatrical career of more than
sixty years as an actor, had to give up acting for good when, in
the period of Communist normalisation in the 1970s, he was
forced to leave the Czech stage and work as a guest director
abroad. However, acting always remained at the heart of his
work; his direction became more and more a dialogue with the
actors with whom he created theatre. The whole development of
Krejča’s production method in which a unity, often with
a complicated structure, is created primarily through the
dynamics of the relationship between the characters onstage,
indicates that for him “acting and theatre are one and the same
thing”.
How could a play not absorb him when its theme is, as Minetti
says himself, “the art of acting”, “homage to the art of acting”?
The play works with a number of motifs of modern theatre whose
manifest paraphrase constantly suggests movement in this
independent world: from the “masques ostendais” through to
a futile wait for an unrealised meeting; from a King Lear
abdicating his – theatrical – kingdom and (in a raging storm)
encountering his final contest through to acceptance of the
inevitable end. Krejča rightly finds motifs related to other authors
with whom he is in tune, Chekhov and Beckett.
Bernhard devoted several plays to the issue of acting, their
heroes inspiring an ambivalent relationship of sympathy,
admiration and antagonism, an impression of the tragic and the
ridiculous, so that the question “Is it tragedy? Is it comedy” can
never be answered in an unambiguous way. Amongst them
however is the play Minetti, dedicated to the outstanding actor
of the same name on his seventieth birthday, exceptional in
that its hero arouses sympathy, admiration and compassion
rather than negative emotions; in spite of all the
embarrassments and absurdity he maintains his dignity, even
greatness.
The positioning and timing of the single situation of the play
anticipates its conclusion. It takes place on the sea coast (at the
“end” of the continent of Europe) at the end of the year, on New
Year’s Eve in the foyer of a hotel where the maniacal merriment
of drunken masquers imitates the furious element of the
snowstorm which rages over the city of Ostende. An old man
comes here for a meeting with the head of drama of the
municipal theatre for whose bi-centenary he is to play King
Lear, the only classical role he spared when years ago he
“revolted against classical literature”, that “convenience of the
public” (and the theatre) and had to leave the stage. Now, thirty
years later, his only and final opportunity to play “in the real
theatre” should present itself. But the head of drama does not
arrive and the only proof of the agreed meeting – a telegram –
is lost. At the end of an evening consisting of nothing but futile
waiting only one final outcome is left to the old man.
A background to this “anti-action” is created by the
actor’s soliloquy in which real facts indistinguishably
interpenetrate with unreal, the inner action, an image of the
struggle of one life. The destination of a journey to the
absolute of theatrical art, of possession which is on the
boundary of madness – or which rather long ago crossed that
boundary – cannot be reached with certainty. Was that old
actor once really famous? His insistence arouses indifference,
doubt, even derision, and what possible evidence is there?
Photographs, a suitcase of cuttings containing along with
rave reviews, documents of failure – his only property,
anxiously guarded – and whose content he sums up at the
same time in one word: “Revulsion”? Everything is in the
past, unverifiable; unquestionably, Bernhard here captures
the essence of the art of the theatre – including the
impossibility of retrospective verification.
Acting as an art which at the moment of its realisation
loses touch with reality, is thus – as Minetti says himself –
“more than anything threatened with death”. For Krejča,
Bernhard’s play is “the myth of acting”. The myth of an art
which is in its transience an appropriate image of human
existence.
The production realises the text – itself interwoven with
theatrical allusions – by analogous means, by references
and by quotations in the music and design (music by Jan
Klusák, masks by Jan Klobasa). Krejča opens the
performance with a self-reference: the use of an element
through which – with set designer Josef Svoboda – he often
Thomas Bernhard, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man
Národní divadlo, Praha 2001 / Directed by Otomar Krejča / Set design
Jiří Sternwald / Costumes and masks Jan Koblasa
>Photo Oldřich Pernica
Portrait of the Artist as an
Old Man
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A DIRECTOR AND AN OPERA FOR “THE HAPPY FEW”
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indicated the transience and multiplicity of stage reality:
a large spherical mirror, the ancient symbol of mimesis.
Simultaneously it is a reminder of his most recent work
with the great designer, Faust – even though in this case
Svoboda had to be replaced by his pupil Jiří Sternwald. At
the beginning it ostentatiously confronts the auditorium
as a reminder of the apparently banal, simple, and at the
same time ambiguous relationship between the stage and
the auditorium. The element, which creates illusion at the
same time as it disturbs it, indicates the permanent
ambivalence of the set, both its authenticity and lack of it.
The mirror reflects the theatre lighting, but the typical
murmur of the auditorium is inauthentic, only a recording
played from the other side of the footlights; even the
reflection in the mirror of the set, which lives its own,
independent life, can be similarly uncertain. The lights are
dimmed, music sounds, the mirror is raised, creating
a heavenly sphere which reflects and multiplies the
projection of thickly falling snow and reveals on stage the
action ground of the play: a hotel foyer, around which rages
“a snow storm in Ostende”. Against the penetrable black
backcloth, through which light can shine and people pass –
again one of Svoboda’s magic tricks – only a belle-époque
lift, a reception desk and a sofa indicate the setting. The
simple turning and manipulation of this last piece of
furniture changes the disposition of the individual scenes.
The method whereby the director makes the text
concrete and places the accents is apparent from the
beginning of the performance, from the Lady’s opening
monologue. As performed by Johana Tesařová she is not – as
in the original play – an old lady, but an ageing but still
attractive woman who makes a strong impression through
her first rejoinders: “To hold out / to be alone. ” The
emphatic exclamation marks with which the Lady performs
her monologue contrast with the absurd and simultaneously
banal aim she is striving for: all her energy is focused on
achieving a state of alcoholic stupor. Thus the first thing
meaningfully displayed on stage is the “ape mask” of the
Lady. This is not actually shown until the conclusion, but is
so to speak made present from the first moments of the
insistent monologue, thus creating an invisible antithesis to
Minetti’s hidden but carefully guarded mask of King Lear.
The protagonist’s arrival contrasts with the theatrical
appearance of the Lady: at the beginning František
Němec’s Minetti merely gives the impression of being
a moderately old world “comic gentleman”, as the hotel
receptionist characterises him. The audience only gradually
notes that the black coat and white scarf are past their best, only
gradually becomes aware of the down-at-heel shoes and the
tapes trailing from his underpants, the umbrella, of very archaic
type seemingly from the first half of the last century, serving as
a walking-stick. Our attention is drawn by the way he enters,
stands and looks around, as though creating space around
himself for a dignified aloofness. He enters like a self-confident
artist aware of his own importance, and even though this selfawareness soon has some holes torn in it, he maintains it to the
Thomas Bernhard, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man / Národní
divadlo, Praha 2001 / Directed by Otomar Krejča / Set design Jiří Sternwald
Costumes and masks Jan Koblasa >Photo Hana Smejkalová
end. Whatever happened to this character in the past – the text
does not allow for an unambiguous judgement – the director and
the actor take it seriously and at least believe in the authenticity
of his “mortal wounding” by an artistic work. The dialogue the
character leads with the world develops from this temperate
entry through an unusually worked-out scale of expression. The
detailed construction of every individual sequence enables the
actor to display an organic linking of contrasting moments,
gestures both dignified and bizarre, rational arguments,
heterogeneous fragments, sudden flashes of madness. A sudden
bizarre jump surprisingly interrupts an outraged polemic, his
own words merge with excerpts from Lear’s monologues,
explosions of energy abruptly alternate with moments of
weakening, disappointment and weariness, an evermore nervous
glance at his watch as it measures the passing time.
Němec’s Minetti is markedly younger than assumed in the
text dedicated to the first performer in the role on his seventieth
birthday, but the actor does not try to simulate the weakness of
age in its outer form. We are reminded of it only from time to
time through an impatient gesture, a vain attempt to rouse
a failing memory by exasperated stamping or banging with the
umbrella, by a muscular relaxed face which disappointment at
times changes into a tragic mask. It does not even deprive the
figure of humour, discrete, ironic, precisely placed dry points.
The unobtrusive comedy excels in situations where the
character attempts to conceal weakness and maintain his
dignity. So, in the sequence with the unravelled tape from his
underpants, Minetti tries first of all to confront the mockery of
the Lady with only a depreciatory tone and an embarrassed
stammering through which he hopes to overcome such trifles;
then he increases his efforts through his movements, hopping
on one leg and vainly trying to tie up his tape. In the end he
succeeds with the help of a willing hotel porter whom Minetti
drags around with him whilst continuing to emit his tirades. It
is a small clowning episode, the increasing embarrassment of
a comic which does not evoke laughter but rather the uneasy
flicker of a smile – an expression of the audience’s sympathy,
appreciating this metaphor as part of the common human
situation. Minetti makes himself ridiculous by his exaggerated
self-veneration; in fact he invites ridicule by trying to defend
himself against it, through which an indication of senile decay,
a small but humiliating mistake, grows into something
immeasurably great. But at the same time his situation,
commented on by the untimely, pathetically mean ridicule of
the Lady, is seen as her own situation which is, even though she
is unaware of it, analogous. Or rather, essentially worse than
the situation, in which he is derided: an extinguished life lived
in a stupor is opposed to the pathos of a true contest in life. In
every micro-situation the “invisible hand” of the direction
shows itself thus, a hand which opens it to a dramatic quality,
finds and sharpens the encounters, the small conflicts;
increases the contrasts, points to the similarities of being left
Old Man
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alone in the human situation – and at the same time to the
mutual isolation, to the blindness towards this situation. That
is Krejča’s “signature”, the fundamental approach he brings
from his beginnings as a director. He stages Bernhard in the
same dramatic way as dramatically he once staged Chekhov.
Minetti’s waiting time is measured off and divided by the
incursions of the New Year’s Eve masqueraders and the arrivals
of hotel guests. The guests, no more than types passing in
silence, are themselves reminiscent of “masks”: an elderly
couple, a drunken youth, a Lilliputian in officer’s uniform and
a man on crutches wearing the mask of a dog. In the production
these gradually merge with the crowd of masqueraders. The
masqueraders, consisting entirely of young people, come down
in the lift from time to time and burst shrieking into the foyer
where they sweep everything and everyone before them.
Without the masks the young people behave naturally, just
a little drunk and unruly; in their masks they are a dangerous
instrument of irrationality. The anonymity of the masqueraders
multiplies the strength of an unleashed crowd, changes the
merriment into something sinister, the movement of the
masqueraders as unpredictable as their aims. Under the masks
are faces still a long from age, suffering and death. The
madness of New Year’s Eve, connecting an end with a new
beginning, best suits those who look only to the future.
However, from time to time during the unmasking a lower layer
of mask is revealed, a white corpse-like skull, resembling the
ever-present death each one of us carries within ourselves. The
masqueraders who present this “interior” as a defiant mockery
of the world over which they temporarily rule, eventually turn
literally against Minetti, casting doubt on all his striving
through their chorus-like ridicule.
At the end the guests mix with the “masks” in a procession
which is some kind of dance of death. They pass the bench
where Minetti finally rests in his mask of King Lear: the mask
of a dead king which, unlike all the others, is golden.
But before Minetti definitively escapes from the round dance
of the masks, he is rewarded with a meeting with another
young human being, a girl (Jaromíra Mílová) waiting for her
lover. The actress, who is referred to the fundamentals of the
art of acting – “to hear / and see / and understand” – is
a sensitive partner for the protagonist, even though her part is
almost wordless. Němec’s Minetti turns to her with an altered
tone, more intimate and heartfelt; her courteous attention
provides him with a last opportunity to unload the whole story
of his “mortal blow” through art, and in the end reach a sincere,
bitter admission of defeat. The naive, uncomprehending but
patient listener leaves him with the compassionate admiration
we devote to someone or something which to us is alien and
incomprehensible, but which we are at the same time forced to
respect. She leaves him a gift which is in itself absurd:
a transistor radio, broadcaster of a constantly-present
background noise which for her is synonymous with music,
something she assumes to be a shared value. The point of the
meeting again has a double meaning, but even the ironic
accent is in Bernhard’s own way proof at the same time of the
emotional presence accompanying Minetti’s last battle. The
compassion does not rule out lack of understanding, and here
creates a unique mixture which leaves us in uncertainty – “Is
it comedy? Is it tragedy?” In the script, the last responses in
the play belong to one of the masked characters who turns to
the bench where Minetti, on whom snow is settling, is sitting,
and then runs away, calling out: “Artist / Theatre artist /
Actor.” It is typical of Krejča’s interpretation that he has
entrusted these lines to the girl and her lover, and on their
lips they sound not as mockery but amazement and respect.
It is an unobtrusive but explicit accent – just as the structure
of rhythm and meaning in the whole production is explicit,
all its elements focused on the actor.
At the end of the play the mirror again descends and hides
the set where, for a while, only the bench with Minetti
remains, covered with theatrical “snow”. The actor slowly
rises, steps out of the play, lays down his mask and overcoat,
and moves towards the mirror with his back to the
auditorium. Then, out of character, he turns round to us to
reap his due reward. The director and the actor remind us
once again of the power of the stage, of the mirror; not an
ordinary mirror which does no more than reflect, but one
which in its imaginary, transient and multiplied reality is
much more powerful than a simulation of life, than a place
of entertainment where the theatre worker, grown lazy,
provides a comfortable audience with his services.
A mystery remains which can “mortally wound” and which
is worth dedicating one’s life to. Krejča’s production of
Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man is a confession;
a committed, magnificent homage to the theatre and to the
actor, bearer of the mystery of the theatre.
Thomas Bernhard: Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man,
translated by Josef Balvín, directed by Otomar Krejča, set design
Jiří Sternwald, costume design and masks Jan Koblasa, music Jan
Klusák, National Theatre Prague, première 22. 11. 2001
Old Man
025-029/COOL
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Karel Král
IInn--yyeer-face
r-face
but Gently
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In-yer-face
Three comments on the “in-yer-face” school in the Czech lands
If there is any direct equivalent in Czech of the English
word “cool”, then it is “věcnost”, the word which, in the
period between the wars, translated the German
“Sachlichkeit” in the context of the movement “neue
Sachlichkeit” or “new objectivity”. The disarming “cool”,
the “objectivity” which is a necessity, which means a shift
forward, which does not question and is thereby dramatic,
thereby communicative. Someone who is really making an
effort to shock usually ends up looking stupid, in the same
way as if he had made a decision to create “something of
genius”. Kane and, somewhat later in the same field,
Ravenhill, simply appeared, knocked on the door, and
presented something unexpected, unusual, strong,
something that belonged to this world, as we would know,
if we did not make out we didn’t know.
Jiří Pokorný, director
it does seem to be a tradition in the Czech theatre to incline
toward amiability, ironic exaggeration and metaphor. The
following comments* on productions of three plays of the “inyer-face” school in the Czech lands are no more than a small
and unsystematic, but also open, contribution to the issue of
whether this inclination is our strong or weak side.
Mark Ravenhill’s Faust (Faust is Dead) was voted by the
Czech critics as the best play of those shown for the first time
in Czech theatres in 2000. Myself, I would not exaggerate this
praise.
If one has something with which to reproach Ravenhill, it is
his simplification of the philosophy of Michel Foucault (whose
persona is recast in the character of the French philosopher
Alain) to an essentially banal thesis. We have reached the End
of History, therefore there is no hope of progress; man and
mankind have gone to rack and ruin, we are free, but all we
have left is fucking…, or in other words, desire and cruelty both
towards the other and oneself. What follows from this is that
Mark Ravenhill, Faust (Faust Is Dead) / HaDivadlo, Brno 2000 / Directed by Jiří Pokorný / Set design Petr B. Novák
Costumes Kateřina Štefková >Photo Ivan Kuťák
We Czechs are supposed to be doves, squeamish about
violence or of a cowardly nature, jokers along the lines of the
Good Soldier Schweik. They say we use irony as our form of
resistance, even as an opportunistic alibi, that we’re players of
games, able to take the language of metaphor to perfection
whilst being unwilling to commit ourselves directly… Even
though it is odious to generalise about any national character,
not only Alain but all the characters in the play, all of us, are
already the living dead. Only death brings meaning. The story,
a road movie, corresponds to the notion. Donny, who shows off
on the internet how he has slashed his body, chooses “The
Golden Section” as an expression of human authenticity and
slices the artery in his neck. Alain has already decided to die
before he sets off on a journey with Pete, a casual American
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IN-YER-FACE BUT GENTLY
but Gently
lover; that is, before he provokes Pete, lets himself be slightly
wounded with a gun, and completes the incomplete murder by
the suicidal refusal of medical aid. It seems (all one can do is
interpret) as though even Pete, the only survivor, is in his way
a dead man. Son of Bill (i. e. Gates), prince of cruel virtual
reality, he starts by rebelling, stealing a diskette from his father
with the programme “chaos”. In the end however he returns
with this treasure of doubtful content and undoubted power to
daddy’s throne. In so doing he ceases to be a human being. Pete
is the angel of death.
The director Jiří Pokorný, who successfully staged the play
at HaTheatre, holds the author in honour. So much so that in
homage he makes his own contribution to the play (to its
theatricality and to a certain measure to its ideas).
Ravenhill counts on the use of video. Pokorný however, with
his set designer Petr B. Novák, achieves a specially remarkable
effect by projecting onto a screen set in the shape of a V. In the
circle thus evoked of “new” theses the following can emerge: if
we “excise” any sort of detail of the human body by a camera
shot, it becomes pornography; all pornography is vivisection,
vivisection is death, therefore death is sexy, if pornography is
sexy…
Thesis or no thesis, it is valid that the staging in showing
“details” is adequately “cool” or “hard” (I am confused by these
expressions). The public is shocked; however, it seems that
Alain’s (Tomáš Matonoha) playing with Pete’s (Pavel Liška) sex
is not an acted reality but a live show. Naturally; the boundaries
between authenticity and media duplicity (not only television
and internet, but also theatre) have to be unclear. In the same
way it has to be unclear who – according to the author’s (or
Alain’s) central question – is the seducer and who the seduced.
In this direction the better instructed spectator can miss Alain,
who would be appropriately seductive in a Foucault-like way
(magically bald). That is one of the small but serious
reproaches which can be made of the staging. On the other
hand, I think Pokorný’s own stage ideas or metaphors are an
asset. The chorus, which has lost its function as a commentator
(it only reproduces the words of other people, characters in the
play) is made up of a few “revived” statues of the female sex…
When it comes to it, they are just the kind of women suitable
as car seats for men on a journey and during sexual games in
a car. The altar placed in an elevated position in the
background is a counter with a pan in which popcorn, the
manna of the global audience, roasts and erupts (or ejaculates).
And the peak of the director’s “wilfulness”? Pete can stand
reality only in the frame of a computer screen. Therefore he
follows his own sex act with Alain on camera and even – as
though on television – commentates on it. When he says he
sees a racoon hopping along the prairie, a strange lizard-like
/27
creature crawls out of a trapdoor, crosses the stage and
disappears. We see it for a couple of seconds, but it is
unforgettable. It is – even whilst looking exotic – a Czech
feature. This joke is delightfully subtle, “soft”…
It can be playful, it can be soft, but it can be treacherous.
And this in spite of the fact that at first sight the subtlety can
appear as something more sensitive than the naturalism with
which in the Czech lands (Pokorný’s Faust is an exception) we
have nothing but problems.
This treachery and its problems are documented in the
staging of Sarah Kane’s play Cleansed at the Theatre Na
Zábradlí (Theatre on the Balustrades).
The author who requires, as far as violence is concerned, the
cutting off of an arm and a leg, appealed to the Zábradlí actors
so little that they refused to appear in the play. Allegedly they
were even scared by Gerardian Rijnders’ Lieffhebber, which has
a repertoire of horrors, masturbation, naturalistic-seeming
incestuous sexual intercourse, murder and suicide. The actors,
maybe all of us, seem to lack the appropriate genetic make-up;
bloodthirsty pieces such as Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus
were never part of our domestic fare.
In the end it was young guest artists such as Petra Špalková
who appeared in the Zábradlí production, directed by the
young Brno talent Pavel Baďura. The premiere, which I am in
a position to write about, was little more than a staged reading,
but it seems that even later performances were no more than
that. A blatant incongruity arose between the sketchy
characters and actions (they could clearly be no more than this
when the actors carried their scripts the whole time) and the
veneer of “complete direction” which the production otherwise
brought. The decor especially, chic black blinds, was almost
too definitive and chilly. This wouldn’t necessarily have
mattered if the exalted emotion and passion (and through
Sarah Kane, Cleansed / Divadlo Na zábradlí – in the Eliade Library, Praha
2001 / Directed by Pavel Baďura / Set design and costumes Lucie Kuropatová
>Photo Martin Špelda
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blood the “hot” breath of death) had achieved the appropriate
temperature. What awaited the audience – and not only in the
violent scenes – was a mere, for the most part banal,
suggestion: the manipulated people are presented by actors
suspended in harnesses, the peep-show is staged as a coy little
dance and so on and so on… Even from such ideas I can judge
the direction in which the direction deliberately set out: we
have to imagine that which should, according to the author, be
visibly “in-yer-face”.
At first glance the production was excessively sensitive.
Naturalism had no place; the empty space was filled with
metaphors and comic exaggeration. Such delicacy seems to me
a typical Czech anaesthetic. The question however remains:
what, protected from pain, do we actually feel? I fear, just
a mild excitement over foreign deviations.
Pur-lease! Pur-haps we have here our national contribution
to what it means to be “cool”… Being cool for us means that we
can experience absolutely everything, and feel nothing.
The play Boiled Heads by the young Czech author Marek
Horoščák (prize winner in the Alfréd Radok Award for the best
original play of 2000) has some of the attributes of the “in-yerface” school. At first sight verbal cynicism and its
consequently violent inclinations are the properties of youth,
but then it is shown that the generation of apparently decent,
settled parents are much better at it: papa, whom we
wouldn’t expect to be a “murderer” of anything more than
rabbits and hens, really does boil those importunate young
heads alive. The division of roles, a variant of the generation
conflict, incites the reader to see a naturalistically rough
morality on the theme: “Who really is responsible for
today’s marasmus?” in the play. It seems as clear as day in this
case that it is the parents. A production comprehended as
directly as this would soon run out of breath.
Director Pavel Šimák, also from Brno, made the right
decision to read the play as a wild and grotesque fairy story.
And there was nothing wilful about that. The story is perhaps
too reminiscent of the Gingerbread Cottage (for which – as can
appropriately be mentioned in this connection – the Brothers
Grimm were inspired by the murder of an old woman in the
Black Forest, burnt to death by a couple of evil adolescents). In
this story first a lost girl (a character known as angel-devil)
finds her way to the cottage in the depths of the forest where
the old married pair live, followed by two youths (known as
city types) whose car has crashed nearby looking for refuge.
A second “fairy-tale” inspiration is then unwittingly supplied
by the author: the girl in his play is wearing – in spite of the
bitter cold outside – the suspiciously scanty garb of
a prostitute, but explains it away by saying she went to the
forest to look for her missing pussy-cat. The director
doesn’t hesitate to take the girl at her word, whereupon Puss-
Sarah Kane, Cleansed, Divadlo Na zábradlí – in the Eliade Library, Praha 2001 / Directed by Pavel Baďura
Set design and costumes Lucie Kuropatová >Photo Martin Špelda
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Marek Horoščák, Boiled Heads / Divadlo Husa na provázku, Brno 2001 / Directed by Pavel Šimák / Set design Pavel Borák
Costumes Markéta Oslzlá >Photo Radan Koryčanský
in-Boots appears in front of our very eyes.
Does it matter? I don’t think so. This fairy-tale pussy-cat
always shows things in the right measure, and immediately
indicates by its presence that this is no naturalistic crime but
a fiction. A fiction, at least as I understand the play, is here in
form and theme. When we look for the answer to the abovementioned ethical question, we would have to mention two
things. The first is that as well as being a moralist the author
takes a suspicious enjoyment in playing with motifs (even fairytale motifs), with language situations, characters – i. e. , in
writing a theatrical play. Another is that there is no reason to be
optimistic about Horoščák’s young people (even the surviving
young men pass on the news about the boiled heads coldbloodedly, as a sensation). What turns the fairy-tale catastrophe
on its head is the fact that the young do not have time to express
themselves thoroughly, for they have undervalued the combat
readiness of the “married couple in the cottage in the forest”.
The couple, apparently cut off from civilisation, have been
prepared by television for the intruders. Tutored by TV, they
also anticipate that every chance guest is a dangerous criminal
for whom it is necessary to be “actively” prepared. Television
also gave them the basic guidelines for what to do.
This theme that it is not only reality which inspires fiction
(including theatrical fiction) but also fiction which gives
guidelines about what life is, can be and should be, seems to
me much more interesting than, for example, the question of
generational guilt. The theme is in any case inspirational, as is
clear from the actors’ energy, both comic and bravura in the
best sense of the world. Giving superb performances are not
only the “old masters” of the Theatre Husa na provázku
(Theatre Goose on a String) – Alena Ambrová and Pavel
Zatloukal – but also the truly sexy and indeed angel-devil
Kateřina Šudáková, and the innocently dangerous “types”
Tomáš Sýkora and Radim Fiala. A joy to behold. Just the kind
of enjoyment which I would like to describe as the Czech
hallmark is also a perfect balance to the “hopelessly bestial”
cool connotations of Horoščák’s play.
(This article appeared in the journal Svět a divadlo [World
and Theatre] no. 4/2001)
Mark Ravenhill: Faust (Faust is Dead), translated by Jitka
Sloupová, directed by Jiří Pokorný; set design Petr B. Novák, costume
design Kateřina Štefková, music Roman Holý, dramaturge Lenka
Havlíková, film shots Marek Najbrt, Benjamin Tuček and
J. Pokorný, HaDivadlo, première 28. 11. 2000
Sarah Kane: Cleansed, directed by Pavel Baďura, translation,
dramaturgy and lyrics by David Drozd, designer Lucie Kuropatová,
music Jan Budař, specialist assistance on the translation Ivory
Rodriguez, Divadlo Na zábradlí, première in the Eliade Library
14. 1. 2001
Marek Horoščák: Vařený hlavy (Boiled Heads), directed by Pavel
Šimák, dramaturge Radan Koryčanský, set design Pavel Borák, music
Jan Budař, costumes Markéta Oslzlá, Divadlo Husa na provázku,
première 9. 3. 2001
In-yer-face
but Gently
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not Only to the Desert
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The Činoherní klub (Drama Club) is a small theatre right in
the centre of Prague. Ever since the theatre opened in 1965 the
shallow stage, minimally equipped, has predetermined it for
the kind of theatre that starts out with a strong text and, in
interpreting it, relies mainly on the personalities of the actors
and their ability to convince the audience through their art.
After the Činoherní klub’s famous era in the 1960s and
beginning of the 1970s, the theatre settled for a period into
a routine inertia, due first to administrative changes resulting
from the end of the Prague Spring, and later when the founder
generation of actors grew older and left their home stage. The
disintegration of the formerly close-knit company was speeded
up at the beginning of the 1990s by the arrival of the Slovak
director Vladimír Strnisko as artistic director. At the end of the
decade the post was taken over by the long-term dramaturge of
the Činoherní klub Vladimír Procházka, supported by the
director Ladislav Smoček, who had for twenty years been
virtually responsible for maintaining artistic continuity. Their
idea about the future orientation of the theatre was clear from
the beginning – to return to the original programmatic vision of
the Činoherní klub in a new context and with a radically
rejuvenated company. Jaroslav Vostrý, one of the founders of
the theatre, had formulated the vision as the possibilities of
man disclosed by the means of the actor.
The new leadership of the Činoherní klub achieved its first
convincing success at the end of 2000, with a production of
a play Le retour au désert by the French dramatist BernardMarie Koltès whose work had been only sporadically
performed in the Czech lands up to that time. The considerably
rejuvenated company with the star of the theatre Petr Nárožný
(Adrian) at its head, strengthened by the Slovak actress Emília
RETURN NOT ONLY TO THE DESERT
/31
Bernard-Marie Koltès, Le retour au désert / Činoherní klub,
Praha 2000 / Directed by Roman Polák / Set design Ján Zavarský
Costumes Jana Zbořilová >Photo Yvona Odrazilová
Vášáryová (Matylda) and the outstanding Bára Hrzánová
(Maame Queuleu), demonstrated a quality of teamwork not
seen for a long time. The actors (most of them performing
together for the first time) became trump cards and a key
element of the discreet direction of Roman Polák. Through the
acting and a special – almost eccentric though not unnatural –
rhythm of speech, they were jointly successful in opening up
the situation of a play full of provocative tension and
inexplicable nervousness. The terse atmosphere of the
individual scenes, soaked in the orient and a foetid hardened
narrow-mindedness, a certain unspoken quality of behaviour
and sudden reversals in the moods of the characters, arousing
curiosity and at the same time making indeterminate;
everything is concrete, but at the same time full of mystery. It
is gripping to follow how an essentially abstract problem (for
what in the Czech lands can parallel the French trauma over
the war in Algeria?) can, thanks to a lively and dynamic
rendering of the characters, suddenly become a gripping
starting-point for multi-faceted conflicts of characters,
mentality and temperament, sometimes ironic, sometimes
judged with tragic seriousness.
Thanks again to the performances and a clear directorial
concept, there was a successful revival last year of the centuryold comedy by Václav Štech, Registered Estate. In this
production the director Ladislav Smoček set out with the actors
on “an expedition into a Czech past which could be an apology
for our contemporary age”; that is, research into particular
n
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Václav Štech, Registered Estate
Činoherní klub, Praha 2001 / Directed by
Ladislav Smoček / Set design Karel Glogr
Costumes Jana Zbořilová
>Photo Yvona Odrazilová
humorous stereotypes in the thinking and behaviour of the
Czech bourgeois. Along with the author he uncovered
primarily the mechanism of tactics in business, politics and
Czech public life in general. Ladislav Smoček added his own
flavour to the play’s language, which as it was already
contained unusually topical moments for today’s Czech
Republic, which finds itself again in a period of “naive”
democratic capitalism. The impression of playing with burning
contemporary issues in period costume is almost perfect. The
main character is the estate agent Fistr (Pavel Kikinčuk) who
has political ambitions – to become mayor of a district of
Prague. His office offers a special service under the rubric
“registered estate”: matchmaking. One prime source of comedy
is Fistr’s incredible eloquence, which he uses to convince
anyone – whether in business or politics – that things are other
than in reality they seem: a bog is a lake, a ruined house is an
estate in perfect order, and his own advantage the common
good. Also in the amorous entanglement, involving
Fistr’s daughter (Veronika Žilková), an impoverished nobleman
(Matěj Dadák), a rich widow (Dana Černá) and eventually Fistr
himself, a desire for a suitable wedding is linked with political
and sexual affinities in a cascade of breakneck but irresistible
comic situations. In the interpretation of the present actors,
acting originating in the unscrupulous humour of farce has an
intellectual bird’s eye view, and not even in the most daring
scenes (the amorous relationship between Fistr’s daughter and
the widow) does it lose nobility.
Joe Orton’s black comedy Entertaining Mr. Sloane was
produced last year by the Činoherní klub, again under the
direction of Ladislav Smoček. Orton’s play presents repulsive
characters and their behaviour on the level of coarse laughter
and grotesque. However, the production does not make play so
much with the comic elements of Orton’s play, nor does it
accentuate them. Smoček stages his Sloane factually, almost
realistically. And only in a few precisely timed moments does the
action break into brutal farce; for example, when in the course of
a row Sloane (Michal Zelenka) tears out Kath’s (Lenka
Skopalová) false teeth and throws them into the fire; Ed pulls
them out, still hot, and thrusts them back into his sister’s mouth.
To the director, it is not even about people who are, according to
Orton, profoundly bad but irresistibly ridiculous. He is much
more interested in the banality and embarrassment of
contemporary life, in which in the end everything is possible and
believable. Lying and pretending are a normal way of living.
Brutal murder is masked as an accident. Cynical deals and
distasteful sexual involvements cross with kindred relationships,
perceived as a normal standard. Mr Sloane once again entertains
the public at the Činoherní klub, thanks primarily to the perfect
acting teamwork of the quartet of protagonists.
Meanwhile, the latest distinctive trump card of the actors is
the production of a play by the contemporary Irish dramatist
Martin McDonagh, The Lonesome West, an absurd grotesque
about a feud between two brothers in the Irish countryside,
where the local priest can do no more to stop the moral apathy
than to comment sarcastically. The direction by the young actor
Ondřej Sokol leads the actors in an exceptionally sensitive way,
with them strengthening the black humour of the play and
skilfully avoiding stylisation and descriptive naturalism. The
contrast between the first comically inclined half and the
second, with its powerfully tragic subtext, gives an appropriate
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Joe Orton, Entertaining Mr. Sloane / Činoherní klub, Praha 2001 / Directed by Ladislav Smoček
Set design Karel Glogr / Costumes Jana Zbořilová >Photo Yvona Odrazilová
Return
tension and riveting inner rhythm to the production. The
grotesque gradually becomes a morality played on
a knife’s edge. Beneath the superficial Irish blarney – whereby
the country folk from Connemara indulge in vulgarisms, and
mingle infantile babbling with apposite bonmots, intellectual
turns of phrase and management expressions – is concealed
a hopeless callousness derived from generations of emotionally
deprived village folk. From bizarre stories and spiteful
skirmishes about chips, brandy, statues of saints or a stove,
gradually emerges a metaphorical subtext, a precisely
constructed play and its production. In the character of the
Welsh priest Michal Pavlata creates a sensitive, non-moralising
portrait of a clergyman who, face to face with the brutality of
his flock, doubts himself rather than God. In the character of
Girleen, Ladislava Něrgešová links the thoughtlessness of
youth and an unfeminine crudeness and briskness with great
inner energy and some sort of paradoxical purity. Marek Taclík
plays the younger, more naive and direct of the two brothers.
His Valene throws himself into everything headfirst, his
cunning and tricks are robust and primitive. He is more
practical, even his amorality is more pragmatic, maybe more
comic. Jaromír Dulava creates the role of the older of the
brothers Connor in a much more refined way – he acts in the
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Martin McDonagh, The Lonesome West / Činoherní klub, Praha 2001
Directed by Ondřej Sokol / Set design Adam Pitra
Costumes Katarína Hollá >Photo Yvona Odrazilová
theatres experimenting with theatrical form and technical
means. Its premise is simple: only man – i. e., the actor – can
tell on stage of the complications and paradoxes of the human
soul and human heart in the best, most exact and
comprehensible way.
With the use of the articles by Jan Kolář, Marie Reslová and Jitka
Sloupová compiled by Marie Reslová.
Bernard-Marie Koltès: Le retour au désert, translated by Kateřina
Lukešová and Daniel Uherek, director Roman Polák, set design Ján
Zavarský, costumes Jana Zbořilová, music Petr Skoumal, Činoherní
klub, première 11. 12. 2000
“fratricidal” war with a cool cynicism and disdain which are in
their results much more insidious than the coarse attacks of the
younger of the brothers. From time to time Dulava as it were
commentates on himself, so as to unsettle us still more in our
critical judgement of the character, and immediately in some
gag or gesture of pure brutality lets us look openly into it again.
Činoherní klub has, through the most conservative,
traditional method – that is through the actor and his art –
clearly come closer to the tragi-grotesque spirit of the
contemporary time than other Bohemian and Moravian
Václav Štech: Registered Estate, adapted and directed by Ladislav
Smoček, set design Karel Glogr, costumes Jana Zbořilová, Činoherní
klub, première 27. 3. 2001
Joe Orton: Entertaining Mr. Sloane, translated by Dana Hábová,
director Ladislav Smoček, set design Karel Glogr, costumes Jana
Zbořilová, Činoherní klub, première 23. 10. 2001
Martin McDonagh: The Lonesome West, translated and directed
by Ondřej Sokol, set design Adam Pitra, costume design Katarína Hollá,
Činoherní klub, première 8. 3. 2002
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Dejvice
Dejvice
Theatre
Theatre
Jan Kerbr
in Celebration…
and Still an Inspiration…
Fiodor Michailovich Dostoievsky, Brothers Karamazov / Dejvické divadlo, Praha 2000
Directed by Lukáš Hlavica / Set design Jan Tobola / Costumes Ivana Brádková >Photo archives
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DEJVICE THEATRE IN CELEBRATION… AND STILL AN INSPIRATION…
The small hall of the Dejvice Theatre (named after a district
of Prague) now houses the second theatre company whose
work crowns the stage’s decade of existence in its 10th
anniversary. The first chapter of the history of the Dejvice
Theatre was written by graduates from the Department for
Alternative Theatre of the Drama Faculty of the Academy of
Performing Arts (KALD DAMU) led by their professor, the
director Jan Borna. Five years ago this attractive group, whose
work was crowned by Sestra Úzkost (Sister Anxiety), a montage
based by J. A. Pitínský on texts by Jan Čep and Jakub Deml,
moved to the Theatre in Dlouhá Street.
The company which took over from the original group was
also drawn from a single generation, similarly graduates of
KALD DAMU. Their professor also accompanied them to the
theatre, but in Miroslav Krobot’s case under much more
provocative circumstances, since this experienced director
abandoned the stage of officially the most prestigious theatre in
the country, the National Theatre in Prague. Moreover, the first
production by the new company at the Dejvice Theatre was
their school graduation work, Robert Patrick’s Kennedy’s
Children (played here under the title Ó, milý Buddho! [Oh My
Dear Buddha!]) in which, for practice – this did not in any way
detract from the artistic level of the work – the actors played
different roles at different performances. Higher artistic
demands and requirement of a more varied team to interpret
various roles made the company to change. Some of the women
chose for a while maternity leave in preference to an artistic life,
whilst the male side was strengthened by older colleagues
(Martin Myšička and Igor Chmela, who deserted from the
National Theatre, Ivan Trojan and Lukáš Hlavica from the
second most prestigious Prague stage [the Vinohrady Theatre],
and David Novotný from České Budějovice). The company was
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, Government Inspector / Dejvické divadlo, Praha 1998 / Directed by Sergej Fedotov / Set design Barbora Lhotáková
Costumes Petra Štetinová >Photo Martin Špelda
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Miroslav Krobot, Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov, Oblomov / Dejvické divadlo, Praha 2000 / Directed by Miroslav Krobot
Set design Martin Chocholoušek >Photo archives
also supplemented by younger fellow-students from DAMU:
Lenka Krobotová, Jaroslav Plesl and Pavel Šimčík, whilst actors
from the original company looked for work elsewhere.
It was not long before the Dejvice Theatre began to be
spoken about with respect as a “Russian” theatre in Prague,
thanks to the significant proportion of Russian classics in the
repertoire. If we look at the company’s repertoire more closely,
we find that this consists of only three titles; however, their
success has made a significant contribution to the profile of the
theatre as far as the Prague public is concerned. These are great
themes in the context of Russian culture and world culture in
general: Gogol’s Government Inspector, directed by Serge
Fedotov from Omsk (a Russian director with successes in the
Czech Republic) and two dramatisations of major classic
novels, Dostojevsky’s Brothers Karamazov directed by Lukáš
Hlavica and Goncharov’s Oblomov, with which the artistic
director Miroslav Krobot triumphed both as adapter and
director. Chekhov’s Three Sisters dominates the coming
dramaturgical plan.
The backbone of the repertoire is additionally strengthened
by modern English drama: Joe Orton’s Loot (guest-directed by
Michal Lang) and Howard Barker’s Claw (directed by Lukáš
Hlavica); a dramatisation of Marquéz’s tale Unbelievable and a
Wistful Story about Erendira and her Cruel Grandmother
(Miroslav Krobot); and one Shakespeare, Twelfth Night or What
You Will (Miroslav Krobot). They have also performed Edgar
Allan Poe (Tranquilising Method), Carlo Gozzi (The Green
Bird), and experimentally – as a work growing through
rehearsals – My Life with Dogs was created under the young
British theatre director Alex Byrne. The new play Tales of
Common Insanity by the well-known screen-writer Petr
Zelenka has been a sensation with audiences in recent months.
The acting team has stabilised. In the case of Ivan Trojan,
last year rewarded with the Thalia Prize for his performance in
the role of Oblomov, one can speak of one of the triumphs of
Czech acting. The Dejvice crowd is also happy to welcome
interesting guests: the Prague-based Russian actress Lilian
Malkina appeared in Marquéz’s tale, director Michal Lang cast
National Theatre actor Alois Švehlík in Loot, whilst the wellknown actors Nina Divíšková, Jiří Bartoška and the young
Linda Rybová put the final touches to Zelenka‘s new work.
The rawness, verve and maturing of individual actors came
to the surface notably in titles such as Kennedy’s Children, Claw
and My Life with Dogs. In other productions it aimed towards
exact typisation with a very subtle balancing of expressive
nuances in the service of the whole. Novotný’s Shakespearean
Sir Toby and Trojan’s Karamazov père were remarkable
examples of precise characterisation. In the last two to three
years the theatre has begun to gain general renown, and the
productions of Oblomov and Tales of Common Insanity –
judging by the queues at the box office and the sold-out houses
– have become cult objects. The patient building of an honest,
Dejvice Theatre in Celebration… and Still an Inspiration…
Dejvice
Theatre
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Dejvice
inTheatre
Celebration… and Still an Inspiration…
Dejvice Theatre
38/
Miroslav Krobot, Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov, Oblomov / Dejvické divadlo, Praha 2000 / Directed by Miroslav Krobot
Set design Martin Chocholoušek >Photo archives
non-strident image of “actors’ theatre” has begun to pay off and
many speak of the Dejvice Theatre as a second Činoherní klub
(Drama Club). What was it that aroused so much interest in
Krobot‘s production of Goncharov‘s Oblomov? Nikita
Michalkov‘s film with Oleg Tabakov in the title role was already
a signal that there is a much more strongly inspirational basis in
the archetype of the character, somewhat undervalued by
literary history, than merely an exact description of the
passivity and cultivated laziness of an indecisive good fellow. If
the venerable film opus of official Soviet creative enthusiasm is
now called into question, this contemporary Czech production
finds itself in a society in which orientation towards results –
i. e. material success – predominates. Oblomov’s ambiguous
mission meets with an enthusiastic reception. If we compare
Krobot’s version with the famous film, the attitudes taken by the
characters and their behaviour patterns are less polarised.
Oblomov and Stolz (Ivan Trojan and Martin Myšička) are not
shown to be fundamental antitheses. Oblomov’s passivity
makes Stolz sincerely unhappy; Myšička’s slightly maudlin tone
of voice contrasts a little with his activity and maybe indicates
its unheroic mycelium. In the title role, Ivan Trojan is a type for
whom such striking activity and dynamic in work with actors’
media only slightly “lets off steam” in his creation. His Oblomov
gives the impression more of a wise, relaxed man at rest (to be
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truthful, at rest after several years of doing nothing). Krobot’s
dramatisation puts the main accent on the rather sad love story
between Oblomov and Olga (Lenka Krobotová); the faltering
tempo of the riveting scene of timid confession chills the
audience in their seats. The passive hero is however unable to
share with his loved one her idea about how to fill life. The
perfectly rounded shape, interpreting Gončarov in a somewhat
Chekhovian way, skilfully combines the stories of the eight
characters preserved by the adapter of the novel, and allows
others to triumph in addition to the interpreters mentioned
above: David Novotný and guest actor Jiří Macháček as
Oblomov‘s more or less parasitical friends, Igor Chmela as the
servant with a bizarrely dark, melancholic naturalness, Jana
Holcová as a convincingly naive maid and Denisa Nová in the
part of Agaphia, representing the watchful, quiet and patiently
practical female principle. The remarkably worked-out
sparkling relationship between characters and the tempo of the
splendidly built composition of Oblomov also triumphed at the
International Festival DIVADLO (THEATRE) in Pilsen in 2001.
/39
Tales of Common Insanity introduced Petr Zelenka to the
Dejvice Theatre. This young but recognised film director
brought a fresh breeze of poetics to Czech cinema in his
Buttoners, and as screen-writer for Ondříček’s Loners. He
directed his own play with the Dejvice performers. In a
simplified way, we could characterise its hard-to-grasp genre as
tragicomically playful, with strikingly shocking points made
within stories; one can also trace there Zelenka’s favourite
writer, Kurt Vonnegut jr. The portrayal of the characters in the
writer’s theatrical work is made more precise by its
classification in the Czech context.
Petr (Ivan Trojan) wants to win back Jana (Klára Melíšková),
who has left him. His friend Midge (Martin Myšička), a nonstandard sexual visionary, recommends amorous magic,
boiling Jana’s hair in milk and so on. However, in the dark Petr
becomes confused and scalps Jana’s aunt. There has been a
lack of understanding between Petr’s parents (Nina Divíšková
and Miroslav Krobot in his acting debut) for a long time; maybe
it never existed. Mama is a passionate blood donor under the
Petr Zelenka, Tales of Common Insanity / Dejvické divadlo, Praha 2001
Directed by Petr Zelenka / Set design Martin Dejwitz / Costumes Jaroslava Pecharová >Photo Hubert Hesoun
035-040/Deywice
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impression that her valuable body fluid is going to help
Chechnya; papa used to be a news reel commentator during the
1970s period of Communist normalisation, leading to his voice
becoming well-known and somewhat profaned. However, after
a meeting with the eccentric sculptor Sylvie (Lenka
Krobotová), his stock begins to rise as a bizarre entertainer at
private parties. Petr does not live with his parents, and his new
neighbours Alice and Jiří (Zdenka Volencová and Jiří Bartoška)
need a voyeur if they are to have meaningful sexual contact.
They begin to “keep” Petr. His friend Midge, who has intimate
associations alternately with a vacuum cleaner, a wash basin
and shop dummies, believes in miracles, for the dummy Eva
(Linda Rybová) comes to life in his domestic set-up. However,
she leaves Midge because his reaction to this marvel is full of
old-fashioned pathos.
The production navigates the unbearable lightness of oddity
with impressive vigour. The poetic quality of the dialogues, in
which I include the use of the ghastly news programmes of the
1970s, is weighed down from time to time by a politicising overcleverness which is not one of the strengths of the script
(reflections on the relationship between working in dissent and
sexual attractiveness somewhat tie down in his role the
convincing Jiří Bartoška). The compositional treatment of
some details has a somewhat “one-off” effect – for example, the
brief appearance of Petr’s paedophile boss with his bizarre
confession. The biggest stars of the production are Ivan Trojan
Dejvice
Theatre
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31.7.2002 14:56
and Miroslav Krobot. Trojan’s creation relies on a perfect
handling of acting techniques, and with a disarming
obviousness alternates the figure of an intelligent sceptic with a
sexual sluggard and, from time to time, a tolerant though rundown ageing youth. In his attempt to overcome the routine of
life the character balances on the edge of existential hysteria.
Miroslav Krobot excels in a subtle study of an oddball papa on
whose unexaminable inner world is imprinted a strange
professional experience, cohabitation with bizarre family
members and a tender relationship with bottled beer. His
sorrowful appearance and carelessly cadenced utterances draw
the audience into the Father’s secret. Zelenka’s play and
production revolve with some detachment around burning
issues of contemporary life. However, it sensitively and
precisely touches on many pains, frustrations and ungrasped
characteristics still arising at the turn of the millennium.
Miroslav Krobot, Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov: Oblomov,
translated by Prokop Voskovec, directed by Miroslav Krobot, set design
Martin Chocholoušek, music Matěj Kroupa a Pavel Rejholec, Dejvice
Theatre, première 1. 12. 2000
Petr Zelenka: Tales of Common Insanity, directed by Petr
Zelenka, set design Martin Dejwitz, costumes Jaroslava Pecharová,
choreography Klára Lidová, Dejvice Theatre, première 16. 11. 2001
Petr Zelenka, Tales of Common Insanity / Dejvické divadlo, Praha 2001
Directed by Petr Zelenka / Set design Martin Dejwitz / Costumes Jaroslava Pecharová >Photo Hubert Hesoun
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Theatre
U
s t o l u
Josef Mlejnek
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THEATRE U STOLU
It would not be exaggerating to say
that the Theatre “U stolu” (At the Table)
is an exceptional phenomenon in
contemporary Czech theatre. The
theatre’s roots go back to before the
democratic revolution of November
1989. It originated nearly a year earlier,
on the initiative of the actor František
Derfler, who with his colleague Jan
Vlasák and others wanted to present the
work of original thinkers whose ideas
could reach readers only in spoken form;
throughout the years of Communist
normalisation (1968-1989), not a single
original work of philosophy was
published. A reading of texts by the
silenced philosopher Josef Šafařík
entitled Identity Card was to be
premiered in the Brno club “Na Šelepce”
in the spring of 1989. The performance
was cancelled because of censorship, and
was eventually held in a private
apartment. The first unauthorised
performance took place in the Prague
club “Trojická” on 3 May 1989. The
following year Derfler managed to stage
a reading from Václav Havel’s Letters to
Olga, but for the next seven years the
Theatre U stolu, apart from a few
sporadic reprises, remained virtually
silent.
However, in a society coming to terms
on the one hand with the legacy of
Communism, and on the other
assimilating the often precipitous
impulses from what we call the free
world, it soon became urgent and
necessary to preserve or renew the
importance of the spoken word. When
the Theatre U stolu inaugurated its
regular activity roughly five years ago, it
was not entirely accidental that
Šafařík’s Identity Card was shown again
in a revived premiere. In the course of
a few more seasons its creators
succeeded in staging almost a dozen
independent stage productions. In the
critics’ questionnaire set every year by
the journal Svět a divadlo (World and
Theatre), the Theatre U stolu reached
second place in the category Theatre of
the Year 2001.
In German-speaking countries they
have a great tradition of presenting not
only evenings at which the authors
themselves read from their books, but
also works of literature and philosophy
delivered by leading personalities of the
theatrical world. On stage there is usually
only a table, chair, lamp, book and the
reader, who through his or her delivery
succeeds in holding the attention of
a crowded hall for more than two hours.
If we overlook the essential glass of
mineral water, the reader dispenses with
props and everything relies on his or her
art and voice. Partially, but only in one
sense partially, the Theatre U stolu brings
something similar to the Czech
environment through its service to
literature. Through its form it installs
itself in the theatrical space ever more
markedly. And as far as the meaning of its
activity is concerned, one could find and
name even deeper connotations than the
Jaroslav Durych, The Divine Rainbow / Divadlo U stolu, Brno 2001 / Directed by František Derfler / Set design Milivoj Husák
Costumes Bohumila Matalová >Photo Pavel Nesvadba
And God Said - A Concert of Stories from the Old Testament for
Narrator and Percussion / Divadlo U stolu, Brno 2001 / Directed by
František Derfler / Set design Milivoj Husák >Photo Pavel Nesvadba
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THEATRE U STOLU
/43
Fjodor Michailovich Dostojevsky, Dream of a Foolish Man
Divadlo U stolu, Brno 2001 / Directed by František Derfler
Set design Milivoj Husák >Photo archives
faithful relationship and open approach
of the reader to great literary works and
the effort to elevate an uninstructed
public.
In the 1920s the theologian Romano
Guardini, after one of his Easter journeys
to the “uneducated” south, complained
that we would-be “modern people” had
completely lost the ability to watch in
a direct and living way. He was
captivated by the simple visual
concentration and by the special way
people actively participated through
observation in liturgical ceremonies. At
the very end of the twentieth century the
Czech poet Ivan Diviš, recently returned
from the Provençal south, complained in
his typically indignant way that we
“modern people” had similarly critically
lost the ability for concentrated
listening. He was enthused by poetic
competition between villages in the
distance, whose participants sitting by
the fire in the evening sang their original
versified compositions across the hills –
a practice far from being only a folkloric
tradition. The theologian and the poet
were fascinated as well as by the ability
to understand the living language of
imagery, by direct participation in
a particular “educational” process,
following which the guilty aftertaste of
emptiness does not remain in the human
soul as it does when it is merely shed
around.
How does the Theatre U stolu connect
with this? Certainly through its
archetypal title, which evokes times long
ago in the countryside when the wider
family gathered at the table on the
evening before Sunday in a different way
than during the rest of the week. It
creates a ceremonial special occasion,
such as happens with an intimate family
reading of the Holy Scriptures, but also
with secular books of wisdom. Moreover,
the Theatre U stolu at least partially
renews in us the blocked-up abilities of
watching and listening for which
Guardini and Diviš grieved. But primarily
it works on us through perceptive and
impenetrable wisdoms which are not
only in images but also behind them.
Pilgrim on Earth could be considered
to be the peak, so far, of the staged
readings at the Theatre U stolu. The
delivery of excerpts from the prose and
the diary of Jan Čep, a Czech writer with
a Catholic orientation, and the figures,
faces and silhouettes of the readers
(Ladislav Lakomý and František Derfler)
were permeated with the luminous
spacial magic of a Malevich square in the
middle of the stage, which not only
reflected light but at the most effective
moments seemed to emanate it itself.
Everything brought to mind the
personality of Jan Čep and his destiny as
a man, poet and thinker – and as
a witness to Christ in all three roles. Not
only during the Čep evening but during
other creations by the Theatre U stolu,
the audience becomes aware of the
essential role played by the cellar stage of
the Brno House of the Lords of Fanal: the
brick walls and vaulting not only create
an atmosphere of long ago, but also
evoke a spirit of unadulterated
expectancy.
In the case of And God Said – A Concert
of Stories from the Old Testament for
Narrator and Percussion what attracted
most were the scenic marvels of the artist
Milivoj Husák – everything being evoked
and brought to life during readings from
the Old Testament by a variously floodlit
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Bedřich Bridel, In this Light I Am Darkening / Divadlo U stolu, Brno 2001 / Directed by
František Derfler / Set design Milivoj Husák / Music Dan Dlouhý / Choreography Martin Svobodník
>Photo archives
heap of brushwood! The minimalist
music by Dan Dlouhý did not illustrate or
form a background to the sacred texts, as
has happened at similar occasions, but
with great invention created their
“rootstock” to the same degree as the
human voice. The concert is of course the
reading itself.
In the case of the original interpretation of the poetic meditation by
Bedřich Bridel In this Light I Am Darkening, Martin Svobodník’s expressive
dance representing man’s discovery of
himself, the faltering search for space
and the finding of the point of balance,
corresponded with the melodious
undulation of the lines by the Baroque
poet. It is the landmark utterances of the
Old Testament Preacher and excerpts
from the Book of Job that we recollect
more than terrifying images of ruin and
desolation during the reading of
Bridel’s texts. Husák’s set also indirectly
polemicises with the simplified
understanding of the Baroque and
emphasises its Biblical roots. A glass
vessel with limpid water stands in the
foreground as a mark of Divine
simplicity, next to it a globe as an
attribute of Divine power and a triangular pyramid, a symbol of the inner
Divine life in the Trinity.
The actor Igor Bareš introduced
himself in an adaptation of Dostojevsky’s Dream of a Foolish Man. The
“place of action” of the performance
again had an almost archetypal
simplicity: a table, chair and bed, in the
background a rectangular picture which
operated most suggestively at the
moments when a starry sky shone on it
during the twilight passages of visionary
monologues.
However, an adaptation of Jaroslav
Durych’s Divine Rainbow showed it was
possible to go further. Derfler and
Husák’s stage creations gradually tended
towards a consistently theatrical shape
which flowed from a deep understanding
of the texts and from an intuitive
Theatre
Bedřich Bridel, In this Light I Am Darkening
U
s t o l u
Divadlo U stolu, Brno 2001 / Directed by
František Derfler / Set design Milivoj Husák
Music Dan Dlouhý / Choreography
Martin Svobodník >Photo archives
recognition of what stage shape best
corresponded. The Divine Rainbow was
therefore in essence a legitimate
theatrical performance which for that
matter did not deny – could not deny – its
genealogy. The setting: on the wall in the
background the dim indication of
a cross, on the floor windblown leaves,
in the foreground a bed, chair and table
on which Woman gradually sets
a candle, bread and a jug of water. In the
background a bell and above an opening
in the ground two boards at right angles,
alongside a coffin, or rather a chest. Man
is played by Ladislav Lakomý, Woman by
Ela Lehocká. Both have lived through
wartime and postwar catastrophe. By
a crucial accident they meet on a farm in
the middle of an abandoned, plundered
village, gradually open up one to
another, and leave themselves at the
mercy of the other. Here too the rule of
maximum expression through minimum
means, typical of every preceding
production by the Theatre U stolu,
remained valid.
The Theatre U stolu does not dazzle
with politically adventurous experiments, but refers to the natural world
which becomes ever more despairingly
less evident. Together with the theatre
we can peer into the blocked-up depths
not only of humanity. The Theatre
U stolu in its present form would
certainly be far less expressive were it
not for the cooperation of two artists: the
actor and director František Derfler and
the painter Milivoj Husák. The latter
proved his exceptional ability for spacial
theatrical vision twenty years ago with
his images for the street theatre
adaptation of Comenius’s Labyrinth of
the World and Paradise of the Heart by
the Theatre on a String. Based on what
the two of them have so far created and
on what they are planning, their
invention has plainly not reached the
end of its powers.
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The Revival of
in the
Opera
Czech
Lands
Radmila Hrdinová
Leoš Janáček, Fate / Národní divadlo, Praha 2002 / Conducted by Jiří Bělohlávek
Directed by Robert Wilson / Set and light design Robert Wilson / Costumes Jacques Reynand >Photo Oldřich Pernica
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THE REVIVAL OF OPERA IN THE CZECH LANDS
The art of opera, above all the staging of opera, is going
through an apparent revival in the Czech lands. As well as
opera directors from abroad who have been working here over
the last year as guest directors, possibly all the most important
Czech directors of the younger and middle generation from the
straight theatre have tried their hand (some of them
repeatedly) at directing opera, resulting in a striking impact on
the theatrical quality of opera productions.
The first two years of the new millennium also brought, for
opera houses in the Czech Republic, a successful climax to
a tendency initiated in previous seasons. The management of
the opera at the National Theatre completed its efforts to
acquire international personalities in opera direction for
productions of Czech classics. This is how the production of
Smetana’s Devil’s Wall (premiere 20. 12. 2001) came about,
directed by the English director David Pountney. Pountney has
wide experience in the Czech repertoire (Smetana, Dvořák,
Janáček and Martinů) and during the previous season at the
State Opera directed (with his assistant Nicola Raab) Bohuslav
Martinů’s operatic debut The Soldier and the Dancer. His
interpretation of Smetana’s opera focused more on the intimate
story of the emotional deprivation of an ageing man than on
the details of Czech life, arousing antagonistic reactions but
categorically enriching the domestic opera scene with
a production marked by the clear imprint of
a director’s signature and opinion. The same can be said of
a guest production by a legendary personality of international
theatre, the American Robert Wilson, who directed
Janáček’s opera Osud (Fate) at the National Theatre. Osud is an
opera rarely played in the Czech Republic because of its
difficult libretto, and is consequently little known. Wilson
adapted Janáček to his own poetic of highly stylised visual
theatre, which somewhat overcame the problem of the realistic
handling of a not very consistent story, but which only loosely
corresponded with Janáček’s music. In the last few years the
National Theatre has striven for the modernisation of the
theatrical shape of opera productions by extending invitations
to theatre directors of the younger generation (Petr Lébl,
Vladimír Morávek, J. A. Pitínský, Jana Kališová, Hana
Burešová). J. A. Pitínský‘s second production (following
Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde) was Smetana’s Dalibor. Pitínský
brought it up to date, but unfortunately the production, sketchy
in style and logic, aroused numerous negative responses in the
audience and informed public, although it could not be denied
that it was an attempt to take a new view of the traditionally
heroically conceived theme of this Czech national opera.
Amongst the successes of this season at the Prague National
Theatre was the Alfréd Radok Award for best production of the
year to Alban Berg’s Wozzeck directed by David Radok, which
originated as a co-production with Göteborg in Sweden.
The State Opera in Prague continued in the dramaturgical
line followed by the artistic leadership since 1996. This has
been mainly in the staging of 20th century operas (in past
seasons Benjamin Britten, Philip Glass, E. F. Burian and others)
and the inclusion of original works. Two operas by foreign
composers had their premieres this season at the State Opera in
Prague: Joseph Merrick dit Elephant Man by the French
composer Laurent Petitgirard (7. 2. 2002) and Circus Terra by
the Norwegian composer Trygve Madsen (16. 5. 2002). Petitgirard’s opera, based on the theme popularised in David
Lynch’s film The Elephant Man, brought to the Prague stage
a melodic “retro-opera” linked in its musical expression to the
line of French music linked with the names of Saint-Saëns,
Fauré, Debussy and Ravel. Madsen’s “opera-musical”, on the
other hand, is from the musical point of view no more than
a craftily constructed compilation, its libretto likewise a highly
confused anecdote characterised by pseudo-philosophical
passages on the theme of human freedom. Both productions,
but especially the second, raised the question as to whether the
leadership of the State Opera is not striving after world
premieres at any cost, without regard to the quality of the
works staged. The production of the Petitgirard opera was the
climax of the French cycle at the State opera, in the context of
which the State Opera had already presented Giacomo
Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable and Paul Dukas’s Ariane et Barbebleue. A more meaningful quality, especially from the point of
view of the music and singing, came with the premiere of the
opera Hamlet by the French composer Ambroise Thomas
(21. 3. 2002) which opened a cycle based on themes of
Shakespeare’s plays. A similarly interesting initiative was the
“comparative cycle” of which the first project was the
production of two operas on the theme of Don Juan – Giuseppe
Gazzaniga’s Don Giovanni and Mozart’s opera of the same
name (13. 12. 2001). Antonio Vivaldi’s Orlando Furioso
(18. 10. 2001) likewise represented a worthwhile attempt to
Leoš Janáček, Fate / Národní divadlo, Praha 2002 / Conducted by Jiří Bělohlávek / Directed by Robert Wilson / Set and light design Robert Wilson
Costumes Jacques Reynaud >Photo Oldřich Pernica
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Opera
Czech Lands
The Revival of
Leoš Janáček, Fate / Národní divadlo, Praha 2002 / Conducted by Jiří Bělohlávek
Directed by Robert Wilson / Set and light design Robert Wilson / Costumes Jacques Reynaud >Photo Oldřich Pernica
Bedřich Smetana, Devils’ Wall / Národní divadlo, Praha 2002 / Conducted by Jiří Bělohlávek
Directed by David Pountney / Set design and costumes Johan Engels >Photo Hana Smejkalová
in the
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Stránka 48
THE REVIVAL OF OPERA IN THE CZECH LANDS
Thomas Ambroise, Hamlet / Státní opera, Praha 2002 / Conducted by Jiří Mikula
Directed by Dieter Kaegi / Set design and costumes Stefanie Pasterkamp >Photo František Ortmann
bring baroque opera to the contemporary public. The State
Opera made space for young composers and their previously
unperformed operas with the cycle “Pounding on the Iron
Curtain”, in which the operas The Knight and Death and
Jelizaweta Bam by Vladimír Wimmer, The Divine Comedy by
Martin Kumžák, Venomous Love by Otmar Mácha and Wir
spielen Frieden by the German composer Jörn Arnecke (in coproduction with the Musikakademie Rheinsberg) received oneoff performances. Even here doubts were raised over the
quality of some of the works.
A more interesting stimulus in the field of original work was
brought by the Opera Studio of the Music Faculty of the
Academy of Performing Arts (HAMU) in Prague by the
introduction of two original works by young authors – the
operas The Fool and the Nun by Michal Nejtek and The Girl and
Death by Marek Ivanovič. The production gained added value
not only for the quality of the two works, but also because of
the direction by the young graduate of HAMU Jiří Heřman. He
likewise made his debut on the professional stage in the J. K.
Tyl Theatre in Pilsen with the opera Samson et Dalila by
Camille Saint-Saëns which belongs, as far as the stylistic
finesse and emotional relationship to the musical language of
a work is concerned, to the most remarkable operatic initiatives
of the last season. The Pilsen Opera continued in its pioneering
dramaturgy of Czech compositions (Fibich’s Šárka,
Foerster’s Simpleton) with the staging of Otakar Ostrčil’s opera
Kunala’s Eyes. The problematic direction by Jiří Pokorný and
insensitive encroachments into the musical structure of the
work (conductor and present head of the Opera Petr Kofroň)
considerably devalued the merit of this initiative.
During the same season the Opera of the National Theatre in
Brno maintained in general the high musical level of
productions and tendency to interesting dramaturgy. After
Janáček’s Makropulous Case with Gabriela Beňačková in the
leading role at the end of the preceding season, this year there
followed a concert performance of Janáček’s Šárka. In May,
a festival took place in the Brno National Theatre which
presented the work of the Brno native, the composer Erich
Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957). The festival reached a climax
with the premiere of Korngold’s opera Die tote Stadt (in coproduction with the Badisches Theatre in Karlsruhe, Germany)
in a remarkable production both from the point of view of
music and staging (premiere 10. 5. 2002).
The National Theatre of Moravia and Silesia in Ostrava
continued with a constantly interesting standard of dramaturgy
and staging. The repertoire of Janáček operas expanded already
last season with his early work The Beginning of a Romance
(also staged at the Janáček Festival in Hukvaldy in July 2001)
and this season with Káťa Kabanová (December 2001). It
became one of the few out-of-Prague opera houses to risk
presenting Borodin’s opera Prince Igor (February 2002), thanks
to a high-quality cast of singers strengthened by voices from the
countries of the former Soviet Union and an excellent chorus.
Of the other opera houses, the F. X. Šalda Theatre in Liberec
presented an attractive dramaturgy (Orff’s Die Kluge,
Massenet’s Werther, Giordano’s Andréa Chénier) and a high
level of staging (especially under the direction of Anton
Nekovar), as did the Moravian Theatre in Olomouc
(Britten’s Albert Herring) and the Theatre of South Bohemia in
České Budějovice (Mozart’s Zaida). The festival Opera 2001
organised by the Union of Music Theatre in the National
Theatre in Prague was devoted to opera in the Czech Republic,
aimed mainly at staging tendencies; so was the Smetana
Festival in Litomyšl, which apart from some great productions
in recent years has revived the historic chateau theatre
(a period interpretation of Jacopo Peri’s Euridice); the Janáček
Festival in Hukvaldy; and the summer opera festivals in Kutná
Hora and Loket.
Antonio Vivaldi, Orlando Furioso / Státní opera, Praha 2001 / Conducted by Jiří Kotouč / Directed by Gilbert Blin / Set design Gilbert Blin
Costumes Josef Jelínek / Choreography Zuzana Dostálová >Photo František Ortmann
Paul Ducas, Ariane et Barbe-bleue / Státní opera, Praha 2001 / Conducted by Vincent Monteil / Directed by Paul-Emile Fourny
Set design and costumes Daniela Villaret >Photo František Ortmann
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PUPPETS IN BOHEMIA
At the present time, the statutory puppet theatres (those
with their own building and, above all, a grant from the local
authority) are meeting serious competition for audiences from
independent professional groups and the numerous and, as far
as inventiveness is concerned, ever-more assertive amateur
companies (Střípek from Pilsen, Čmukaři from Turnov and
Céčko from Svitavy).
Professional puppet companies have held their ground most
successfully in the field of stage design. Their designers have
not surrendered the will to experiment and incorporate the live
actor in a natural way into a daring solution of the stage space.
The technique of shadow theatre has reappeared (most
recently in the successful Sávitrí by the independent group
Theatre Líšeň); work with light, projection and multi-purpose
mobile stages has been fostered (the most daring realisations
have been linked with the name of Petr Matásek – for example,
the design for the production of Nosegay at the Naive Theatre
in Liberec, or the production, resolved on a similar principle, of
The Three Gold Hairs of Grandad Knowall, designed by Marek
Zákostelecký for DRAK Theatre). New non-traditional spaces
were sought – whether a wide variety of street theatre or the
use of “non-theatrical” buildings like Bouda-La Barraque by the
company Volière Dromesco and the brothers Forman, or –
another sanctuary for this theatrical partnership for the project
Crimson Sails – a cargo ship. A number of puppet productions
have taken place in a circus big top (for example, the circus
musical Pinnochio), in which the Theatre DRAK took part as
well as the production of independent groups Studio dell arte,
and Continuo Theatre’s Circus Vitae). The theatrical activity of
the Malé divadlo (Little Theatre) from České Budějovice takes
place in the gardens of chateaux and castles. Puppet theatre has
stepped out of dimmed halls and come right out to its
audiences in the most charmingly varied spaces, where the
audiences are treated to theatrical tricks and dodges often
inspired by the magic of old theatrical productions.
As far as the dramaturgy is concerned, apart from wellknown authors (František Pavlíček, Milan Pavlík, Iva Peřinová
– the most frequently performed author on Czech and
international puppet stages – Pavel Polák and Jiří Středa), new
names have appeared (Blanka Luňáková, Vlasta Špicnerová,
/51
Sávitrí / Divadlo Líšeň, 2000 / Directed by Pavla Dombrovská
Music Luděk Vémola / Puppets Eva Krásenská / Set design Jana Francová
>Photo archives
A Plague on Both Your Houses! / Drak, Hradec Králové 2001
Directed by Josef Krofta / Set design and puppets Irena Marečková
Music Jiří Vyšohlíd >Photo Josef Ptáček
the young and talented Klára Peřinová, René Levínský). The
dramaturgy – whilst not neglecting the child audience – has
expanded into a repertoire for adult audiences (very strikingly
in the musically coloured repertoire of the Brno Divadlo
Radost [Theatre Joy], most remarkably in the production in
the Alfa Theatre in Pilsen of the provocative play by Iva
Peřinová Gee Whiz, Dogheads! touching on the Czech national
character). The well-known Spejbl and Hurvínek Theatre
regularly plays for adults (Hurvínek’s Excursion into the XXIst
century).
For several years in succession, inspiring puppet
productions have found their way into the “big” theatre
festivals such as the International Festival THEATRE held in
Pilsen and the Hradec Králové Festival Theatre European
Regions, whilst “traditional” Czech puppet festivals such as
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Gilgamesh I and II / Buchty a loutky, 2001 / Conception and music
Tomáš Procházka / Set design and puppets Renata Pavlíčková
>Photo Pavel Matela
A Plague on Both Your Houses! / Drak, Hradec Králové 2001
Directed by Josef Krofta / Set design and puppets Irena Marečková
Music Jiří Vyšohlíd >Photo Josef Ptáček
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Mateřinka in Liberec or Skupa’s Pilsen, the new festivals such
as the international Spectaculum interesse (from 1995) in
Ostrava and the World Festival of Puppet Art (from 1996) in
Prague have opened themselves to independent groups and
companies from home and abroad which use the media of
puppet theatre in wider connections of theatrical work. An
example is the very successful production How I Lost Myself
(directed by Jan Borna at the Divadlo v Dlouhé [Theatre in
Dlouhá Street]) linking straight drama and puppet appearances
in a story by Ludvík Aškenazy with popular period songs from
the “Golden Sixties”.
The professional puppet theatres resort to international
participation for the realisation of major projects for youth or
adult audiences. One example is the Czech-Japanese coproduction variation on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet,
which under the title A Plague on Both Your Houses! was
presented by DRAK Theatre in Hradec Králové, directed by
Josef Krofta.
In difficult conditions, and after ten years of courageously
defending its position, the ambitious independent group
“Buchty a loutky” (Buns and Puppets) and Continuo Theatre,
base of their repertoire primarily on an adult audience. Buchty
a loutky, as they show in their most recent productions
Gilgamesh I and II, tend rather towards intimate performances,
whilst Continuo inclines towards street theatre in the widest
sense of the word. Other productions by independent groups
are a challenge and an inspiration for professional puppet
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PUPPETS IN BOHEMIA
Gilgamesh I and II / Buchty a loutky, 2001 / Conception and music
Tomáš Procházka / Set design and puppets Renata Pavlíčková
>Photos Jaroslav Prokop
theatres: the already mentioned Theatre of the Forman
Brothers, the Kvelb Theatre from České Budějovice,
established three years ago and orienting also towards street
production, the attractive one-man show by the South
Bohemian puppeteer Vítězslav Marčík. An exceptional
phenomenon in this spectrum is the visual theatre by the
sculptor and painter Petr Nikl bringing to the Czech puppet
theatre an unanticipated form of dadaist-surrealist production,
both in his own performances of Nest of Dreams in the Prague
Rudolfinum Gallery and in joint projects with Jana Svobodová
and the husband and wife musicians, the Havels, for the Prague
stage of the Archa Theatre – In the Mirror, Behind the Mirror,
Shabby Dreams.
Since 1991 the Czech professional puppet theatre has had an
annual confrontation, “Flight over the Puppet Nest”, with the
most striking productions from amateur companies. Since 1997
it has awarded the ERIK Prize for the best production of the
year; in 2001 it went to the young company DNO from Hradec
Králové for Variations on the Famous Theme of Cyrano.
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The Alfréd Radok Awards 2001
Awarded 26. 4. 2002 in the National Theatre in Prague, based on the voting
of Czech theatre critics in the journal Svět a divadlo (World and Theatre):
Production of the Year 2001
Alban Berg: Wozzeck, directed by David Radok, conductor Elgar Howarth, co-production of the National Theatre in Prague
and the Gőteborg Opera
Best Actress of the Year 2001
Marie Málková – Madeleine (Carrière: La Terasse, directed by Jiří Pokorný, Divadlo Na zábradlí [Theatre on the Balustrade])
Best Actor of the Year 2001
•David Prachař – Faustus (Marlowe: The Tragical History of Dr Faustus, directed by Michal Dočekal, Divadlo Komedie
[Comedy Theatre])
Theatre of the Year 2001
Klicperovo divadlo [Klicpera Theatre], Hradec Králové
Play of the Year 2001 (award made to the first production)
Petr Zelenka: Příběhy obyčejného šílenství ([Tales of Common Insanity], directed by Petr Zelenka, Dejvické divadlo [Dejvice
Theatre])
Scenography of the Year 2001
Petr Matásek – set (The Tragical History of Dr Faustus, directed by Michal Dočekal, Divadlo Komedie [Comedy Theatre])
Music of the Year 2001
Petr Ulrych (Ulrych – Moša: Koločava, directed by Stanislav Moša, Městské divadlo [Municipal Theatre] Brno)
Talent of the Year 2001
Miroslav Krobot – actor
Alfréd Radok Award for an original play (chosen in anonymous competition), awarded by an expert jury
1st Prize – not awarded
2nd Prize - Miroslav Bambušek: Písek [Sand]
Roman Olekšák: Neha [Tenderness]
Iva Volánková: Stísněni [Depressed]
3rd Prize – not awarded
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Finalists in the Competition for
the Alfréd Radok Award 2001
Miroslav Bambušek: Písek (Sand)
3 women, 4 men,
The fates of a typical Czech married couple Richard and
Jaruš, of the American millionairess Claudia, and of the war
criminal from Yugoslavia Mr. Ratko and his son Marko
intertwine on a beach in the Canary Isles. The play is inspired
by “cool” drama and at the same time lays heavy emphasis on
atmosphere and symbols of the elements – sea and sand. The
text embraces motifs of caricature and satire, of open violence
and of eroticism. The moves of the complicated action are Mr.
Ratko and Marko, who gradually murder Jaruš, Richard and
Claudia, until eventually they themselves seek death and
oblivion in the waves of the sea.
The play exists in a Czech and in a Czech-English-Serbian
version.
(2nd Prize)
connivance of his own daughter, with whom he is sleeping.
Hugo eventually kills his sister, exhumes his mother, and chops
off his own hand, and from these three types of meat prepares
a meal for his father (both corpses are hanging from a tree in
the background). At the end in a fit of madness (a progressive
disease from Africa) he challenges his father to kill him. The
author uses very utilitarian language and a style on the border
of “coolness” and the drama of Jean Genet. Amongst the merits
of the play are a well-established atmosphere around
Hugo’s progressive madness.
Jaroslava Justová: Na tenkém ledu (On Thin Ice)
2 women, 4 men
A detective play with a touch of psychology. Kamil Marek
has an amorous relationship with Helena, his brother’s wife.
Helena dies and it turns out she has been murdered. The
Jakub Fabel: Nebe, peklo, ráj
investigation is completed by the psychological reflections of
(Heaven, Hell, Paradise)
Kamil Marek. Eventually it turns out that the murderer was
Kamil’s wife Marta. In the closing monologue Kamil Marek
1 woman, 1 man
comes to the opinion that he really “killed” Helena and he will
The leader of an unnamed political party enters a public forever – as a punishment – live with his wife, the real offender.
convenience and discovers he has no money on him. This is
obviously not going to satisfy the attendant, who decides she
will not allow the politician to leave the cubicle. The situation Marcel Kabát: Plovoucí podlahy
is sharpened by the fact that the party leader is travelling to the (Floating Floors)
party congress, where he is standing again for leadership. This
conversational comedy is founded on an encounter between
3 women, 3 men
the “voice of the people” and a politician somewhat removed
Eva, just sixty, discovers in the course of her birthday that
from reality. The author has a command of both genre and style everything she has been striving for all her life – at the price of
as well as of surprise, when at the end the attendant leaves to personal compromises and compromises with the political
check the chairman’s jacket where allegedly he has some regime – is collapsing. A symbol of her striving is the luxurious
change, and returns to find the locked cubicle empty.
apartment which she has tried to hang on to for her son Jirka.
He, however, has his own family and almost hates Eva for her
compromises. In order to hold on to the apartment, a long time
Petr Cholt: Hugo
ago she renounced her husband, an emigrant, and became
involved with the opportunist Dr. Janeček. She recapitulates
her life and only once takes the opportunity to answer
2 women, 2 men, chorus
The play takes place in a French gipsy ghetto to which Hugo otherwise than “at that time”. In the end she loses the
returns from Africa, to find his white step-father and sister. He apartment and a new tenant appears, her former husband. An
ascertains that his father killed his mother with the mute almost traditional conversation piece.
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Finalists in the Competition for
the Alfréd Radok Award 2001
Roman Olekšák: Neha (Tenderness)
2 women, 3 men
In a deserted, clearly post-apocalyptic landscape lives
a family of parents and children. It seems they are the last
people in the world. Everything civilisation achieved has
disappeared and they live a primitive way of life. One day,
things from the past begin to appear on the tree where the
children play: a saucepan, a comb, a mirror and a book. The
tree is a variation of the Tree of Knowledge, because it is
through the book that the children realise their parents know
how to lie (when they try to hide from them that they know
how to read, in order to protect themselves from memories of
the past). This first sin leads eventually to murder when the
children kill the Old Man, who came “from nowhere” and their
father. Only the mother remains with the children who, settled
on their favourite branch, plan in quite an adult way their
common future, counting especially on maintaining the family
nd
line and thus mankind. A model absurd play.
(2 Prize)
Zdeněk Palusga: Císařovna Rézi
(Empress Rézi)
6 women, 6 men
An apocryphal comedy in a light conversational tone from
the time of Maria Theresa’s reign. A relatively simple but
skilfully constructed plot, with the help of which the author
demonstrates “principles of power and delight” at the imperial
court. Apart from showing “The Lord of the World in
a dressing-gown” it also develops a side-plot about the possible
illegitimate child Carlo Goldoni.
Richard Slanina: Už jsem vám říkal ten fór?
(Have I Told You This Joke Already?)
7 women, 13 men
A farce, even crazy comedy, set in a hospital to which the
Bridegroom is brought dressed ready for the wedding
ceremony, to be equipped with the consequences of too
boisterous a stag night. The author skilfully makes use of time-
honoured gags and procedures of the selected genre such as are
the most varied confusions, errors, slips of the tongue and
spoonerisms. There even appear small satirical motifs, of course
in the intentions of the somewhat communal spirit of the text as
a whole.
Oldřich Vlček:
Jeruzalém, miesto o které se bojuje (Jerusalem,
the City for which one Fights)
10 women , 22 men
A historical play reminiscent in its structure of the historical
drama of the Czech National Revival. The main line of action
describes the efforts of the ascetic and preacher Milíč to build
a house called Jerusalem for the correction of fallen women in
the heart of the centre of all sin and fornication – Prague at the
end of the 14th century. Milíč’s effort is suspicious and he runs
into difficulties not only with the representatives of the “state
authorities” but even his subordinate. Milíč builds his house, but
thanks to intrigues and to human nature tending more towards
sin than to humility and asceticism, the whole project eventually
goes bankrupt. The second line of action is taken up by the fate
of Bára, Milíč’s relation, who is sent to him from the country but
who mysteriously gets lost. It turns out that Bára is now the
Princess, the most sought-after and at the same time most
devious of the prostitutes, who holds firmly to her aim – money.
Iva Volánková: Stísněni (Depressed)
5 women, 7 men
A poetic, even dreamlike drama which takes place on the
staircase of a house, a house “which remembers”. The play does
not have an unambiguous story or plot, it is rather a sequence
of scenes – memories of the past and present inhabitants of the
house on whose staircase not only the memories but also the
guilts and hopes push to the surface. Lines are repeated like
refrains in the play (often with different speakers), motifs
interpenetrate, emphasis is laid on atmosphere and poetic
language. The emphasis on “the woman’s angle” is clear, and
characteristic for Volánková.
(2nd Prize)
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Czech Theatres in 2001: Basic Statistical Data
In the Czech Republic last year, there were 52 repertory
theatres with their own companies of various types in
operation (14 of these were multi-ensembles, the basic model
being the coexistence of opera, drama and ballet companies)
that had regular funding allocated from local budgets (43
theatres) and from federal budget (9 theatres). Another 36
standing stages without their own companies were also
financed from public resources (local budgets).
A total of 184 theatres and subjects dedicated to the
performing arts (57 of these without their own company, and
36 without their own stage) were regularly and systematically
active in the theatre life in the Czech Republic during the year
2001. 221 theatre stages were in operation, offering a capacity
of 58,306 seats. A total of 8,432 people were employed in all of
these subjects – of which 3,566 were artistic.
1,976 titles were in the repertoire, and 2,353 productions
were produced (of which 733 were premières). In total, 221
new Czech titles were produced. 23,950 performances took
place in the Czech Republic, attracting over 6 million visitors
(the average percent of visitors was 81). Czech theatre
ensembles played 861 performances abroad.
Almost 2 billion crowns were granted from the public
sources to support theatrical activities.
The Transformation of Prague Theatres
The City of Prague has decided to launch a process of
transformation of the Prague theatre network, whose form,
tradition and continuity is for the most part determined by
repertory theatres managed, operated and financed directly by
the city. Before initiating this process they asked the Theatre
Institute in Prague to make an analysis of the conditions of
transformation. Comprehensive material emerged detailing the
historical development of Prague theatre and the development
of its legal and organisational order. It provided basic statistical
information and a description of existing kinds and regimes of
public funding of theatres, including the development of grant
systems.
This analysis defined the Prague theatre network as
a cultural service to the public. It designed a basic concept for
the capital city’s theatre policy, including its aims, principles,
values and priorities. It also prepared the basis of a new grant
system as the precondition of successful transformation. The
analysis derives from a comparison of theatre systems
abroad, including their management and funding. It devotes
itself exhaustively to all the legal and economic aspects of
transformation and finally proposes concrete measures for
a first step to be taken for three theatres: the Činoherní klub
Praha (Drama Club Prague), Divadlo Archa (Archa Theatre)
and Divadlo Semafor (Semafor Theatre). The Divadlo
Komedie (Comedy Theatre) will be added to these during the
first year.
One fundamental change is that of legal subjectivity: the
theatres will cease to be beneficiaries of the city (a relic of
socialist legislation) and become not-for-profit organisations or
limited liability companies. The initiation of the transformation
is an open process which will be evaluated after two seasons
and modified as necessary.
New Books from the Theatre Institute
Dalibor Tureček: The Unity Full
of Contradictions (The German-language
contexts of drama of the National Revival)
Edice České divadlo, Divadelní ústav (Theatre Institute),
Prague 2001
The relationship of the Czech literary and theatrical revival
to German-language drama and theatre is an accepted
historical fact. However, for a long time after World War II the
theme remained on the fringe of research – primarily for
ideological reasons. Dalibor Tureček, Professor of Czech
Literature at the University of South Bohemia in České
Budějovice, has engaged himself in the history of the Czech
literary revival, in the course of which he has concentrated on
Czech-German and Czech-Austrian cultural relationships. His
comparatist monograph focuses on the relationship between
the Czech dramatic revival and popular dramatic production
in the German language at the turn of the 18th and 19th
centuries. It derives from reception aesthetics stimuli, and
concentrates on conventional production of that time, whose
influence previously, from the normative point of view in
aesthetics, was mainly directed at the “high” genres and
undervalued in literary history. The author follows the Czech
reception of popular authors of the Viennese folk theatre
(Raimund, Nestroy) and in particular the German theatre
(Kotzebue, Raupach). He analyses the domestic
transformation of typical genres (plays about social mobility,
local farces, sentimental drama) and in particular the
difference in their reception in Vienna and in Prague. For
example, guest productions of Raimund in Prague enable
a comparison between Prague and Viennese receptions of his
performances. The difference between them shows the
specific nature both of Prague German theatre and of Czech
theatre in its formative stages. – The author does not see the
typical texts of the conventional dramas he analyses as static,
once-for-all aesthetically-defined objects, but examines them
in all their dynamic inconsistency, showing how antithetical
cultural models meet in them. – He thus succeeds in newly
showing the essence and value of such cultural phenomena in
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New Books from the Theatre Institute
Czech culture as subjective Romanticism and Biedermeier,
represented above all by the phenomenon of J. K. Tyl. In many
cases his work brings a new angle on the period followed,
even a considerable amount of new information about
essential cultural and historical issues such as the relationship
between Biedermeier and Romanticism, between drama in the
theatre and drama in books, between “low” and “high” theatre
production; but of course, first place is given to the issue –
today once more highly topical – of Czech-German
coexistence.
Miroslav Šulc:
Chronicle of Czech Operetta
This book gives a detailed picture of the development of
operetta and operetta theatres in Bohemia and Moravia from
their beginnings in the 1860s to the start of the 1960s. Part of the
book is a comprehensive Calendar, putting together an
overview of operetta events, especially information about
nearly all operetta premieres in Czech theatres (data,
production teams, chief roles and where possible press
reports).
Visegrad Drama 1 – Weddings
The book is a result of the collaboration of four theatre
institutes from four Central European countries.
The idea of a joint edition of Visegrad drama began at
meeting of theatre institute and museum staff from the
Visegrad countries. They agreed one institution would promote
and publish one volume of this edition annualy, finally
resulting in four books with 16 dramas from the Visegrad Four.
The common language would be English.
The first volume of Visegrad drama contains four plays from
the turn of the nineteenth century to the1920s. They are related
by an important event in human life – a wedding. The book
contains the Czech (or more precisely Moravian) play Maryša
by the Mrštík brothers, the Polish drama The Wedding by
Stanislaw Wyspianski, the Slovak play Snowdrifts by Vladimír
Hurban Vladimírov and the Hungarian play The Glass Slipper
by Ferenc Molnár.
The most famous Czech classical play Maryša (1894) by
Alois and Vilém Mrštík is presented here for the first time in
the English translation by Barbara Day. As a commentary on
the play and its modern meanings the essay Interpreting
Maryša by Jan Grossman, one of the leading figures of Czech
theatre of the 20th century, is attached.
Internet Pages on the Theme of Theatre
Over the last year several Czech internet pages on a theatrical
theme have been made accessible in an English version. The
first, a new version of The Information Centre of Czech
Theatre on the Internet (http://www.theatre.cz), run by the
Czech Theatre Institute, was launched in spring of last year. Its
task is to provide basic information on Czech theatre. The visitor
to the pages can acquire a brief overview of the history of Czech
theatre (under the rubric History). Treated in detail are the
1990s and some specific phenomenon (theatre of the hearing
impaired, theatre for children and youth, puppet journals). The
section News and Information provides topical information
about activities in the Czech theatre world, international
programmes in preparation (a Canadian season, the Visegrad
drama project, the Prague Quadrennial) and so on. Also
available are the latest numbers of the journal Czech Theatre in
PDF format. Some practical pages consist of the theatre address
book (c. 1800 contacts to theatres and their permanent staff,
theatre festivals, institutions, schools, agencies and journals),
regularly updated, together with a database of theatre references
(Links) and programmes of the Czech theatres.
The internet Presentation of the Theatre Institute
(http://institute.theatre.cz) has also been available from
March of this year. The pages provide, apart from the
characteristics of individual departments, their work, services
and projects, information about books published by the
Theatre Institute in English, contacts to individual employees
and an on-line catalogue of the library of the Theatre Institute
(more than 110,000 volumes) and a Czech theatre
bibliography (more than 77,000 references). One of the
departments of the Theatre Institute is the bookshop
Prospero (the only specialist theatre bookshop in the Czech
Republic), which in its internet bookshop (http://www.
divadlo. cz/prospero), available also in an English version,
offers everything published in Czech on the theatre. It also
arranges the purchase and sale of books to foreign customers.
Around 1,800 titles are at present on offer.
Newly available are also the English versions of two theatre
journals:
Divadelní revue (http://www.divadlo.cz/revue/english)
and Loutkář (http://www.divadlo.cz/loutkar/english). Both
of them provide, as well as basic information and contacts to
the editor, detailed English resumés of individual numbers –
Divadelní revue from 2001, Loutkář from number 5/1999.
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Cultural Exchange: Czech Republic and Canada
In a bold attempt to present Czech theatre abroad, the
Theatre Institute has embarked on the largest cultural
exchange project with several festival organizers and
presenters from the Czech Republic and Canada.
During the Six Stages Festival in Toronto in February 2001,
a small group of individuals from the Czech performing arts
field, including Ondřej Černý (Theatre Institute in Prague),
Ondřej Hrab (Archa Theatre), Tatjana Langášková (Konfrontace
Festival of New Dance) and Pavla Petrová (Ministry of Culture –
Library and Performing Arts), had the opportunity to witness
projects from the contemporary Canadian performing arts
scene. Over the course of the year, the organizers began
selecting Canadian theatre, dance and multimedia projects to
present in Prague during the Canadian Season in Prague in the
fall 2002. Venues used for the Season include the Archa
Theatre, the State Opera, the Duncan Centre and the festival site
of the Four + Four Days in Motion, the annual festival known for
hosting its activities in non-theatre spaces.
In 2003, the reciprocal project Czech Season in Canada will
take place in Canada, where Canadian presenters will have the
opportunity of presenting their selection of contemporary
Czech artists. Canadian presenters have already selected some
Czech productions, and already scheduled to perform are The
Collector by SM.Art Productions with David Matásek and Linda
Rybová, the dance creation Venus with a Rubik’s Cube by
young Czech dancer/choreographer Kristýna Lhotáková and
musician Ladislav Soukup, and the Naive Theatre of Liberec
with their puppet theatre productions of Ali Baba and the Forty
Thieves and When Little Jacob Was Visiting Markyta. Other
productions are still being considered for a Canadian tour.
More information will be available in the next issue of Czech
Theatre Magazine.
You can find complete information about the Canadian
Season in Prague on the website www.kanadska-sezona.cz.
Taneční zóna (Dance Zone)
Taneční zóna – a review of contemporary
dance which has for more than five years
devoted itself to trends in contemporary
dance, physical theatre and transverse genres
– began this year to be published in two
languages: Czech and English. This has made it easier for it to
communicate with foreign devotees, and they with it. The
journal comes out quarterly and publishes reflections about
dance, written from many points of view in different fields,
genres and history, as well as reviews of the youngest, budding
generation of choreographers. Taneční zóna reflects dance as
an expression of symbolic thinking and emphasises the
spirituality present even under a contemporary deposit of
naturalism and abstraction.
NV
NotebookNotebook
31.7.2002 15:36
Stránka 1
Czech Theatre 18
obálka#18?advanced*

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