Barbara Day

Trial by Theatre

Published by Charles University,

Karolinum Press

Ovocný trh 5/560, Prague 1, Czech Republic

Cover and graphic design by Jan Šerých

Typesetting by Karolinum Press

First edition

Part of the Dramatica Series

© Karolinum Press, 2019

Text © Barbara Day, 2019

Photography © Barbara Day; Miroslav Hák; Jaroslav Kořán; Jaroslav Krejčí;

Petr Mazanec / ČTK; Vilém Sochůrek / ATI; Jaromír Svoboda. 2019

Images courtesy of: the Arts and Theatre Institute; the City of Brno

Archives; the Czech News Agency; the Museum of Czech Literature;

the Theatre on a String archives; Wikimedia Commons

The cover photograph is of Otomar Krejča’s production of Romeo and Juliet at the National Theatre, 1963.

Photo by Jaromír Svoboda (courtesy of the photographer)

Frontispiece photograph is of Peter Scherhaufer’s production of Chameleon, 1984. Photo by Jaroslav Krejčí

(courtesy of the photographer)

Peer reviewed by Veronika Ambros (Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto) and Martin Pšenička

(Theatre Studies, Charles University)

ISBN 978-80-246-4068-6 (epub)

ISBN 978-80-246-4069-3 (mobi)

ISBN 978-80-246-3922-2 (pdf)

ISBN 978-80-246-3953-6 (print)

CONTENTS

1. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

2. PREFACE

3. INTRODUCTION

4. PROLOGUE

5. I BOHEMIA RESURGENT

6. National Awakening

7. National Theatre

8. Arenas and Tingle Tangle, Cafés Chantants, and Cabaret

9. Turn of the Century

10. II INDEPENDENCE: THE FOUNDING AND FALL OF THE FIRST REPUBLIC

11. In the New Republic

12. Devětsil and the Avant-Garde

13. “The Daring Threesome”: Honzl, Frejka, E. F. Burian

14. Jindřich Honzl and the Dědrasbor

15. Jiří Frejka and Constructivism

16. Honzl, Frejka, and the Liberated Theatre

17. Frejka and the Theatre Dada

18. E. F. Burian and the Voiceband

19. Voskovec, Werich, and the Liberated Theatre

20. Jaroslav Ježek and the Jazz Revue

21. The Turn of the Decade

22. The Prague Structuralists

23. Frejka at the National Theatre

24. E. F. Burian and Déčko

25. The Fettered Theatre

26. III UNDER THE PROTECTORATE

27. E. F. Burian and the Gestapo

28. The Little Theatre for 99 and Occupied Prague

29. Terezín and the Concentration Camps

30. IV LIBERATION, VICTORIOUS FEBRUARY, AND WHAT BECAME OF THE AVANT-GARDE

31. Brief Window: 1945–1948

32. Socialist Realism

33. The Daring Threesome and the Thief of Happiness

34. After Stalin

35. V THE GOLDEN SIXTIES

36. Spring Awakening

37. Akord Club, Reduta, and the Text-Appeal

38. Otomar Krejča at the National Theatre

39. Laterna magika

40. The Theatre on the Balustrade

41. Founding of the Theatre on the Balustrade

42. Ivan Vyskočil at the Theatre on the Balustrade

43. Jan Grossman at the Theatre on the Balustrade

44. No Heroes Live in Thebes with Otomar Krejča

45. The Invention of the Grenoble

46. Václav Havel’s The Garden Party

47. Ubu Roi, Beckett, and Ionesco

48. Havel’s The Memorandum

49. Grossman’s The Trial, and the End of an Era

50. The State Theatre Studio (Státní divadelní studio) and Other Small Stages

51. Origin of the State Theatre Studio

52. Suchý, Šlitr, and Semafor

53. Paravan

54. The Drama Club (Činoherní klub)

55. Maringotka

56. The Theatre of Jára da Cimrman

57. Krejča at the Theatre Beyond the Gate

58. Rokoko

59. Viola

60. Orfeus

61. Evening Brno (Večerní Brno)

62. 1968

63. VI “NORMALISATION”

64. The Theatre on the Balustrade and What Became of Jan Grossman

65. The Theatre Beyond the Gate and What Became of Otomar Krejča

66. The Fates of Macháček, Radok, and Schorm

67. Semafor, Drama Club, and the End of the State Theatre Studio

68. Václav Havel, Charter 77, and the Anti-Charter

69. Irregular Dramaturgy

70. Theatre [Goose] on a String

71. HaDivadlo (Theatre of the Haná Region)

72. Between Dog and Wolf

73. VII THE THEATRE AND THE VELVET REVOLUTION

74. DRAMATIS PERSONAE

75. TITLES OF CZECH AND SLOVAK PLAYS, OPERAS AND FILMS

76. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

77. NOTES

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Chameleon by Ludvík Kundera, Petr Oslzlý, and Miloš Štědron, directed by Peter Scherhaufer (frontispiece)

The National Theatre in Prague (37)

Milča Mayerová ín Vitězslav Nezval’s Abeceda (57)

The Czech edition of Alexander Tairov’s Notes of a Director (61)

Cirkus Dandin by Molière, directed by Jiří Frejka (64)

The Poet and the Women by Aristophanes, directed by Jiří Frejka (64)

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, directed by Jiří Frejka (77)

Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind, directed by E. F. Burian (82)

May by Karel Hynek Mácha, dramatised and directed by E. F. Burian (83)

Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich in Caesar, directed by Jindřich Honzl (85)

The Opening page of Jan Patočka’s essay on Ivan Vyskočil from the journal Divadlo (124)

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, directed by Otomar Krejča (133)

The End of Shrovetide by Josef Topol, directed by Otomar Krejča (134)

the Theatre on the Balustrade, 1966 (138)

Cover of the journal Divadlo, January 1964 (151)

The Memorandum by Václav Havel, directed by Jan Grossman (167)

The Trial by Franz Kafka, dramatised and directed by Jan Grossman (169)

Jiří Šlitr and Jiří Suchý in Jonáš a tingtangl (181)

Brno’s House of Art (231)

Various ground plans for Theatre on a String productions (234–235)

Tales of the Long Nose by Edward Lear, dramatised and directed by Eva Tálská (239)

Res Publica in the Realist Theatre of Zdeněk Nejedlý (255)

Founding of the Civic Forum in the Drama Club (259)

PREFACE

In the country now called the Czech Republic, the 1960s are known nostalgically as the Zlatá šedesátá, the “Golden Sixties.” For a quarter of a century, Czechoslovakia had been shrouded in Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism, but seemed in that decade to be emerging into a time of freedom. Czechs were looking forward to speaking and behaving as they wished, without fear of betrayal. The political hopes of the period, summed up in the phrase “Socialism with a human face,” proved an illusion. But the Prague Spring itself was not; the decade of the sixties really was a time when literature and the arts flourished. Freedom of speech culminated in the summer of ’68, when censorship was abolished.

I was fortunate enough to be there. Intrigued by meetings with young Slovaks and Czechs in Italy and France,[*] I found a way to cross the Iron Curtain by means of the bilateral cultural exchange programme administered by the British Council. In October 1965 I registered in the Drama Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts (DAMU). I was overwhelmed—by the beauty of Prague, by the eagerness of new acquaintances to introduce me to their culture. Everyone went to the theatre, it seemed, and moreover had connections to someone working in it. My most important discovery was the Theatre on the Balustrade (Divadlo Na zábradlí); at first Ladislav Fialka’s mime company, whose production Fools (1965) had a poetry and intensity I had never experienced in the British theatre. Then I met the drama company, led by the theatre director Jan Grossman with his close colleague, the playwright Václav Havel—Czechoslovakia’s future president. Within weeks I had seen Havel’s first plays in their original productions,[*] as well as Jan Grossman’s iconic Ubu Roi (1964). In May 1966 I was watching the rehearsals for Grossman’s dramatisation of Kafka’s The Trial.

As a fresh graduate from Manchester University’s department of drama, I was accustomed to the hierarchy of English theatre. But in my discovery of the Czech theatre, I found myself running neck and neck with luminaries of the British theatre: Peter Brook, Martin Esslin, Kenneth Tynan, Peter Daubeny… In the spring of 1967 and 1968, the Theatre on the Balustrade was a highlight of London’s World Theatre Season; I was there, employed in an undefined role backstage. In June 1968 I returned to Prague hoping to negotiate a more defined role—until we were woken before dawn one August morning by the thunder of Soviet aircraft.[†]

Over the next few years I watched from a distance the gradual demolition of the society that had so engaged me. The country entered its third phase of totalitarianism. The lowest point came in 1979, with the imprisonment of the playwright who, in 1966, had lent me the first English translations of his plays: Václav Havel. I realised that not only had the whole world of the 1960s disappeared and its playwrights, directors, and dramaturges been dismissed, expelled, or otherwise silenced, but that the period could not be written about at all, that its names and activities were being erased from history. In an unserious moment I observed that the ban could not apply to me; I was beyond the jurisdiction of President Husák’s “Normalisation.” The observation was taken seriously by the scholar and expert in Russian theatre, Edward Braun; in 1980 I was accepted for postgraduate study at Bristol University, researching the history of the Theatre on the Balustrade and the small stages of the 1960s.

On my return to Prague in 1982, I was registered in the Department of Theatre Studies of the Arts Faculty of Charles University. A remorseless purge had been operating in the faculty throughout the 1970s; a process that had involved not simply the abolition of departments and the dismissals of academic staff, but long drawn-out appeals, examinations, justifications, and assessments followed by constant checks, in an effort to ensure the faculty’s loyalty to the regime.[‡] In retrospect, I appreciate all the more the assistance I was given by my ironical consultant, the theatre historian Milan Lukeš, and by those he suggested I should met. At the same time, I sought out my old contacts; knowing now what humiliations these practitioners and scholars had suffered and the risks they still ran, I look back with amazement at the willingness with which archives and memories were opened. I remember a visit to a windowless archive where the theatre historian Jindřich Černý introduced me to the daughter of the philosopher Jan Patočka; the lilac-scented, crumbling Sova Mills on Kampa Island, where I interviewed the theatre historian Vladimír Just; an enigmatic summons from the head of the Theatre Institute, Eva Soukupová; and long conversations with Jan Grossman in his apartment on the Vltava embankment. Later, I brought copies of articles I had written for the British press to Karel Král in the documentation department of the Theatre Institute; and met Anna Freimanová, who was secretly working on the samizdat journal O divadle, in the corridors of the National Museum’s theatre department, where she was officially employed. Then, as I went around Prague one day in spring 1984, I was quietly informed by three different people that Havel had been taken from prison to hospital. I became increasingly aware of solidarity in theatre circles, and a network of connections functioning below the surface.

Not all my research was on the decade of the 1960s. I became fascinated by Czech theatre history, especially the nineteenth-century National Awakening and the interwar avant-garde. Above all, I discovered that theatre under “Normalisation” was not the barren land it seemed from a distance, but was full of fresh growth that subtly camouflaged itself to avoid attention from the authorities. Most dynamic of all, commended to me immediately on my arrival by Jan Grossman and by Milan Lukeš, was the Brno Theatre on a String (Divadlo na provázku). Its impact was similar to that of the Balustrade Theatre twenty years earlier, but this time my role was to bring the theatre to England. With the cooperation of Bristol University and many others, in a festival held during one of the low points of the Cold War (1985), audiences were cheering not only Theatre on a String but also the dance theatre Chorea Bohemica, the jazz musician Jiří Stivín, and other high points of Czech culture. Through the dramaturge Petr Oslzlý, the driving force behind Theatre on a String, I became involved with the “underground seminars”; that is another story, told in The Velvet Philosophers (1999), but I thank Roger Scruton, my colleague then, for his encouragement with the present book.

Over the years I have many people to thank: for the original dissertation, Edward Braun and Bristol University, and the British Academy, which helped to fund my research; also the bilateral exchange programme administered by the British Council, which made longer visits to Czechoslovakia possible; and my examiners, J. P. Stern of Cambridge and Robert Porter of Bristol. Robert Pynsent and David Short of London University and James Naughton of Oxford University were generous with their time and knowledge. Simon Trussler published a long essay in New Theatre Quarterly (August 1986), following which Nick Hern commissioned Czech Plays (Nick Hern Books, 1991).

Among my Czech teachers and friends, I remember with especial gratitude Karel Brušák of Cambridge University and Jan Grossman. Jitka Martin, Petr Oslzlý, and Richard Weber were also immensely important. Close behind came Oldřich Černý, Lída Engelová, Jiří Hanák, Antonín Jelínek, Karel Král, Zuzana Kočová, and Zdenka Kratochvílová. Those who gave much help when I was researching the original dissertation included Jan Burian, František Černý, Jindřich Černý, Drahomíra Fialková, Jarmila Gabrielová, Vladimír Just, Jakub Korčák, Otomar Krejča, Milan Lukeš, Lída Myšáková-Paulová, Bořivoj Srba, Jiří Suchý, Milena Tomíšková, and Ivan Vyskočil. I also interviewed or corresponded with Jiří Daněk, Jan Dušek, Ladislav Fialka, Václav Havel, Miroslav Horníček, Václav Hudeček, Jan Hyvnar, Karel Jernek, Jaromír Kazda, Jan Kopecký, Karel Kraus, Ivan Kyncl, Oldřich Lipský, Harry Macourek, Miloš Macourek, Luboš Malinovský, Zdeněk Míka, Jiří Nesvadba, Petr Pavlovský, Karel Pech, Boleslav Polívka, Zdeněk Potužil, Jan Přeučil, Petr Scherhaufer, Evald Schorm, Otakar Roubínek, Zdeněk Šikola, Josef Škvorecký, Ladislav Smoček, Zdeněk Svěrák, Ctibor Turba, Milan Uhde, Nina Vangeli, Radim Vašinka, Vladimír Vodička, and Stanislav Vyskočil. The help of the Theatre Institute has been invaluable throughout. More recently, my thanks go to Veronika Ambros, Marie Boková, Jan Dvořák, Anna Freimanová, Vlasta Gallerová, Jaroslav Krejčí (photographer), Julek Neumann, Jana Patočková, Ladislava Petišková, Jitka Sloupová, and Eva Šormová. Finally, I want to thank Martin Pšenička for his encouragement and perseverance in seeing this project through from 2014.

I am grateful to the students on the Arts and Social Change program of SIT Study Abroad, Czech Republic, and Academic Director Sarah Brock, and to the students on the international programme at DAMU, Dean Doubravka Svobodová and Vice Dean Marek Bečka, for giving me the chance to relive this story of Czech theatre. At the final stage, I turn again to the Department of Theatre Studies of the Arts Faculty of Charles University Prague and the Karolinum Press, and thank them for enabling this publication.

Barbara Day

June 2018

_________________________

[*]This was in 1963 and 1964, when travel restrictions began to ease; students from the Bratislava Academy of Performing Arts (Vysoká škola múzických umení, VŠMU) brought Pavel Kohout’s musical version of Around the World in 80 Days to Parma’s 11th Festival Internazionale del Teatro Universitario. The student group included the future stars of Czechoslovak theatre, Emília Vášáryová and Marián Labuda.

[*]The Garden Party (1963) and The Memorandum (1965).

[†]AN-12s carrying tanks.

[‡]In the early part of this century, this operation was the subject of research project KSČ na FF UK 1969–1989 (The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia at the Arts Faculty of Charles University 1969–1989) funded by Charles University, the Academy of Sciences, and the Czech Science Foundation. The resulting literature can be found in the Bibliography.

INTRODUCTION

The past is never far away in Central Europe, and this book is for those interested in the ethical and cultural resistance to the destructive ideologies of the twentieth century. Trial by Theatre: Reports on Czech Drama is not concerned with theatre alone; nor is it intended as a comprehensive history of the Czech theatre. It is rather an exploration of why the theatre is central to the social and political history of the Czech lands (Bohemia and Moravia). Czech theatre, described by the historian Jarka Burian as the “Reflector and Conscience of a Nation,” is neither peripheral nor elitist, but an essential part of daily culture. Historically, it is identified with the spirit of the nation, and with the revival of its language. It is about the power of the creative spirit and its engagement with the deadly forces of totalitarianism.

Trial by Theatre is a revision and completion of my dissertation The Theatre on the Balustrade of Prague and the Small Stage Tradition in Czechoslovakia (1986). I worked on this during the years of “Normalisation,” to keep alive the memory of the small stages that had played a critical role in the society and politics of the 1960s. I followed threads leading back to the Czech “National Awakening” in the Habsburg Empire. In the Bohemian lands, the theatre’s status and reputation enabled its practitioners to develop visual, linguistic, and dramatic features that they used to promote national objectives. The pressures of history led to their constant reinvention and redeployment at times of social and political crisis. Between the wars, the Prague Structuralists created a laboratory for the analysis of theatre. During the Nazi occupation, theatre became a refuge. The intense theatrical creativity of the 1960s was partly due to the ideological barriers that forced intellectuals out of literature and academia. Similarly, the theatre of the 1980s owed much of its vitality to the influence of personalities banned from public life after the Soviet invasion of 1968. It was, as it turned out in 1989, the theatre that shaped the Velvet Revolution. The historical examples I have chosen often come from the “poor theatre” (in Jerzy Grotowski’s sense) rather than from the classic stage. The deeper I went, the more I realised how much more there is to discover. I do not consider this book to be a definitive text, but a handbook for further exploration.

The prologue reports on a debate organised by the journal Divadlo (Theatre) in November 1968, three months after the Soviet invasion. The theatre directors, playwrights, dramaturges, and critics involved were aware of how the theatre could influence the emotions and behaviour of the public, and of their own responsibility in this context. Conscious that they were standing at a historic moment, they reflected on the emotional power of history, and on how it had been used and misused. Since they invoked the National Awakening, I have made this the starting point of my narrative. In the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth century, two theatre cultures ran side by side: the mainstream German-language theatre and its makeshift country cousin, the Czech-language theatre, always translating, improvising, complaining, shouldering its way onto the stage. The roots of theatre in the Bohemian Crown Lands, however, reach deeper. Maybe they took hold in the first century AD when the Celtic Boii settled at the crossroads of Europe, or perhaps five centuries later with the arrival of the Slavs. Surrounded on three sides by Germanic tribes, the Czechs took possession of a bowl of the most fertile and picturesque territory in Europe. Among the legends later dramatised are those of Princess Libuše, prophet of the greatness of Prague. The martyrdom of Jan Hus in 1415 established him as a national hero, while the military defeat of 1620 (the Battle of the White Mountain) was followed by the executions of the Czech aristocracy and the emigration of the Protestant intelligentsia. The next three hundred years, controversially denoted an “age of darkness,” were marked by re-catholicisation and the dominance of German as the language of education and administration. This formed a historical context in which an emotional yet practical and articulate resistance developed on several levels.

In this environment, theatre became a tool for survival in the hands of a nation that felt existentially threatened. This was when the “myth of the National Theatre” emerged—the “Golden Chapel” built out of the contributions of ordinary people. Even if one allows that most of the funding came from state sources, the myth has its own validity, and its impact on the popular attitude to theatre is recognisable today. In the nineteenth century the theatre was an essential element of Czech identity; in the twentieth it asked increasingly difficult questions, instinctively analysing and subverting any ideological programme. In its role as the conscience of the land, the theatre has been educational without being didactic, ethical without being self-righteous. Although often intensely political, it did not condemn or endorse, but invited theatregoers to decide for themselves. That is not to say it did not know right from wrong; rather, it asked theatregoers to look at right and wrong from different angles, and maybe to revise their conclusions. The audience took the questions home, or debated them there and then in the theatre foyer.

Excerpt from the e-book