LEAVING IMPOSSIBLE Franz Kafka II („Questioning“ of Václav Havel) Jana Patočková: Leaving: A Tale Thought Out Thoroughly to The End Martin J.Švejda: A Very Cherry Lear Martin Bernátek: An Unembarrassed Change of Advisor (Leaving in Poland) Karel Král: Leave? Impossible! (Leaving in Slovakia)
DELIGHTFUL FREAKS Kim Yun-Cheol: Two Delights From The Czech Theatre Hrvoje Ivanković: Delicacies for Export Jiří Černý: An Opera Trial with Milada Horáková Freakshow Three Times (Yann Frouin: Some Thoughts on The Freakshow, Michal Čunderle: Mistakes Without Mistakes, Karel Král: Ugliness... and Fear)
CLAMOR OF DANCE Jiří Adámek: Somewhere Between Clamor and Silence (The Narrative of Today’s Individual In Handa Gote’s Trilogy) Jiří Adámek: The Spring Dance Festivities
NATION WITH HELL Michaela Mojžišová: Konwitschny’s Butterfly Mária Fekar Jenčíková: Nation As The Main Character (A Monothematic Nitra Theatre Season Dedicated to Classical Slovak Repertoire) Michaela Mojžišová: I Carry Hell Inside Me (Treliński’s Orpheus and Eurydice)
GAMES NOT ONLY ON TRURH Jakub Škorpil: The Truth Games (of documentary theatre) Jan Jiřík: Theatre in Poland/Poland in Theatre (Jarzyna, Wojcieszek, Pollesch) Jakub Škorpil: Polish Icons (Polish Showcase 2008) Marcin Kościelniak: Theatre as Game (On The Theatre of Michał Zadara)
POST-DRAMATIC DREAD Jiří Adámek: Hungarian Post-Dramatic Theatre Karel Král: 56-38: The Dread of Fun and The Fun of Dread
WAYS OF TRANSCENDENCE Jan Jiřík: Ways Within A Drama (Some Thoughts About Contemporary Polish Drama) Fighting The Ghosts (“Questioning” of Michał Walczak) Andrea Tompa: Not A Pinch of Transcendence (New Hungarian Drama)Great Reader (“Questioning” of Péter Esterházy
THE ACTORS ARE COME Milan Lukeš: Acting and Self-Presentation, Part 1 Not To Be a Carnival Girl („Questioning of Emília Vášáryová)
TRAFFICKER... AND IMPERATOR Karel Král: Shop and Swim Away! (Slovakian Hypermarket and Czech Water Ballet) Michal Čunderle: Resurrected (Vladimír Morávek’s Brothers K.) Ivan Žáček: Fire at the National
THEREMIN... AND AMERICAN INDIAN The Rockstar (Petr Zelenka Answers on Karel Král’s Questions) Jakub Škorpil: Radok Goes Beatles Viliam Klimáček: Theatre is Looking for Drama and Drama for Theatre (on Dráma 2005) On The Warpath (An Interview With Jáchym Topol)
PHAIDRA... AND NICK CARTER Rita Júlia Sebestyén: Three Journeys Into The Depth Of The Soul István L. Sándor: The Paths of Contemporary Hungarian Drama
INSPECTOR GENERAL... AND DRAGON Joanna Derkaczew: Jan Klata or The Necessity of War Ewa Wąchocka: The Strategy of Political Discourse in Contemporary Polish Theatre The Tiny Teeth of Censorship (or „The Role of Our Cultural Institutions“) PENTHESILEA... AND PROPHET ILYA Mária Jenčíková: Theatre Festival in Nitra: Word as Weapon Peter Scherhaufer: Six Wonders Of The Season (Slovak Dramatic Theatre 2005/2006)
MONTE CHRISTO... AND HERMAPHRODITE Kamila Černá: Cakes and Classicism and Tibet on Top Karel Král: The Carney In His Best Years (The Alternative According To Petr Nikl) Jack Of All Trades (An Interview With Petr Nikl)
THE ACTORS ARE GONE Nadežda Lindovská: The Confession of Dr. Husák Milan Lukeš: Acting and Self-Presentation, Part 2
BUENOS DIAS... Everybody is already in Mexico...
QUESTIONING: IVAN VYRYPAEV Theatre Has to Awaken the Soul (“Questioning” of Ivan Vyrypaev)
AND OKAY Michal Čunderle: Stavrogin Is The Devil? Radka Kunderová: A Bride Bartered On The Cheap, Or, The Tribulations Of The Czechs Searching For A Sea Of Their Own Martin Porubjak: What Does It Mean Okay?
QUESTIONING: ANNA VIEBROCK Theatre Should Be a Place Where One Does Not Know What Is Going To Happen (“Questioning” of Anna Viebrock)
SHADOWS OF EASTERN EMPIRE... AND FRANZ K Tomáš Kafka: A Solo For A Stubborn Lady Milan Lukeš: Vienna’s Patterns and Prague’s Drawings Matěj Král: The Rules Of One Struggle Jakub Škorpil: One Official’s Dream
QUESTIONING: ÁRPÁD SCHILLING Dancing at The Absolute Verge Of Immorality (“Questioning“ of Árpád Schilling)
BLACKland... KAFKA’S CAKE István L. Sándor: Personal Theatre (Theatre Productions by Arpád Schilling) Rita Júlia Sebestyén: Black, Black, Black Country Jakub Škorpil: Collision Tales of Kafka’s Cookies Rita Júlia Sebestyén: The Mystery Of All Mysteries
QUESTIONING: DANIEL GULKO The Spectators Are Satisfied When Experiencing Something Real (“Questioning” of Daniel Gulko)
ANATOMY... AND GENIUS OF MEDIOCRITY Karel Král: Drama of Anatomy (Czech Mission In Bratislava) Martin Porubjak: A Genius Of Mediocrity
QUESTIONING: KOSSI EFOUI The Need For Trance Is Not Something That Can Be Suppressed Forever (“Questioning” of Kossi Efoui)
HELL... AND ZARATHUSTRA Joanna Derkaczew: In The Ruins Of Hell (Nietzsche’s Mystery Directed by Krystian Lupa) Thus Spoke… (Krystian Lupa Answers Questions From Lukáš Jiřička)
NEW AGE OF THE NEW AGE
Francesco Lugeri: Hell, Heaven, Garden (An intimate report from the Festival of Total Theatre of the 21st Century)
CONTACTS
Milan Lukeš: Kontakt Narration
MADE IN CZECH: DAUGHTERS & IDIOTS & CO.
Milan Lukeš: Daughters of August Strindberg
Václav Šebesta: Onwards Drama in the Czech Lands
Martin Velíšek: The Alfréd Radok Awards (for the best original play in Czech or Slovak)
Michal Čunderle: „Prince Myshkin is an Idiot and Mr. Morávek too“ (not to mention Raskolnikov)
ATTACK FROM RUSSIAN PROVINCES
Tereza Krčálová: New Russian Playwrights (The Making of Drama from the Spirit of the Provinces)
VILLAINS IN THE THEATRE
Milan Lukeš: Shakespeare’s (?) Villains
MADE IN HUNGARIA: FAIDRA & BACCHAE & MEDEA
Rita Júlia Sebestyén: Perfectly Different Worlds (On Sándor Zsótér’s Antiquity)
THE NIHILIST
Paul I. Trensky: The Irresistible Rise of Martin McDonagh
MADE IN POLAND: TEMPEST & TEMPEST & TEMPEST
Bozena Winnicka: Attract the Attention of the Audience – And Win (On Krzysztof Warlikowski’s Theatre)
I Want To Ask Questions (Interview with Krzysztof Warlikowski)
Marie Reslová: A Storm in a Glass of Human Imagination (On Warlikowski’s Tempest)
DIALOGUES
Martina Černá: The World and Theatre (A Place Where We Live, and a Place Where We Act Out Life)
HYPERMARKET
Miroslav Petříček: The Sleep Of Reason Brings Forth Hypermarkets
MADE IN SLOVAKIA: SISTERS & HELL & DUNES
Josef Fabuš: The Ambiguity of Postmodern Interpretation (Three Sisters in a Museum)
Martina Ulmanová: Nostalgia For Local Hell
Jitka Sloupová: Hot Night Among The Dunes By the Danube
BARBARIANS
Matěj Král: Civilizations, Injustice and Causes of Terrorism (A Few Comments on the Speeches of Mr. George W. Bush)
POST SCRIPTUM
HUBERT KREJČÍ: DEPARTURE OF INSECTS (Drama in Two Acts)
It is the year 2006 and the votes in Italy are still being counted. Has either Prodi or Berlusconi gained a narrow majority? Which of them will govern? Or will they govern together in great coalition? “Professor and Clown. What a government!” announces a newspaper headline. We are immediately in the theatre. In Italy this couple - Professor Prodi and Clown Berlusconi – is very traditional, they are two commedia dell’arte characters, Dottore and Arlecchino. In 2006 a parallel existed in the Czech Republic: President Václav Klaus and Prime Minister Jiří Paroubek.
Similar parallels could be found in Iva Klestilová(Volánková)’s political persiflage(?), satire(?), panopticon(?), thriller(?), grotesque documentary(?); whichwas in repertoire at Dlouhá Theatre under the title Standa Has a Problem etc... Rokoko Theatre staged a complete version of this play under the remarkable title My Country. The main difference between these two productions, however, is not their length, but something more fundamental. In Dlouhá Theatre the play is performed by flat “lifeless” puppets, which are simply cut out of cardboard and animated on sticks from below by a puppeteer, who could often be seen. In Rokoko Theatre they use live actors. Thus in one city there exists side by side two productions of the same text that are performed in two different theatre “languages”.
What kind of text is it?
Klestilová deals with current standards in the political scene, which have sunk to the level of mere political scandals and affairs. Her story features the figure of Stanislav Gross, the young star and leader of the Social Democrats who was not able to submit a reasonable explanation as to the origin of the money he paid for his luxury flat. The affair brought an end to his political career and is similar to many others covered by the media and bitched about over pints in pubs. Klestilová’s commentary is present in the stage directions, which in both productions are heard, but also hidden in the subtly stylized political jargon of the protagonists: the texts are more or less authentic, but the dramatist inconspicuously, yet clearly emphasises their stupidity.
An example par excellence is a monologue by ‘schizoid’ Miroslav Kalousek (the top politician since 2006), in which he leads a dialogue with himself, while shifting from the first person to the third person. At first, he identifies with his own self and the next moment he also distances himself. Kalousek is as if following Stanislavski and Brechtian methods simultaneously, he is constantly entering and distancing from his persona... furthermore, when using the third person, Kalousek evaluates and comments on both the ‘Stanislavski’ and ‘Brechtian’ selves.
This form of text significantly influences, even determines its stage production, being more suitable for seemingly ‘dead’ puppets than live actors. A cardboard puppet is a sign (despite being “obviously illustrative” as each puppet has a photographic portrait of the politician it “represents” glued to its head). It is easy for the puppet to perform the schizoid polemics between Kalousek and Kalousek in a simple, clear and funny way. It is enough for the puppet with Kalousek no. 1 to face the audience with its forward-facing side in one replica and Kalousek no.2 with its reverse side in the following one. In the first case we see the side of the puppet with the photograph of Kalousek, in the second we see just the back of the dirty cardboard. This demonstration of the double nature and schizoid personality is almost childishly simple and naive, yet it is theatrically effective and meaningful. The beauty and wit lie in simplicity.
The live actors, on the other hand, try to portray the characters (even if they are real and well-known politicians) as realistically as possible and they also try to parody them. The only ingenious exception is Bohumil Klepl, who ‘acts’ Jiří Paroubek, but also his two preceding socialist PMs and Party Chairmen Vladimír Špidla and Miloš Zeman. Klepl managed to “find” a telling detail for each of them, which he sometimes, but really only rarely, precisely and distinctively “acts out”, while still remaining and being Bohumil Klepl, who comments tongue-in-cheek on the replicas of the character he is presenting. Klepl succeeded in discovering the style and a hidden humour in Klestilová’s text.
The contemporary political panopticon is definitely present in the play, yet to really enjoy the performance, we must be aware of the background. The audience must know the context and the absurdly grotesque political reality in the Czech Republic. A foreigner, even if they could understand Czech, would feel disoriented, be it by the puppets or actors. Although the text is based on documentary material, neither of the productions are documentary theatre. Foreign audience would probably think them fictitious, yet the Czech audience knows that they are not.
Iva Volánková: Standa Has a Problem etc., directed by Karel Král, stage design and puppets Zuzana Petráková, Dlouhá Theatre, Prague, premiere 12 January 2006.
Iva Klestilová: My Country, directed by Thomas Zilienski and Tomáš Svoboda, stage design Jaroslav Bönish, dramaturgy Valeria Schulzová and Vladimír Čepek, Rokoko Theatre, Prague, premiere 4 February 2006.
english version of the article from Svět a divadlo magazine, issue 3, volume 2006
The show Political Cabaret or Grab that Shit! in the multicultural artistic centre MeetFactory in Prague was originally designed as a purely democratic project. The dramaturge Jan Tošovský together with the director Braňo Holiček invited everyone to send them texts concerned with politics. The texts were supposed to be used later for a cabaret. Nevertheless, as Jan Tošovský commented, “there were not enough texts sent and unfortunately most of them were not suitable for our project.” The authors thus began meeting with various politicians and representatives of local initiatives and finally wrote short sketches and songs themselves (they were mostly written by Braňo Holiček).
It is quite agreeable that the authors of this project – according to the interviews and other supplementary texts – did not have a clear idea in the beginning about what exactly they wanted to say. The ‘advertisement’ on the MeetFactory website states the following: “How do you make political theatre today? Should it mirror our age? Should it make us laugh, and thus bring us relief? Should it analyze a problem, and try to find a solution? Should it mobilize us to act? We don’t know. But we are trying somehow.” In what aspects does this performance differ from the other ones? The authors do not preconceive either a leftist or rightist position, and mainly they do not look for and point to a responsible party. Cabarets such as The Blond Beast through their commentary and ‘quoting’ of several well-known affairs aim at capturing the general miserable mood and social conditions. In my opinion, there exists a risk that the audience will be satisfied only with laughing at the stupidity of the politicians, and that’s all. Those in power are bastards who steal. Everybody knows that.
Grab that Shit! does not offer such consolation. The politicians are presented together with their buddies from the business sector. There is even a married couple in a car, who know well how these liars and corruptionists should be treated but they do not hesitate a second to corrupt a traffic police inspector. Moreover, there is – in many forms – the ordinary citizen. A victim of illegal wheeling and dealing of the higher-ups to be rushed off one’s feet randomly? Only to a certain extent. The citizen does not mind being manipulated as he is corrupted as well. Not directly by money but by promises. Those politicians, who momentarily promise more prosperity and easier solutions, could be certain of his vote and loud support. In other words the society is thoroughly corrupt, shit is omnipresent, everybody can smell the stench but no one is willing to admit it and clean it. Under all this, mostly subliminal, is the challenge articulated most clearly in the Media Song: “Think before you make up your mind/ Think before you chose/ Don’t trust everything you read/ Look for connections”.
The opening and closing scenes with president Václav Klaus attract obviously the most attention. The theatre makers use the speculations about Klaus’s closet homosexuality, and create a ‘micro-story’ leading from toilets under the bridge (where before 1989 the secret police recorded a discrediting video) to the current presidential office, where due to the influence of the video (which was later inherited by the KGB and even Vladimir Putin) Klaus together with the allegedly richest Czech businessman Petr Kellner report to the Russian ruler their achieved tasks. Beside Klaus and Kellner appears (though without being directly named) the former Mayor of Prague, Pavel Bém, and his friend (one of the so-called ‘Prague Godfathers’) Roman Janoušek. The performance includes even a drunk scene with the top leaders of Věci veřejné (the Public Affairs Party), which however does not use quotations as in The Blond Beast, but a new – and much more grotesque – text. The focus of the performance is somewhere else. In my personal view, the best scenes are those in which the authors manage to express and name the mood in society in a more general and metaphorical way.
The first scene that gave the name to the whole cabaret is particularly telling: three people are walking their dogs in a park when suddenly they smell something unpleasant. One of their darlings made a pooh. All of them know that something stinks, but no one is willing to admit it or to clean it. They debate about it for a while (they even start pushing each other) but finally they come to a conclusion that it does not concern any of them, and thus “nobody gives a shit”. It is obvious that Holiček and Tošovský view Czech society exactly like that. Nobody wants to dirty their hands with problem solving. This seemingly defeatist and in many ways traditionally satirical sketch is balanced immediately by a song called Radorap, supposedly written by one of the actors, Radovan Klučka, while he was waiting in vain for a train for more than one hour. The song is a long, rhythmical tirade full of vulgarisms. It is not clear whether it is meant as a serious, personal declaration of the authors or whether it is a parody of the contemporary fashion of ‘protest songs’ by various popular artists. Probably the best metaphor is the dance number called “Dancing across centuries” during which three actors facing the audience repeat well-known gestures in a marching tempo: “We begin with Nazi heiling, continue with a clenched left fist and Havel’s ‘Victory’ sign, and end with a raised middle finger. Later on a diamond shape appears – a sign standing for a vagina - (created by joining two ‘victory’ signs on both hands together), which when decomposed changes into VV (an abbreviation of the political party Věci veřejné)." The point is that the originally integrated sequences gradually break down, the gestures mingle, and the original ‘political’ signs retreat in order to be replaced by the obscene ones.
The authors proclaimed that “In the end we found out that we did not want to just poke fun, there is enough of that, and in our view there is no time for jokes.” Fortunately, they do not mean it literally. There are a lot of fun - cruel, daring and uncompromising jokes. The production combines two moods: total annoyance and total enjoyment of play. It is paradoxical that someone could enjoy telling and playing such things so much. But Radovan Klučka, Ivan Lupták and Marie Štípková are really charming. Dressed in dark trousers and blue, white and red T-shirts that when placed in the right position resemble not only Czech national colours but also the Russian Federation flag. On the stage, which is covered in newspaper and ‘decorated’ with three table lamps hanging, the actors need only binders with forms. They do not have any other props, yet they manage to create by simple gestures everything from a fast going car to Janoušek’s swimming pool, a meeting room of the city council of an unnamed metropolis to a lively demonstration at the main square or toilets under the bridge. Obviously, the imagination of the audience must cooperate despite the small – yet welcomed – obstacles put in their way by the director Holiček. He does not build his sketches in a descriptive way but often almost decomposes the acting space into individual, seemingly independent, spheres. Thus the Policeman bending into a car window asks for personal documents on the right side of the stage; while a Man is looking for them on the far left, and a Woman standing at the back in the centre of the stage gives him the documents. Similarly ‘decomposed’ are even the before mentioned toilets or a ride in the mayor’s car that replaces the originally intended walk in the Municipality scene. The only ‘tangible object’ of the whole production is the eponymous shit that from time to time (as a certain emphasis but it is not a rule) falls from the gridiron on the stage where it gradually creates a sticky, unpleasant and slippery base.
Alongside the before mentioned trio of actors appears also the percussionist Ondřej Dočekal. He not only divides individual scenes by clinks but he accompanies all ‘songs’. The quotation marks are indispensable here as it is mostly just rhythmical recitation with only the refrains or repetitive passages properly sung. They create an onomatopoeic background for the soloist (only rarely the songs are sung as a two-voice, once as a three-voice). The songs are composed as a collage; the voices divide the citations from real documents (a list of the attempts at reducing the immunity of the MPs, data about corruption or a study of the similarity of the intoxication by drugs and power).
Everything is simple - devoid of affectation and stylishness. It is cruelly funny. It is depressing. Some softer characters have been seen meditating while leaving the MeetFactory hesitatingly standing above the train tracks leading to the nearby railway station.
Braňo Holiček and col.: Political Cabaret or Grab that Shit!, directed by B.Holiček, stage design and costumes Nikola Tempír, music B.Holiček, dramaturgy Jan Tošovský, MeetFactory Prague, Czech premiere May 17, 2012
English version of the article from Svět a divadlo magazine, issue 4, volume 2012
Ten years ago Patrik Ouředník won the hearts of the Czech readers with a thin book, which at first sight resembles swotty school notes by a secondary school pupil, who despite being very meticulous, is completely unable of distinguishing what he heard at school from the things he saw in some trashy TV quiz. Europeana consists of a free stream of historical data, mixed with miscellaneous information from popular science on technology, sociology and politics; magazine gossip is complemented by shocking and peculiar details, on top of that, the mixture is spiced up by banalities, clichés and primitively paraphrased ideological slogans. Ouředník uses stiff schoolboy style, repeating constantly sentences such as “Some people said this and others said something else.” Descriptions of war horrors appear as a refrain and the absurdity of this surreal mixture is supported by a pseudoscientific glossary, which is printed in a column on the margins of the page (“The future is full of excitement”). Heaps of corpses are mentioned with the detachment of a statistician and the invention of the pushup bra receives similar attention as the Oedipus complex or the atomic bomb.
The book begins with the information on the length of a line which could be formed from the corpses of American soldiers who died during the D-Day operation in Normandy (38 kilometres). It concludes with an even more telling reminder of the optimistic theory about the “end of history”, which is closely linked with the definite victory of liberal democracy, “which was invented in 1989 by some American political scientist.” Moreover, Ouředník includes a vicious, yet in its brevity very telling epilogue: “Yet many people didn’t know the theory and kept on making history irrespectively.” In the meantime, the history of the 20th century is narrated at random as a chaotic bloody mess; purposefully there is no gradation nor structure (except a very vague chronology describing the events from the oldest to the newest with many digressions and jumps).
Although Europeana is soaked in irony, Ouředník does not openly give hints to his readers (the above mentioned comment on making history is one of the few exceptions). He rather adopts the attitude of a naively trustful stupidity with almost Schweikian rigorousness. He describes all events very seriously and with conviction– but from such perspective and in such context that the ridiculousness, senselessness or even murderous stupidity of the events is fully shown. Ouředník is unusually skilful and manages to be subversive in a very catchy way. As a result, almost all readers agree with Europeana. It is a strange paradox: he laughs at everything and everybody and still wins praise from everyone. It seems that Europeana matches the current mood with almost dangerous precision.
The readers of Europeana might be confirmed in their comfortable “pub” feeling that nothing has (and never had) any worth, as they have always suspected and that now they together with the author of Europeana have finally seen it in full light. However, nothing is so simple, Ouředník definitely does not relish in such banal plebeian attitude: his stance is despite all irony quite clear and consistent. On the whole, it seems more conservative than plebeian. His disgust with wordy ideologies, concepts, social engineering and revolutions is most strongly revealed when he writes about Nazism and Communism (which is very often). Enthusiastic revolutionaries of Paris Spring, various sectarians or Esperantists trying to save the world also get their scolding. Basic human values – but surprisingly also faith and even the church, both being common targets in such cases – Ouředník leaves aside. Europeana is a sarcastic and cruel book, but it is not without distinctions, nor is cynicism an end in itself.
Jan Mikulášek and his production team (especially the dramaturge Dora Viceníková, the co-author of the production) not only had to face the ‘evident’ question how to transfer Ouředník’s nontheatrical text to the stage, but they also had to decide how to deal with the purposeful shapelessness and aimlessness of Europeana.
The answer to the first question is a marthalerian fluid stream of images that partly illustrate, partly comment on and are partly independent of the text. Much more complicated is the answer to the overall meaning and aim of the production. Mikulášek’s Europeana is set in the 1970s or 1980s formica polyester hideousness, but simultaneously evokes a contemporary “European” conference. The episodes from European history are presented within a certain timeframe, yet the production has an air of fuzzy and foggy timelessness.
Mikulášek and Viceníková chose from Ouředník’s messy and chaotic “notes” above all the passages dealing with war horrors. Contrary to the novel, the stage production of Europeana has also a gradation and thus becomes darker and more serious. It is emphasized in the final long scene (one of those that are not based on the original) where the actress Zuzana Ščerbová recites year by year the dates. The actor Jiří Kniha keeps on falling from a chair with each year recited by Šcerbová – it is getting more and more difficult for him to get up again. Another distinguishing aspect of the theatre adaptation of Europeana is the general atmosphere of intensive awkwardness, in contrast to the amazement at human incorrigibility in the book.
On the bare, almost empty stage lighted from above by strip lights, stands a long conference table with few microphones, headphones, papers and bottles of mineral water. At the back is a glass box (smoking room) and large sign EUROPEANA, the letter N is upside down. The introductory scene (and a couple of the following ones) really resemble a conference: seven actors enter the stage and sit at the table, Jiří Kniha acts out a grotesque etude with a non-existent microphone stand, into which he, after a lengthy manipulation, announces the name of the author, title and subtitle of the production: A Brief History of the 20th Century. After that, Kniha joins the others at the table, all actors put on their headphones and stare at the audience in silence for a long time. Later they begin to hum a melody, which slowly merges with various “war” sounds in beatbox style and also with the song Where have all the flowers gone? (one of the leitmotifs of the production). The actors are dressed adequately to the scene: men wear cheap shapeless suits, hideous ties and greasy sleek hair, the ladies with strange hairdos and unfitting dresses, hiding grandma underwear. From the very beginning the production fully stresses awkwardness as an aesthetic category.
As opposed to the book, which begins in medias res with the banal measuring of the line of dead soldiers’ corpses, the theatre version opens not only with a couple of warm-up scenes, but also with something like a motto: “The 20th century has been described as the most murderous, and those who were looking forward to the 21st century used to say that nothing can be worse, but other people said that it can always be worse or even as bad as before.” It is the first real replica of the production, announced with meticulous diction and the smooth-tongued tone of a TV News presenter, by Ondřej Mikulášek sitting at the table. Immediately he adds more citations from Ouředník’s book; the other actors listen to him and sometimes they illustrate with exaggeration of his words with movement or mere sounds. Ondřej Mikulášek – the oldest person on stage and simultaneously the father of the director – remains for many minutes the only speaking actor; for a while it seems that he is going to play a sort of solo-witness.
The production finally gets going thanks to the few more or less independent comedy scenes. While Jiří Vyorálek plays and sings Dylan’s protest song Masters of War with growing passion, Jan Hájek translates the lyrics into sign language in a very funny way. The most entertaining scene of the whole evening is loosely related to the theme of war horrors, but could easily stand independently as a cabaret number. It becomes clear that Hájek, Vyorálek and Kniha will be the leaders of the production, mainly because of their ability to underact (in contrast to their other colleagues, especially the ladies). In other words, they are able to create grotesque, affectedly awkward situations with poker faces, treating everything as the most usual business.
Another noticeable feature is an example of a marthalerian lengthy scene playing out of a single motif: as the celebrations of the new millennium are approaching, the actors are trying in vain to open bottles of champagne in a way that more and more resembles masturbation. When Jiří Hájek mentions his worries about the Y2K effect, the lights in the theatre suddenly go off for several moments. Despite resembling an independent comedy number; this passage fits in the production not only with its absurdly awkward mood, but also with the above mentioned reference to masturbation. In the theatre version of Europeana sex is as important as the totalitarian and war horrors. Sex is presented solely in its most pitiable form; sweaty autoeroticism is from this angle unusually “photogenic”.
Sex and autoeroticism is presented more times in various (always repulsive) ways as a sign of impotence and substitution. Most effective is another awkwardly funny scene based on the Ouřeník’s sentence “they practiced different modes of sex”: Jiří Kniha describes partly with gusto and partly with clerical matter-of-factness the achievements of the sexual revolution, while forcing a couple of staid looking helpers to demonstrate various sexual positions. Dita Kaplanová and Jan Hájek look very unhappy and disgusted, unwillingly they follow the instructions and try to use every opportunity to stagger from the stage. The climax of the erotic awkwardness is the scene in which Jiří Hájek uses a motionless hand of a sleeping woman for masturbation. He masturbates with his back to the audience with an utterly grey unimpressiveness, while leaving, he returns for a while to touch the breast of the sleeping woman with a pitiable lowness.
All the “erotic” scenes described above are performed in a very entertaining way. In some passages of the production these scenes are far more impressive than those developing the main “historical” themes. Nevertheless, the deeper meaning of the erotic theme line is more difficult to decipher. It seems as if the main aim of the erotic scenes was to make the production as awkward as possible. It remains questionable whether not it is too little for a production, whose ambition, similarly to the book, is to capture the “non-sense” of the 20th century. Paradoxically, the awkward erotic scenes are most theatrically creative and have even a trashy “edge” that is missing in the more serious scenes.
The “main” or “historical” theme line suffers from an opposite problem. The purpose is clear, but the production does not succeed fully in expressing it in a theatrically effective way. When successful, there are passages where the production is frostily cheerful. When not, the stage is slowly filling with dragging boredom.
In one of the most effective scenes, Dita Kaplanová at first describes in an inappropriately seductive voice the effect of gas on the soldiers, later she enumerates with clerical matter-of-factness the names of innumerable international conferences that made the use of gas illegal. With each date, her colleagues numbly and mechanically raise their hands in the act of voting; Václav Vašák has a gas mask on for the entire scene, while the spiritual “We shall overcome” underlines the scene silently. In this case, the production perfectly goes in hand with Ouředník, who returns to the motif of combat gas many times. In the following scene the production even manages to create an effective shortcut connecting several motifs that are not related in the book. Dozens of dolls falling from the gridiron seem at first a funny illustration of a Barbie story, gradually though, the heap of doll begins to resemble terrifying heaps of corpses, well-known from the documentaries of concentration camps. In the meantime, a seductive lecture on eugenics and sterilization of unadaptable persons is recited, while Marie Jansová is slowly stripping and later she disappears backstage.
Other scenes are less successful: for instance, when Zuzana Ščerbová ecstatically utters Ouředník’s sentences about how many dictators and mass murderers were educated and culture-loving, the accompanying scenic action seems empty and banal (the rest of the ensemble are crawling on stage and simulating masturbation with books). Similarly unbalanced are also the more abstract scenes, which are not based on Ouředník’s book. While the existential scenes with repeating falls of the actors to the ground have undoubtedly an air of barely describable fatality, the long spasmodic dance to Wagnerian music, which closes the first half of the production, is not so effective, despite the neat idea of descending ceiling and the final point with an “inappropriate” dance of two bald dancers: the returnee from a concentration camp and a woman, whose hair was shaved because she had been sleeping with the Germans during the occupation. Even in the main theme line there are several light, yet meaningful, scenes. For example, a weeping tirade mixing a cry to the melody of “Ode to Joy” with weepy singing of “Tell Me Why You Cry” by the Beatles, and finally the crying (but perhaps partly laughing) of the speaker at the microphone.
While Ouředník chaotically places things next to each other and forces the readers to combine the facts themselves and to look for a certain point of reference, the theatre audience is quite easily directed to the expected conclusion, i.e. that in 20th century Europe many terrible horrors were happening and that it was not a nice sight at all. Together with the attempt of the production to alternate serious and lighter passages, it weakens the effect of the written Europeana: absurd monotonousness and naively childish heterogeneity of the stream of fragmented information served without any obvious intention and without any direct authorial commentary.
As with Mikulášek’s other productions, it is typical for Europeana to gain the attention of the audience more by the marthalerian absurd and awkward atmosphere and individual scenes than by the overall message. If Mikulášek intends to continue making theatre that addresses wider social problems, he needs to progress from well-done details to more complex shape.
Patrik Ouředník: Europeana, dramatization Dora Viceníková and Jan Mikulášek, direction and music Jan Mikulášek, stage design and costumes Marek Cpin, dramaturgy Dora Viceníková, National Theatre in Brno – Reduta, Czech premiere 9 June 2011.
english version of the article from Svět a divadlo magazine, issue 5, volume 2011
Playwright and director Miroslav Bambušek is one of the most "socially committed" Czech theatre makers. He usually deals with political and social problems, so, it should come as no surprise that his play ‘The Czech War’ deals with ‘The (anti-communist) Third Resistance.
A clearly presented point-of-view and a radical, almost ‘brutal’, naturalistic staging, which incorporates violence, are typical of Bambušek's projects. In his production of ‘The Czech War’, these expectations are fulfilled. The opposing parties (the Communists versus members of The Third Resistance) get to play with only black and white cards. From the beginning of the production (actually even before that) it is clear that the Communists are bad and The Third Resistance group members are good. There are no shades in-between.
People who were communists during the 1940s and at the beginning of 1950s receive zero tolerance from Bambušek. And in his play he completely omits the silent, maybe non-communist majority of the nation at the time. His essential message is that one has to make the right decision at the right moment. And he makes it clear that the right decision means the right action.
This might seem - especially after last 60 years - as too radical an ‘assessment’ of the nation, but artistic license permits a lot, and with this kind of approach the resulting form is usually more appealing. And above all this is not a documentary, it is a theatre play and production... Apart from a few exceptions the characters in the story are not two-dimensional though, they are not superheroes. Their most crucial decisions are sometimes accompanied by hesitation, and their past acts of resistance weren’t always acts of heroism. Anger, revenge and even the desire to kill surface among them.
According to Bambušek, ‘mad’ times call for strong (vulgar) expression and an abundance of violence, which might not be admired by every audience member. However, the most fundamental drawbacks I found in the play were excessive pathos and the use of near-clichés in certain parts.
The director David Czesany managed however to animate the whole stage and also the auditorium. It has to be said that this wasn't an easy task, especially since the text, written in such a radical way, could easily have turned into theatre propaganda, which might have failed to make the audience's blood run cold from terror but rather from shame.
In addition the director skilfully handled the fragmented collage-form of the text. He used movie-like cutting, which was helped a lot by emotional music, as well as by actors who continued to prove that the ‘Theatre on the Balustrade’ has one of the best ensembles in Prague.
The more incisive, violent parts aren’t softened much. For example, when the gun of the young resistance fighter Radek fails, he clubs the victim (his uncle) to death; and although the act takes place behind a white cube marked ‘native heath’, the young man appears with a bloody face shortly afterwards. The torture of the pastor is intentionally shown to the audience as ‘naturalistically ‘as possible - including moments of water-pouring, kicking, and baton-beating. On the other hand, the director tried to lighten the production with more metaphorical images, though in the end these seemed more monstrous than the naturalistic ones.
This was true especially of the character called XY who chanted pro-communist slogans (Magdaléna Sidonová). Her Folk entourage (Lucie Ferenzová and Tomáš Jandáč), were a couple whose different time periods were illustrated by changes in their costumes. At first they wear folk costumes (and they don't yet pay attention to the agitators); then they become Young Pioneers (here they can already be considered collaborators); and afterwards dressed in army uniforms they clear away sacks from the barricade built by the rebellious villagers, and in the last scene they are "disco-maniacs" who celebrate victory when the last of the resistant fighters are gone.
The couple are dressed then in a 1970s' style, which is not illogical since it implies that these Communists stayed in power for that much longer. The costumes of ‘XY’ also underscore these scenes - at first she is a hardworking shop-worker in overalls and a headscarf, then she turns into an austere clerk tight-laced in her dark suit, and in the end she looks like a freakishly padded monster with a huge dove of peace on her head.
During the Prologue the characters talk mostly about their lives up to that point. After the Prologue, there is a meaning-carrying and mood-creating change of atmosphere, which seems to be a very successful stage idea.
It all starts with an idyllic village scene: a grandmother, her hair tied up in a white bun, sitting on a bench. There is a huge sheet of paper behind her (covering the whole back part of the stage) with a naively painted landscape on it.
Zdena (Zdena Hadrbolcová) talks about her family, thus explaining the origins of the different world-views of her two sons: "In the 1930's Joseph started his studies at the Military Academy... Ferdinand took care of the farm... and then the occupation came... Joseph escaped to England and joined the RAF Special Forces... Ferdinand took part in the local resistance... after the assassination of Heydrich he escaped to the East... and in Buzuluk he joined the 1st Czechoslovak Independent Brigade Group formed under the command of General Heliodor Píka..." Yes, it starts almost like a fairy tale. Two brothers - the Communist official Ferdinand (Igor Chmela) and the opponent of Communism Joseph (Jiří Ornest) have different views, but otherwise it all looks idyllic. After all, the war is over and peace is more important now... But it's not a fairy tale; both of them will be killed.
The painting of the landscape is ripped up, revealing a grey six-storey building behind it. This serves as a variety of spaces for all the other scenes describing the rise (and abolition) of a rebellious group in a Czech village.
The whole action is triggered by the pastor Ladislav Hlad (Leoš Noha) reading "The Pastoral", prohibited by the Communists. When the secret police led by Major (Petr Čtvrtníček) arrive to arrest him, the villagers make a stand. Then the men escape into the woods and form the Resistance unit.
To add some romance to the story, there are a pair of lovers, Marie (Natália Drabiščáková) and Radek (Ladislav Hampl). Through them the moments of decision and hesitation are played out; in the case of Marie there is even a kind of "misstep". When Radek leaves, she succumbs out of despair to the organist (Miloslav Mejzlík), who is full of complexes and misuses her. When Radek's returns, Marie is disappointed by the change in him: he is no longer the sensitive young man she used to love, but a killer who wants - as stated in the play - "the meat". The times have changed him and even Marie eventually accepts this. She also decides to fight.
As stated before, the play's structure resembles a collage. After the intermission, the collage is amplified by an intermezzo during which different opinions on the anti-communist resistance are read: "As the Cold War wasn't really a war, the Third Resistance wasn't really a resistance./…/ It is justified to use any means to defy enslavement. /…/ The Third Resistance means nothing to me. Those people, who are viewed as heroes today, took their actions at a time of solid peace and while Czechoslovakia was a valid member of the United Nations. /…/ If the violent killing of committed collaborators and tools of the communist system is viewed by some people as murderous, then even those fighting the Nazis must be murderers..."
These are some of the opinions we encounter today. Of course, the creators of this play stand up for the Third Resistance, but they don't idealize it. For them, those men made decisions for different reasons, and they took their anti-communist activities to the extreme. Yet for many audience members the resistance fighters were heroes.
Miroslav Bambušek: The Czech War, directed by David Czesany, dramaturgy Lucie Ferenzová and Ivana Slámová, set design by Tomáš Bambušek, costumes by Zuzana Krejzková, music by Roman Zach, Theatre on the Balustrade, press night 20. 5. 2011
english version of the article from Svět a divadlo magazine, issue 4, volume 2011
National Moravian-Silesian Theatre - photo by Radovan Šťastný
What are the Czechs like? Are they Schweiks; Are they laughing monsters, heathens, cowards, thieves... Even if we agree that there is actually something like a "national character", we would probably just be throwing around pejorative labels and comparisons. Unfortunately, that's exactly what we do. But it hasn't always been that way.
At the beginning of the National Awakening, we turned to our Slavonic nature. Maybe it was a way to make ourselves look better, but it was also a way to prove (and not just to the Germans) that we existed as a nation with a rich culture. This was supposed to be proved by the discovery of hundred-year old "manuscripts" for example, though later on they were found to be fake. (So are we also a nation of crooks on top of everything else?) Many revivalists have adopted the symbolism that Jan Kollár used to characterize not just the Czechs, but all the Slavs. In his words, we were ‘little bees, lime trees and honey’. Hostile Germans were self-indulgent swine and oak trees. Yes, we - the sweet and hard-working ones - faced a bitter and lazy enemy... But that was a long time ago, and today we just smile at the memory. But maybe we should be inspired by such an attitude.
What does Polish journalist Mariusz Szczygieł write about the Czechs? His book Gottland was originally written for a Polish readership. But while the author doesn’t show the Czech character in general, because he is describing particular tragic lives, he introduces these lives from a new point of view and without judgment. And that's why his book has been able to stand one test, namely – the ability to become a bestseller even in the Czech Republic.
The fact is that some of the people appearing in the book are relatively unknown to Czechs, for example the sculptor Otakar Švec, who designed the Stalin monument at Letná, or the writer Karel Fabián, who completely changed his literary and personal identity after February 1948, and also there is a short chapter about Franz Kafka's niece, who hides away from the world in a Kafkaesque way when anyone tries to interview her about her uncle.
In the chapter called ‘The Film Must be Shot’, Szczygieł uses the example of JaroslavaMoserová to serveas a link between ‘human torches’ Jan Palach and Zdeněk Adamec. The author has created his report from testimonies; and made a mosaic of antagonist statements, complementing them with archive documents and jokes from that particular time period.
He is neither ironic nor overly benevolent and agreeable. He is trying to be neutral. He intentionally chooses lives which escape explicit assessment. All are linked by a political system and the state of society, being the elements that brought these people into situations where they had to choose correctly. If they hadn’t, we would laugh at them today.
The author's opinion of the Czechs is only revealed in one passage of Gottland. All the rest are our own assumption and projections. There is just one hero whom Szczygieł doesn't spare judgement: the one hidden in the title of the book.
"In July 2006, his museum was opened in Jevany near Prague. With the name Gottland above the entrance in neon lights. No other living artist - at least in Czechia - has ever had his own museum where paid tour guides provide a commentary in three different languages. Karel Gott is a sacred object in a secularized society. A world without God isn't possible, so in the most atheistic country in the world, the Czech Republic,this 67 years old singer plays an important role. A role called mein Gott. /…/ They loved Gott and together with him they survived communism. If he “had to comply with what was the only right thing”, how could we not? To find ourselves in Gottland is comparable to gaining the imprimatur, our past is ok."
The author's ability to describe on a small scale the key moments in another’s life is a big asset of the book. From the individual chapters, which are actually autonomous literal reports, we often learn more than we would from biographies several hundred pages long. On top of that, the chapters are more readable and witty. But it seems to be more difficult to turn them into a theatre piece.
At the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre, director Jan Mikulášek and literary manager Marek Pivovar, both inspired by the well-known hockey chant, subtitled their production Whoever Doesn't Jump isn't Czech. At the Švanda Theatre in Smíchov, director Petr Štindl and artistic director Dodo Gombár went for a different subtitle – The Masks of Tragic Helplessness. Both productions stayed faithful to their subtitles. The one in Ostrava portrays the Czechs as a herd, while the Prague production describes individual tragic lives.
Neither of them has dealt with all the characters from the book, and the production in Ostrava didn't sustain Szczygieł's neutral outlook. Mikulášek and Pivovar make it much clearer who should be exonerated. Particularly the famous Czech actress Lída Baarová, whom Joseph Goebbels loved, is described as an innocent victim of the manipulated herd. This is suggested to the audience by the theatrically nice stage image: two men reveal her back, on which they draw the swastika. The poor star then tries to wipe it off, but she can't reach her own back. It is a wonderful theatrical metaphor, but the message it delivers is problematic.
In Ostrava, they didn't stage Szczygieł's book, they rather used it as an inspirational source. Unfortunately as a result, most of the additional material felt superficial - at least in comparison to the original.
The first part of the Prague production takes place among members of a virtual community of Facebook fans; the second is located in some strange sanatorium for the dead, who during their lives used to be addicted to social networks (which is a very poignant metaphor). Sometimes the stage becomes the Gottland museum (including visitors walking around) or the metro stop at Muzeum (near the place where Jan Palach and Zdeněk Adamec burned themselves to death). And even here, there are some added characters: especially the architect Jan Kaplický, or more accurately his model of the "Octopus", the winning design for the Prague National Library, the construction of which was cancelled by Prague councillors - probably under the influence of ‘artistic outrage’ by President Klaus. At the very end of the production a letter by Kaplický is cited. He, as an emigrant, expresses his conviction that once certain circumstances in our country change, he will be able to have his designs realized in his native land. That's quite a bitter end to the production, but very poignant.
Both productions share the motif of an all-powerful media. Again, the Prague creative team incorporates it better in their production. The first part of the story is situated in an environment where (theoretically) the characters could have met (of course it's necessary to take into account that they come from a different time period). It is situated in an internet social network that allows for many ‘Facebook jokes’ projected on a large screen: for example Goebbels asks Baarová to become his friend, and a group called The Final Solution is founded etc... However, for the older and less computer-skilled generation this update might be completely wasted, maybe even annoying. Also the importance of the characters of journalists Egon Ervín Kisch and Renáta Kalenská is underlined here while in the book they are mentioned rather marginally. In the production they play the roles of registrars and truth seekers.
The Ostrava production is again rather simplistic in comparison. At the very beginning, the chants draw attention to the cheesiness of the tabloids, and to those who are treated as our "national heroes" today: especially the entertainer Leoš Mareš and the pop music star of the socialist era Michal David. And of course, Karel Gott. Later, during the story of the discrediting of writer Jan Procházka, one of the icons of the Prague Spring, the added character of a Showman appears. During a staged New Year's Eve variety show he jovially comments on Procházka's fate, adding jokes about other dissidents who had to work as window and stairway cleaners.
Švandovo divadlo - photo by Patrik Borecký
This principle somehow manages to reflect the era and its values. It is also possible to find a link between the media in the past and in the present: the information delivered used to be and still is distorted, superficial and even untrue. These links feel quite obvious, however.
In both productions, the stage and costume designs are based on similar principles. At the beginning of the Prague version, an indistinguishable crowd dressed in black and white office outfits gather in an austere room. In the second half, each character gets an individual outfit, for example Baarová wears an evening gown while Adamec is bandaged head to toe...
In Ostrava, individuals dressed in brown, badly-sewn outfits, enter the stage. Later they turn into a jumping crowd, and even later individual characters are distinguished by their costumes. All this happens in a spacious hall with a back stairway, and there is a black sign “I DON'T WANT TO” written on the wall.
In terms of acting, the performances of the actresses in the role of Lída Baarová were outstanding. In Ostrava, Gabriela Mikulková portraits the star as a beautiful, proud and tragic woman. Alexandra Gasnárková as an older Baarová is already an unhappy woman, broken by historical events (that this Baarová lacks a sense of her own uniqueness and importance is the result the creative team’s interpretation). Her final monologue on the injustice of fate is a brilliant acting and rhetorical performance.
At Švanda Theatre, just one actress - Kristýna Frejová - portraits the famous star (Baarová's beauty is renewed after her death). Her Baarová is a seemingly self-confident star, but she loses her advantage as a beautiful woman and offers a more human side of her personality after an encounter with the Nazi chiefs (especially Hitler).
Probably no one else in the cast made as strong an impact on the audience. In Prague all the performers were precise, in Ostrava they seemed to make incidental appearances during the production. However, both actors performing the role of Karel Gott - David Viktora in Ostrava and Tomáš Pavelka in Prague - are worth mentioning. Their caricatures of Gott were thorough and their singing perfect.
Mariusz Szczygieł: Gottland, dramatization by Marek Pivovar and Jan Mikulášek, directed and music by J. Mikulášek, dramaturgy M. Pivovar, set and costume design Marek Cpin, National Moravian-Silesian Theatre in v Ostrava, press night 20. 1. 2011.
Mariusz Szczygieł: Gottland, script Petr Štindl and Dodo Gombár, directed by P. Štindl, music by Karel Albrecht, set design by Petr B. Novák, costumes by Zuzana Přidalová, dramaturgy Lucie Kolouchová, Švanda Theatre in Smíchov, press night 19. 3. 2011
english version of the article from Svět a divadlo magazine, issue 3, volume 2011
In the fall of 2005 one theatrical production in the Czech lands was experiencing great success. Its title wasIvánek, my Friend, Can we Talk? or Would You Believe That Shit, formally it was in fact a stage reading, and its popularity at first seemed to be a lucky coincidence. The conversation of football officials recorded by secret services investigating bribery in football at first became a juicy morsel for the media, and soon after also for the theatre, which dug up the case to again shine on title pages, and thus stole part of the media attention also for itself. However, one would have hardly thought that secret recordings will become a rich source of Czech documentary theatre, especially comedy-wise.
Petr Čtvrtníček, the author and director of this initiation production, put the text together from actual wiretaps of various football big shots and referees with special focus on phone calls of Ivánek (Ivan Horník, the sports manager of the Viktorie Žižkov team) and Milánek (partly the syndicate chief of referees, Milan Brabec, partly the referee Milan Šedivý). However, the result is far from being accurately documentary. The identity of the speakers does not match reality – Ivánek and Milánek are prototypes as if from commedia dell´arte: two blockheaded wiseacres. The dialogues of the mentioned officials were also interlarded with the words of many other people, for example, those of Václav Zejda, an especially corrupt referee. He is in fact the author of the famous cover terms for bribes – carps, apples, pears; and he is the ‘co-author’ of the tough, sexist dialogue with the football delegate Jan Prášil about the female referee Dagmar Damková (Zejda: That´s enough for her, I will touch her cockroach in the showers right after that. / Prášil: Oh fuck, right, and your nails will come off. / Zejda: Not with my hand, with my football boot.) Čtvrtníček´s selection of statements that he used as the dialogues of Ivánek and Milánek can in general be considered quite successful.
It is symptomatic that Čtvrtníček preferred manly direct, tough vocabulary. The protagonists address each other with the title ‘friend’ but also ‘dragon’, ‘jerk’ and ‘bastard’, and the repeated phrases are full of vulgarities (“media dicks”, meaning journalists, are quite frequent), and obscenities (“would you believe that shit”, “I´ll be fucked now”). Such specific vocabulary creates a distinct atmosphere, and Čtvrtníček and the audience like it. Of course that Čtvrtníček is not an idiot, and he knows that these vulgarities come from the mouths of football crooks on high posts; nevertheless, he finds a certain delight in this language. He documents it in the show, the framework of which is a dialogue with his colleague actor and Milánek of the production, Jiří Lábus, where they adapt such vocabulary (and thinking and acting) for the theatre, and even more so in the book entitled Blood, sweat and slides (2006). In the book the script of Ivánek is framed by Čtvrtníček´s much longer, mystifying text about the production´s origin that is written in the football officials´ ‘poetics’. Čtvrtníček even offers some statistics of the show´s vulgarities (I presume that with only one exception, where the binary number is turned into a three-digit number): “From 19:00 sharp we have used 284 cums, 151 dicks, 657 jerks and cows, 101 bitches and once we even touched a cockroach.” The text also touches upon the contagiousness of ‘football language’ that Čtvrtníček labels as verbal disease. Personally, I find a great increase of dragons and cums in everyday speech from the time Ivánek was staged. This infection, similar to gonorrhoea or other diseases, destroys the body as well as good reputation, and it has probably affected language as a system, and thus everybody who uses it. While it should have been the other way around – those secretly recorded rascals should have been forced to verbal reformation as part of a sound punishment.
The football guys use such crude vocabulary to compensate for their socially aggrieved sentiment. Ivánek distributes ‘notes’ according to which the match is supposed to unwind, however, he “doesn´t do it for himself”; therefore he wants to “boss it around a little” in order to “help his luck a little bit”. He is among his own kind, “the proles of fucking football”. In connection with the proletarian use of language it is surprising that these football thugs talk only about corrupt doctors and journalists, no politicians are involved. Paranoia leads one to attribute it to the dramaturgy of superior positions that wanted to make some of the conversations public and others (those with politicians) not. Without paranoia one only knows what he knows, and barely suspects that in football certain officials are more than happy to make do with one another. Both points of view probably connect in the character of Miroslav Pelta. In the times of ‘Ivánek´s’ corruption he was the sports director of Sparta, and in the tapped phone calls he became notorious for his phrase “Everything is greased, idiots”. Sparta was also suspected of corruption. Nothing more. Today, Pelta is the chairman of the Czech and Moravian football association – in other words the head of Czech football.
A couple of years after the football scandal the political party Věci veřejné (Public matter) entered the Czech political stage proclaiming to put an end to local corruption while created as a ‘project’ of the security agency ABL that would thus be able to get hold of government contracts. The party demonstrated living up to its ‘detective’ origin not even one year after its marvellous entry on the political stage in the beginning of April 2011. The business plan was then revealed in a quite typical manner: the media made public a recording from 2008 where the owner of the party, Vít Bárta, informs the top managers of his agency about the secret ‘five-year plan’ of infiltration into politics. Maybe the recording was made public by the young star of Věci veřejné, and the chairwoman of their parliamentary club, Kristýna Kočí, maybe it was her colleague and vice-chairman of the party, Jaroslav Škárka, in other words the duo that in the scope of a few days sued Bárta for corrupting party colleagues, and was thus dismissed from the party. Speedily, another member of Věci veřejné, Lukáš Vích, made public his recording where Kristýna Kočí reveals her plans for an internal party coup d´état co-authored by Petr Tluchoř from ODS party and other politicians to Vích and another regional party official, Markéta Dobešová. Both the mentioned recordings, especially the more colourful one with Kočí, gained instant popularity.
Kristýnka or The Blonde She-Beast
The theatre reacted in a trice. Four days after the media released Vích´s recording A-studio Rubín staged a production, again in fact a stage reading, Kristýnka or The Blonde She-Beast. The production – or so it seemed – rounded off the events that up to then took place very quickly one after another: director Tomáš Svoboda and his colleagues can really be credited for such foresight. Their approach is in fact a blasphemy of the so-called high politics and the adequately high culture. The protagonists of the recordings – that is the politicians themselves - radically contributed to their own shame. As in the case of the football bribers it was enough to take their words, and read them out with only minimal theatrical effects.
Čtvrtníček put an orchestra at the back of the stage, Lábus and himself sat in the front, and only the referee (played by Josef Polášek) was allowed to walk across the stage and act. This set-up was interrupted only by a video projection of carp pond fishing. Everything was very simple even the choice of music and songs that gave the show a cabaret edge. The music – especially football and other sports melodies – was an evident product of unsophisticated association made original by weird tempos or ‘symphonic’ orchestration.
Svoboda opted for a similar method. The stage design was supplied by chalk drawings on the black wall of the basement theatre: this time it was mainly inscriptions describing how far it is from here via tunnel to the Senate, Parliament or the Prague Castle. Here also music numbers (borrowed as well as original) played their part. At the same time the songs had more than just simple illustrative function that would concentrate the spectator´s attention in only one direction, and the structure of the whole evening was ‘interrupted’ by several foreign elements right from the beginning. The gastroenterologist Jan Martínek´s lecture on the topic of constipation and another disorder when after sitting down on the toilet one´s sphincter does not loosen up but on the contrary tightens even more was especially successful. The doctor calls it ‘obstructive defecation syndrome’ the abbreviation thus matching that of the already mentioned political party – ODS.
This joke moved the show towards its political essence - the texts put together from both of the recordings. These were staged using significant theatrical caricature. For example, both of the ‘regional’ protagonists from the second recording, the staging of which took up most of the production´s scope, were ridiculous figures right from the start. Lukáš Vích, played by Ondřej Pavelka, wore a bumpkin titfer, a coat as if part of a folk costume, and in his hand he clutched a pitchfork. Markéta Dobešová wore a restrained dress and a blonde wig, however, she was played by a male actor, Lukáš Příkazký, and so the effect was sufficient. All three actors entered the stage equipped with various recording devices that they did not bother to hide from one another. This was – together with the energetic interpretation of Kočí by Barbora Poláková – the most evident sign of reality being affected by theatre.
Again, the dialogues from these two recordings did not have to be adapted, it was enough to articulate them, and emphasize the necessary. The similarity to the football tapes was quite striking especially the ‘distribution of notes’. Here also the protagonists came close to the typology of commedia dell´arte – let´s say a boasting loudmouth and an ambitious goose. However, as we moved upwards with the political protagonists we expected them to have more class. And really: a theatre frequenter could have come to the impression that he recognizes more heroic qualities here.
Kristýna Kočí is verbally the more frightening the more it is evident that she is only a naive girl, who simply boasts. Her gentle vocabulary includes ‘motherfucker’, ‘fuck’ as well as ‘bugger off’, ‘buzz off’ and ‘knock off’. This would be enough for the foundation of an innovated Lady Macbeth.
Still, it is nothing compared to Vít Bárta´s monologue that really has a Shakespearean dimension: “Today, political and economical power are one. Money produces power and power produces money. /.../ We have to admit that we as top management behave in the same manner as the existing elites /.../ we corrupt, we support favouritism /.../ I, Vít Bárta, /.../ am even tougher than that.” Isn´t it reminiscent of Malcolm´s self-accusation from Macbeth (IV.3.)?And isn´t it in this case even more up to the “reader” whether he will see in the speaker more of a scoundrel or a down-to-earth expert on reality?
However, in Rubín they wisely went for the more adequate comedy, and the loudmouth, and the goose. In this way they opened themselves a door to a sequel based on material the protagonists of which do not resemble Shakespeare´s villains in any respect as they have barely reached the puppet size of the characters from King Ubu.
The sequel was expected: the upcoming trial of the two accused, and yet mutually accusing politicians, Vít Bárta and Jaroslav Škárka, promised new material. However, from a theatrical point of view this event did not live up to the expectations: it presented chaotic and weak material. As if the aim of all the testimonies was blabbering that would ‘digest’ the truth and lies into some undistinguishable and stinking excrement. According to what I saw and heard I would not dare to decide on the guilt or innocence of the accused. However, in my eyes all of them stayed suspicious: the accused, the witnesses, politicians from all the parties who were or were not involved in the case.
The Blonde She-Beast II – The Beast Returns the Blow
The boring testimonies only now and then included some interesting, funny phrase, story or alibi. The kidnapping of Kristýna Kočí by some men in a Hummer Car, who put a balaclava on her head, turned off her cell-phone, and took her to a secret meeting somewhere outside of Prague, was among the most extraordinary stories. However, puerility (in this case resembling that of a B-action movie) is so typical for the behaviour of Czech officials of all kinds that I wasn´t sure for a moment: maybe the story is true. And maybe that is why the creators of The Blonde She-Beast II – The Beast Returns the Blow did not use it even though it is so amusing.
I think that even the creative team from Rubín was quite disappointed with the trial especially since this time the protagonists´ equipment so often failed. They spied on each other where they could; however, it was quite difficult to understand the recordings. It is a cunning paradox that Kristýna Kočí is among those, who speak quite clearly – she forgot to switch off her dictaphone, and in court presented a recording where in the end she again boasts about her intrigues and declares that she is going to “buzz off Bárta”. This recording came in useful in Rubín. It suited the image of ‘innocently naive’ Kristýnka more than her otherwise memorable declaration that she had said it “after a conceptual meeting-party, where 10 bottles of French wine were drunk, and during which Vít Bárta apart from other things asserted that he has control over Putin and Obama, and that he walks Klaus as a puppet.”
It is understandable that the more the protagonists were boring in reality the more the theatre made them amusing. Vít Bárta (Lukáš Příkazký), who became famous for his crying in court, sprays tears around from a rubber balloon like a clown. Radek John, in reality ‘only’ a jovially grim chairman of Věci veřejné, is played by Ondřej Pavelka, who turns him into a mightily clumsy drunkard. And Bárta´s wife and party colleague, Kateřina Klasnová, is simply a doll in the show, a Barbie carried around in Bárta´s suitcase. The stage version of the trial with Bárta and Škárka is far from faithful in a documentary manner; on the contrary, the passages from the phone tapping of Pavel Bém (ODS) from the times he was the Prague city mayor with the ‘godfather’ businessman Roman Janoušek are a transcribed copy of reality. These appeared during the trial with Bárta and Škárka possibly intentionally (one theory claims that the media were provided with the recording by ABL) from the theatrical point of view it definitely was a lucky revelation. The recordings gave the show zest, and indirectly made possible the return of a certain half-forgotten theatrical ‘genre’ to the Czech stage.
It was no accident that after the procurement of the Bém-Janoušek recordings the internet thrived with the comparisons of their dialogues with those of the football officials. It really seems to be coming out of a single ‘source’. Bém and Janoušek call each other Hummingbird, Mollycoddle, Maori princess and Colombo, they use secret cover names for those they are talking about, they distribute and accept “notes”, and they want to “orchestrate” the media so that the “bastards” will not pose “fucking questions”. Bém and Janoušek must have read children detective stories a lot: when masking cases that are to be solved they call them “stumps” that do not belong in woods, “deadhorses” or “envelopeproblems” that – as Janoušek hopes – never existed.
This puerility nicely matches Kristýnka´s naivety, and the atmosphere of kids´ games that all the high ranking officials and politicians in the show play. When the court, so to say, does not pay attention Bárta, Kočí and Škárka (Příkazký, Poláková and Jan Vlas) stick their tongues out at each other, make faces, throw paper balls at one another, and they even stick their bottoms out at each other like kids in primary school. Bém and Janoušek (Příkazký and Vlas again) are also a childish duo playing golf on a runty coaster from which they mainlined some heroin just a moment ago. The first one mentioned then climbs the Himalayas (the pipe above the stage), and the second one whips himself in the “sauna” with Škárka´s toupee instead of a besom. In spite of all this the show is not just simple fun.
Maybe it helped that the production used two separate narratives that the engaged matador of political drama and publicist, Karel Steigerwald, and the co-authors of this piece did not forcefully connect even though it sort of suggested itself: according to Škárka, Věci veřejné got a financial contribution before the elections from Roman Janoušek. The production is coherent simply because everything happens in the scope of one theatre evening-court trial.
The Rubín ensemble follows up the first Blonde She-beast with the same actors in the roles of Kočí and Bárta as well as other things. In the sequel they also used an absolutely simple stage (two tables, some chairs and a music stand), which is again supplemented by chalk drawings on the wall – this time illustrational ones. Here also doctor Martínek presents a lecture (this time, as an expert appointed by court, answering the question whether we are all fucked). And this time also we get to hear popular as well as original melodies sung in a cabaret-like manner: in the end Poláková steps out of her role, and sings a new hit – We are fucked.
This finale is a bit too pathetically militant but at the same time it is a commentary of sorts - a ‘figure’ quite crucial for the second Blonde She-beast. The song comments on the bad mood that the scandals provoked. Ondřej Pavelka, whose character oscillates between a court servant and a narrator, tells an introductory crazy fairy-tale that is an insane commentary of the insanity of the cases in question. Škárka´s dog, who also testifies in the theatre court, has a similar role: he repeats and thus comments on the declarations from Bárta´s ‘five-year plan’. And the scenes with the three big Czech unresolved corruption scandals – all played by Eva Salzmannová – are comments on the pettiness of the current case in court. The audience has a reason to believe that everything really is ‘greased’ anyway and that the court trial is only a device for “pacifying the common folk”. However, many of us would like to believe the Judge (Michal Dudek), who thinks that it is going to be the big scandals´ turn now.
The theatrical ‘genre’ that returns to the Czech stages with The Blonde She-beast II is the so-called live news that could experience a renaissance of sorts in the times of an over-abundance of information. Live news could become the platform of commentators, who not only document what is happening but who also state the various (!) things they think about it.
The May 2012 arrest of the Central Bohemian county representative, the former Minister of Health and a high ranking social democrat (ČSSD), David Rath, at the moment when he was carrying a seven million bribe, was a hopeful event. At the same time this new scandal proved that the secret recordings – this time police wiretap – stay a popular, quality source of comedy and Czech documentary theatre.
Ivánek, my Friend, Can we Talk? or Would You Believe That Shit, dramatization of the police wiretaps of football officials, directed by Petr Čtvrtníček, premiere April 23, 2005 in Divadlo Na zábradlí
Kristýnka or the Blonde She-beast, directed by Tomáš Svoboda, A studio Rubín, premiere April 17, 2011
The Blonde She-beast II – The Beast Returns the Blow, script Karel Steigerwald in cooperation with Kryštof Pavelka, Jan Martínek and others, directed by Tomáš Svoboda, song texts Barbora Poláková, music Miki Jelínek and B.Poláková, mask Jana Preková, A studio Rubín, premiere April 1, 2012
english version of the article from Svět a divadlo magazine, issue 3, volume 2012
translated by Ester Žantovská
Ivánek, my Friend...
Kristýnka or the Blonde She-beast
The Blonde She-beast II – The Beast Returns the Blow
