Summary 4/2013
The next instalment of the series “Sceptics and Subverts” is entitled “The Art of Politics” and in it Miroslav Petříček comments on excerpts from “Political Considerations on Pursuance of the State” by Gabriel Naudé. The first essay in the section “Instructions of a Dream” also has a political theme – “Right-wing Left-wing Theatre” by Roman Pawłowski reflects on the authenticity of left-wing theatre in Poland on the basis of the Demirski-Strzępka duo production Dario Fo Sent Instructions. The section continues with a review of Krystian Lupa’s production The City of Dreams by Paweł Sztarbowski (“The False Palimpsest”). In the section “János Béla Kornél Gábor Réka” Jakub Škorpil considers this year’s Hungarian Showcase (“Samples of the Alternative”) and Vladimír Mikulka writes on the Katona Jószef Színház production Musik, Musikk, Musique (“Reminiscent Remembrance on the World which did not exist”). In the section “Rimini Non-Theatre” Martin Sládeček writes about “experience” productions by the Rimini Protokoll Remote Berlin and 10 Antenkilometer Dresden (“From the Theatre towards an Experience”) and complements this with an interview with the literary manager Sebastian Brünger (“Sometimes Even a Little Spark is Enough”). The next section “Schauspielburgensemble” stays with the German language and Barbora Schnelle reviews productions based on texts by Friederike Meyröcker and Elfriede Jelinek (“Two Austrian Women at Theatertreffen”), Dominka Široká writes about the production of Ewald Palmetshofer’s play brigands.guilty gender at the Burgtheater (“On the Track of a New Bernahrd”), and Vojtěch Varyš (“Heroes…”) reports on the new productions by the directors Dušan Pařízek (William Tell), Alvis Hermanis (The Story of Kaspar Hauser), Thomas Ostermeier (An Enemy of the People), Robert Wilson (Peter Pan) and Frank Castorf (The Duel). Three further sections look at Czech drama. “The Decline of Laureates” begins with Mervin J. Minky’s essay “The Ends and Beginnings of Theatres” and continues with reflections on productions of winning texts from the Radok dramatic contest: this year’s Retreat in Slovan (S.d.Ch.: “May Première of the Tempest…”) and last year’s Vladimir’s Whore (Švejda: “Strange Time”). The next section belongs to the playwright Lenka Lagronová (all q.v.) and besides Tereza Marečková’s essay (“The Extreme Intimacy of Lenka Lagronová”) it includes reviews of the productions From Stardust (Kerbr: “Are We Lonesome, Or Are We Not?”) and Čupakabra (Zahálka: “Hunting Scenes from West Kłodzko”). The section “And of Drinkers” (all q.v.) foreshadows the play of this issue which is Petr Zelenka’s Dubbing Street, and alongside a review of its production at the Dejvické Theatre (Král: “Bottoms Up!”) it offers an interview with the author, entitled “Under the Sod and with Booze”. In the section “Comedy Mix… and Comics” readers can find extracts from the performance of the League of Gentlemen at Drury Lane, the traditional “Kaleidoscope” and a review of The Cherry Orchard directed by Jan Frič (Urbanová: “So Long, the old Zábradlí!”). In order to rectify the error we made in the previous issue we publish two instalments of Lucie Lomová’s comic strip Shooting Star: the ninth - “On Hunting!” and the tenth - “The Meeting”.
The Decline of Loners In her essay “The Extreme Intimacy of Lenka Lagronová” Tereza Marečková deals first with the playwright’s works The Cry, The Wing and From Stardust. She sees them as a culmination of Lagronová’s production style, describing it as intimate and autobiographic. She notices similar formal constituents (disintegrating language of characters as well as the structure of texts) and repeated and recurring motifs (relationships with parents, particularly with the mother; solitude; faith; dreams). At the same time Marečková shows how these characteristic features of Lagronová’s plays change in these texts, how reconciliation, attempts to understand and (perhaps also) forgive are preferred to the earlier emotional tension and formal experiments. In his review of the production From Stardust directed by Štěpán Pácl at the National Theatre, Jan Kerbr acknowledges the worthy performances by the cast, but believes that the director relies far too much on the construction of separate scenes and cares less about the mood of the production, leaving it disjointed and lacking in emotional animation. Čupakabra, the most recent text by Lenka Lagronová, again staged by Štěpán Pácl, this time with the company Masopust, is an adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk’s book Drive Your Plough over the Bones of the Dead. The model is “a strange whodunit” but in her adaptation Lagronová softens this feature and focuses more on the peculiar martyrdom of the main heroine. Traditional Lagronová themes also recur, such as religious belief (and bigotry), reclusion and separation from the society. Already in the adaptation – and more distinctly in the production – there are many surprisingly comic or even grotesque features.
The Decline of Drinkers Dubbing Street is the latest play by Petr Zelenka, the most translated Czech playwright and renowned filmmaker. The title of Karel Král’s opening essay “Bottoms Up!” refers to both the drinkers’ toast and exitus. “There are two things the Czechs are really good at: drinking and dubbing” is a tag line of Zelenka’s own production at the Dejvické Theatre. The author links both these gifts into a story that could have been something of a Nordic tragedy if the playwright – also in a characteristically Czech way – was not inclined to fun and jokes. He shows the decline of one dubbing studio and one drinker as a comedy ending in a tragedy. He says it depicts the end of the 1990s, the end of illusions and optimism. However, he does this not through a symbolic play but in the form of what could be called a psychologically reliable sitcom. He shows a presenter and forecaster, a famous person who is the personification of success primarily because he gives an impression that fulfilling of dreams is easy. However, it turns out that on the contrary he is the one who ruins everything. His fall creates a vortex pulling others down. The strength of the production, which is waiting for a new Czech première, lies in the balance it maintains between comedy and tragedy, between exaggeration and naturalistic fidelity. In this respect, the performance by Martin Myšička in the lead role is particularly admirable. The text of the play is preceded by an interview with Petr Zelenka (“Under the Sod and with Booze”) who says among other things: “One of the tasks of theatre is to demythologize the recent so-called economic crisis and to put it into a wider context of a general failure of the system /…/ This crisis does not have an economic solution but it could have artistic ones.”