Summary 6/2013
The last instalment of Miroslav Petříček’s series “Sceptics and Subverts” is entitled “Happiness and Misfortune at Court” and is dedicated to Charles de Saint-Évremond. The following section “A Rural Playwright in Town” reports on a survey about the playwright and director Martin Františák (Rubeš: “From Poetry to Agitprop”) and includes an interview with him by Blanka Křivánková (“Not to Lose Sensitivity and Faith”). The section “Conquerors” consists of essays by Michaela Mojžišová on Konwitschny’s direction of Verdi’s Attila (“Verdi’s Hun in Vienna”) and by Tereza Krčálová on the latest production of Teatr.doc, 150 Reasons Why Not to Defend the Country and Even 7 More (“Analysis of a Disaster”). The section “The End of One National Theatre” returns to the final period of Róbert Alföldi’s era at the Hungarian National Theatre with an essay by Tamás Jászay (“National Turnaround”) and a review of the productions Angels in America and Mephisto by Andrea Rádai (“Angels and Demons”). Selected productions from the Festival d’Avignon 2013 are reviewed in the section “Courts and Cabaret” by Soňa Šimková in her essay “Treacherous and Magical Spaces”. Tatiana Brederová offers a portrait of the Russian Joseph Beyus Theatre considering the field of documentary theatre in her essay “Reviving a Historic Memory”. The section “A Memory of Joseph Beyus” also includes an interview with a leading personality of this theatre, Michail Kaluzhsky (“A Viewer Should Not Leave the Auditorium Contented”). Michaela Mojžišová looks back at the Salzburger Festspiele and Edinburgh International Festival in the section “Invoking the Spirits” (“Performer, Pensioner and Dictator”), as does Dana Silbiger-Sliuková (“Samples of the World Theatre”). In the section “And Kosky in Berlin” Lenka Šaldová writes on the Komische Oper Berlin following Barrie Kosky’s start as director in September 2012 (“The King is Dead! Long Live the King!”). The section entitled “Death and Other Aberrations” consists of Tatiana Brederová’s essay about the Moscow festival of experimental theatre, Teritorium (“A Territory of Freedom”) and Natálie Preslová’s reviews the production of Vitrac’s play Victor, or Power to the Children at Théâtre de la Ville (“The Excommunicated Surrealist is Coming Back”) and an unconventional site-specific adaptation of Meyrink’s Golem on Prague’s Štvanice Island (“Waiting for Golem”). The closing section “Apocalypse with Grant-in-aid” consists of an essay by Kalus X entitled “Supplements to the End”, Karel Král’s essay “The Trap of Grants (Documentary Theatre, Sample II; Divadelná Nitra 2013)” and Eva Kyselová’s short review of the stage reading of the Divadlo Letí entitled “From Germany in Brief – Times Four”, foreshadowing the play of this issue, which is Best New Europlay by the Romanian author Peca Ştefan. In this issue’s “Comedy Mix” we introduce comedian Anthony Jeselnik. Lucie Lomová’s closing instalment of her comic strip Shooting Star is entitled The Finale. This issue also includes photographs recalling the inaugural presentation of the Ferdinand Vaněk Award at the Dejvické divadlo in November 2013.
A Rural Playwright in Town In his essay From Poetry to Agitprop Josef Rubeš analyses texts for radio and theatre, firstly their formal aspects and then their themes and motifs. He concludes that a playwright’s imagination tends to weaken particularly in later titles, poetry and strong metaphors are ever more often swapped for clichés, content and structural predictability. Františák’s plays are classical theatre texts and especially in the case of the earlier pieces their dominant principle is a poetic language that seeks original word phrasing in order to express often archetypal themes, a language-symbol. Plays like The Bride or At Home are primary examples of this kind of work and in the latter the author even let his characters talk in Moravian Wallachian dialect. Františák’s plays can be thematically divided to those plays from a contemporary village with an ordinary man in their centre (At Home, The Bride and Karla) and those about “exceptional people” (Eskymo is Welzl, The Čapek Case, Frankenstein). Rubeš also observes that a similar rural inspiration, including the language, can be found in Irish drama, specifically in plays by Františák’s contemporaries Conor McPherson and Martin McDonagh. Františák’s latest work, the radio play The Downpour, also emerges from the rural surroundings of rather impoverished social classes. According to Rubeš its plot is rather stilted, characters are simplistic and lacking in challenge. Poetical language has slipped away and the play looks more like a TV production, with clichés and unequivocal condemnations in responses. Similar criticisms can also be made of Františák’s plays about “exceptional people”. In the following interview Not to Lose Sensitivity and Faith Františák expresses his strong belief that it is worth writing new plays, possibly for an amateur company – in fact he collaborates with one in the village of Karolinka and their productions have attracted a considerable audience. According to Františák a lot of attractive stories and dramas can be found in both town and country. He compares the search for them to fishing or hunting, sometimes rich and at other times in vain. He also believes that that we often unnecessarily underestimate a spectator and his or her culture of perception. As for the difference between theatre based on traditional plays and that dealing with post-dramatic texts, he thinks that the result always depends on what suits an artist better, but in both cases perhaps the most important thing is not to lose sensitivity and faith.
The Trap of Grants The title heralds the follow-up to last year’s essay (see www.svetadivadlo.cz – eWAT II) again dedicated by Karel Král to documentary theatre or at least those examples of it offered at the festival Divadelná Nitra in 2013. The offer was affected by the fact that majority of the staged “documentary” productions were commissioned by the festival itself. It was even more obvious than last year that this is a kind of art that comes into existence on commission. The central theme was “Parallel Lives – 20th Century in the Eyes of the Secret Police” and in many productions it was conveyed straightforwardly but in an infectious way. Almost all artists felt the need to project something and to accompany pictures with relatively similar music. Passages intended to arouse emotions were usually accompanied by piano and cello while wistful settings were similarly superseded by a deafening rock or orchestral uproar. Drama was evoked by repeated sounds, sometimes more or less a death knell, at others a suspiciously approaching shark from Jaws. Productions resembled adverts in their shape and rather desultory communicativeness. The emotional character was not based in theatrical action. A typical production in this respect was Follow Me (Up) by the New Theatre from Krakow, the authors of which did not treat either the archive stories or the art seriously. There was a man in a wheelchair on the stage constantly shouting obscenities at a go-go dancer, but there was no emotion in this. The only powerful impact was from film documentaries: particularly horrific was a shot from Warsaw where a police armoured car ran over a protester. In the international competition of theatres from France, Hungary, Germany, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia the best piece was perhaps Aleš Březina’s opera Toufar (the National Theatre of Prague, directed by Petr Zelenka) about a priest tortured to death by communists. It is a suggestive picture of power treating a man as a chess piece and the work is close to a passion play.