JAROSLAV MALINA AND CZECH STAGE DESIGN OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY Věra Ptáčkova Czech stage design at the start of the second half of the 20th century was -just as in the period of "Entartete Kunst" under the Nazi protectorate - bound by the rules of the new totalitarianism of Communism, which similarly confined its inner dynamic to a prescribed direction. The creativity of the more relaxed 1960s drew both subconsciously and deliberately from the remnants of earlier periods of freedom in Czechoslovakia, finding its most substantial continuity in the work of František Tröster who in the 1930s created a "synthetic theatre, enriched by the cubist discovery of structure and the surrealist discovery of new worlds" and was in 1946 the founcer of the first department of stage design at the Drama Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts. Truster's concept of monumental shape and architecturally constructed dramatic space was perfected by Josef Svobcda. A highly-developed stage technology was placed at the service of the production as a whole, allowing the qualities of specificity, challenge and prestige to reach a point of excellence in this discipline. But despite this, Svoboda's work anticipated the dawn of a new style: the vast bare stage for Leonid Leonov's Golden Chariot (directed by Alfréd Radok, 1956) determined a swing of tension between the existential empty space and commonplace detail: the accumulation of artefacts from everyday reality, marked by the passing of time. A general exhaustion of the grandiose style, of ostentatious forms of stage design, supported this tendency. The change in values was indicated by emerging artistic trends, of which arte povera was maybe the closest to the feeling of the time. Modest and worn-out materials which the artist only had to touch up a little stimulated the audience to think about things, sometimes even critically. In the Czech lands the stimulating discovery of new sources on the reverse side of the previous aesthetic range went hand in hand with tensions in the field of the visual orte H~~...--------'■--' '■.....------- the spiral of development had returned to the 1920s, when the Czech analogy to constructivism - poetism - was similarly realised on the fringe of official theatrical development. Half-century later stage design, fundamentally allergic to the slightest hint of a decorative tendency, invoked "authenticity" and "functionality". But whereas poetism manifested "pleasure in light, movement, sound, colours, physical and poetic beauty," the later programmes, instructed by subsequent drastic events of history, emphasised the difference between "reality as it should be and as it is" (to quote the programme of the Dutch Studio Scarabee which in the 1970s proclaimed a programme of linking-up artistic disciplines similar to that of the Czech interwar avantgarde movement known as Devětsil). Subsequent decades recorded a preference for deprived, socially controversial surroundings (pop-art rubbish heaps, on which royal dramas are played out). In Germany, for example, the work of Hans Walter Lenneweit reflected this idea: his wooden stable for King Lear made a natural link between the starting points of arte povera and an intention to make topical. Designs by Rudolf Heinrich for Richard Strauss's Elektro (Bavarian State Opera, Munich, 1973) are reminiscent of the archetypal compositions and neurotic structures from the hand of the Czech artist Mikuláš Medek. The set designs by Ezio Toffolutti for Peter Hacks' Marguerite in Aix (directed by Benno Besson, 1973), formed by a canvas with an almost infinite number of possibilities, offer another characteristic facet, possibly the most typical: a semantic changeability, a hidden quality of metamorphosis, organised and revealed by the actor. The proscenium arch stage was no longer the only possibility of organising space; Ariane Mnouchkine's arrival in the 1960s was also guaranteed by the use of unusual performing spaces, anchored in the discoveries of the "happening" movement. The scenography of this new current was given a name. If I pass over Miroslav Rutte - who on the occasion of the premiere of Romain Rolland's Game of Love and Death at the Prague National Theatre in 1926 used the term action in connection with the function of Vlastislav Ur\rmnn c cot- thar ii~r rabínmi ■-»+ 4-lao tianiM>im/i r\£ +-U« mine %*!*+*• 51 basic transformation in theatrical team work Dejstvennaja scenografija - action scenography. In line with contemporary tendencies in design and drama, items : appear on the stage torn from their normal context, objects with a "memory", pointing the way towards this context; they enter the creative í process both as a memento and as a means of alienation. Only the 3 difference in the concept of empirical and dramatic reality distances itself from the aesthetic canon of the first half of the age. The empirical i reality is transformed into the dramatic not by a process of stylisation, but by its connection with other objects on stage, and above all the actor's performance. The procedures themselves do not count a on refashioning the whole, but on the selection and changeability :i of particular details. New forms of André Breton's objets trouvés find continual application in the history of art; reality itself is so ambiguous /, that it is far more adventurous to make discoveries in it than to create u it artificially. The elevation of the process of creation over its results ii is present in the theatre too. Stage space is transformed by the dramatic ik action, properties and furniture become changeable elements, tí. subordinate to the will of the actor. Sets and costumes increasingly )d relate to the audience as a part of a production commentary rather than fii as a suggestive instrument of dramatic illusion. In such a situation :zi theatrical costume experiences a renaissance; it has the same opportunity as the set - even greater - to express the intention of the work, ra It would seem that the artist Libor Fára sensed this need for change du when he created the stage sets for Jan Grossman's production of Jarry's na Ubu roi at the Theatre on the Balustrade in 1964, sets which expressed a this growing current through their poetic. An old brass bedstead, a- a fireman's ladder, metal cannisters, a rocking chair and three dustbins )ýt grotesquely turned into a saluting platform or a chapel, into a jewel box, i a an aspersorium, instruments of execution. Through the metaphoric idy possibilities of scenic elements and their new dimensions as properties Stě Fára became one of the initiators of the „action scenography" of the ■cce following decade; seven years earlier than David Borovskij realised his 3ko famous stage designs for Yuri Ljubimov's Hamlet at the Taganka Theatre rův in Moscow, designs which relied "only" on drapery and which stand sta among the symbols of the new style. reeling ot lire, quite ditterent from the pursuit ot visual mannerism. The objects on stage belonged to a worn-out socially deprived environment (dirty wallpaper and battered furniture, evidence of an damaged and threatened existence whose equivalent could be the agonised pathos of the artists of the Czech informel). Together with a rigorous functionality and raw "authentic" materials, they could have come from the period of constructivism. Hrůza, a pupil of František Tröster, defiantly emphasised the extreme shallowness of the Drama Club stage and the game with space, forcing the action down to the footlights and thus charging the zone between audience and actor with a tension similar to that achieved by his teacher on stages of larger proportions. Truster's dramatic space and Hruza's non-space are the two sides of the same coin, even though one route led to the world of Corbusieresque architecture and cubist analyses, and the otherto the more plebeian sphere of happenings, pop art and arte pověro. It could not be acknowledged earlier: in the mid-1960s a medieval mansion stage construction (designed by Karel Vaca) appeared on the large stage of the Mahen Theatre in Brno for the Comedy of the Martyrdom and Glorious Resurrection of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, directed by Evžen Sokolovský. This too with its rawness and the emphasis on primitive qualities can be attributed to the same stream. The international trend towards "action scenography" was realised all the more intensely in Czechoslovakia given the weakness of the competition from productions of the large theatres. The 1970s and 1980s were also strongly determined by political issues. In the theatre, the Soviet invasion of August 1968 resulted in the breaking-up, forced transformation and interrupted continuity of most of the creative working teams. On the other hand, there were, paradoxically, "fateful encounters" between artists who had formerly been remote from one another, leading to new and distinctive sources of inspiration. The method of survival was through secrecy; the establishment kept the facts secret, the public - especially the specialist public - their opinions. Allegory made conspirators s was Miroslav Melena. The naturalism of the details (above all furniture and properties from everyday life, maybe from a junk shop) which came á together in the absurd "front room" in Thirteen Perfumes (Jan Schmid, 1975), characterises the dialectic of their humour and is evidence of an inner relationship with the work of Luboš Hrůza. Nevertheless, this j. production is an exception from the formal point of view, relying more p on the urgent claims of the text and direction than on the unifying hand 1 of the designer. He understood the requirement for the set to be functional 2 more in the way of an inclination towards abstract construction and a clear basic quality of colour; that which for him could be changed was ^ mostly the basic sterometric shapes. Melena's scenography is closely i bound up with the composition and colourfulness of costume. I In the designs for 0. A. Jurjev's Small Pogrom in the Station Buffet | (directed by Arnošt Goldflam, Theatre on the Balustrade 1992) the & appealing construction of the dramatic space is accentuated through the j expressive lighting of glass slabs, which paradoxically returns (or shifts?) this work into a close relationship with Truster's programme of design for the stage. Studio Ypsilon was, to start with, a part of the Naive Theatre of Liberec. Although this was a puppet theatre for children, Schmid and Melena were still able to implement their views about style; they thus initiated in this field - which even in the Czech Republic had up to now stood on the edge of the creative revolution - not only a stress on the quality of design but also an accomplished technology and involvement with the live actor. In addition to its dramatic function the puppet acquired a role as a singular visual object of design which is a direct inspiration to freer methods of form - especially interdisciplinary. The relationship of the puppet to space, to the proportions of the human p and puppet world, to aesthetic and technical possibilities (acknowledged and unacknowledged construction) evoked a qualitative reversal in the development of the genre. And interpretation appears here as well: ť perhaps most powerfully at the moment of alienation manifested by the S presence on stage of the puppet operator. The most innovative creative path in the craft of puppetry v on the Czech stage in the 1970s was taken by the wood carver František Vítek. His work initiated a dramatic unity between the poetic text, - the artefact of the dramatic hero and the artefact of the set (with the IIICdLIC, CVCII Ulli iiunv. u iv.au i. vvaj uivjjvu v/y mv. nu^| y>-...«^ .^^.. In 1960 Vratislav Habr became head of design and in 1964 a recent graduate from the Drama Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts, Jaroslav Malina, was engaged as stage designer. They were joined in 1968 by the graduate director Karel Kříž and the dramaturge Vlasta Gallerová, and in 1969 by the costume designer Helena Anýžová. For more than a decade this young team worked to establish its way of expression and successfully withstood onslaughts from external powers. From the beginning in Liberec Jaroslav Malina matched up programmatically to the theatre of the 1960s as a participant and fellow-creator of the new wave. After 1970s Liberec, he met in Hradec Králové in 1980 the director Jan Grossman, banished from Prague for political reasons, and in 1983 the former film director Ivan Balada on the stage of the Municipal Theatre in Zlín (at that time Gottwaldov). As part of his inheritance from Tröster, Jaroslav Malina includes in his work a curiosity about space which expands into the psycho-social sphere - the relationship between the audience and actor - thus approaching the perception of the avantgarde of these years. Elsewhere and with other directors he too tended towards the use of irregular space, as it was defined by Peter Scherhaufer of the Brno theatre Goose on a String. In his set designs for Georg Buchner's Leonce and Lena (directed by Ivan Rajmont) for the Drama Studio in Ústí nad Labem, the stage, auditorium and foyer all became acting spaces. This unlikely, and therefore surprising, method of bringing together the audience and the actor was determined by a distinctive feature of Malina's approach to the theatre: the audience is for him an active participant in the production - at least in feeling. Malina thus engaged in the struggle of his generation for theatrical truth. He understood "authentic" materials, the only ones recognised by the avantgarde as a part of that theatrical truth, as an artistic resource in the same way as the antillusionist cleansing method, building a passionate barrier against the new decorativism, and not in any way as an a priori requirement in accordance with the new theatrical fundamentalism. He thus prefers natural materials not because of their ad hoc "authenticity", but for their dramatic effect, for the deep lyrical hyperbole they provoke. His lyricism is part of his personal make-up, and the hyperbole is related to Truster's dynamic spirit. Moreover - and as one of the few of his generation - his activity Midsummer Nignt'S Dream and his colourful actors, for a space where the ceiling slopes to the floor and the floor rises to the celing as though the terms "below" and "above" were no longer valid (Karel Kříž, MDP, Prague, 1984). The colourful lyricism of Strindberg's Miss Julie (Karel Kříž, National Theatre, Prague, 1988, costumes by Helena Anýžová), broken up by actors in black as though from an expressionist painting, was reminiscent of the distantly deceptive luminosity of his painted landscapes, interrupted here by the black contour of the sun, there by a cross, set almost incidentally in the peaceful countryside like signs of some latent anxieties. A depopulated grey cube of waste land for Tankred Dorst's drama Merlin (Miroslav Krobot, Realist Theatre, Prague, 1988) would appear to be exceptional in Malina's use of material (metal sheets). Even this was an opportunity for him to define the role of the costume, its artistic and dramatic radiance. The rehabilitation of costume as a basic component of the scheme of theatrical design likewise distinguishes "action scenography" from that of František Tröster. Jaroslav Malina's gift was in being able to stand - in the difficult competition of a strong generation - as one of the formulators of the new approach in stage design. At the end of the 1980s he sought a new starting point, sensitively perceived both as birth and as the exhaustion of a style. For him, an old and yet new source of inspiration the model of theatrical wings (a concept earlier strictly ruled out) which he used in a production of Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost (Karel Kříž, National Theatre, Prague, 1987). The replication and the spacial positioning of the baroque wings was only partially upheld, the unpainted upper parts placing this "retro" in a postmodern context. The contemporary emphasising of quotations from the past, the defiant return to forbidden or taboo sources, was already an indication of the poetics of the 1990s. After being forced for political reasons to leave the Drama Club in Prague, the director Jan Kačer and the set designer Otakar Schindler (b. 1923) spent the entire decade from 1976 to 1986 in the theatre in Ostrava. Otakar Schindler who - as a pupil of the artist Emil Filla -respected especially the artistic laws of scenography (including colour) often used in expressive design, was linked mostly with the school III yillovd nau [/i-iiuh.». iu jv.,»«. m [,.s.^ -. ___---- they performed onstage, in the auditorium, and in all the foyer spaces. Schindler also perceived costume as a dramatic actor, often more important to the production than the set itself, and was one of the first methodically to combine historical, contemporary, fantastic and fashionable motifs. The last of these he often - especially in historical plays - emphasised as early as the first designs, through confrontations of his own drawings with period and contemporary fashion designs. At the beginning of the 1990s - in a different political climate - Schindler and Kačer joined the Vinohrady Theatre and with an extraordinary sensitivity towards the change in atmosphere and styles applied the retro approach and renewed the function of flat theatrical wings, painting, and (with some slight reticence) their ironic illusive operation. During his early work in Ostrava, Schindlers colleague was the twenty-year younger Jan Dušek, both one of František Truster's last personal pupils and one of the most striking initiators of the change in style. As his most important variable he chose objects used onstage, the element of improvisation and "non-definedness", in close conjunction with the costumed dramatic character, and above all the element of humour, the dialectic swing of views of one and the same phenomenon. Costume became for him a flexible property, especially for its classic function; just as in his stage settings, where he conceived Truster's architectural space as completely and continually changed by the actor. Paradoxically, his work is more reminiscent of Antonín Heythum's anti-illusionist approach to theatre than that of František Tröster: an analogy of stage design which, as the interwar theatre director Jindřich Honzl said, "is nothing in order to be everything". And he too set used objects, fragments of everyday life, into new contexts. The doors from rubbish dumps which create the set design for Crime and Punishment (Pilsen, 1980) are direct descendants of André Breton's objets trouvés. This suggestive stage design, provoking the imagination and rigorous in its choice of non-illusive means gives way at the end of the 1980s in his work from its strictly compositional positions; the set design for Büchner's Dantons Tod (V. Strnisko, National Theatre, Prague, 1989) is equipped with the up-to-now strictly forbidden painted scenery ir> -iQtk, rpntnrv =;tvip Provocative retro is however thrown into doubt by the builder's scaffolding in the middle or tne nan. as wen as the humour and the suddenly alienating element in the set design itself, it provides an opportunity for the actors' acrobatics. In the course of the 1990s Dušek made dramatic use of colour, light and the layering of the stage floor in the striking set design for Shakespeare's Othello (Z. Černín, Municipal Theatre, Brno, 1996); simple and graphically pure shapes which could be distantly inspired by Robert Wilson, or the staircase like the twin of some contemporary German productions (F. Hanig, Kleist's Prince of Homburg). His set design for J. A. Pitínský's Magic Mountain (Theatre in Dlouhá Street, Prague, 1997) links the purest method of constructivist charm and the changeability of action scenography with a new lyricism and a new figuration. The designer Marta Roszkopfová played an important role in the style of this time. From the mid-1970s she and the director Josef Janík were responsible for creating the profile of the Petr Bezruč Theatre in Ostrava. Roszkopfová, a pupil of Jozef Szajna, Ladislav Vychodil and Ludmila Purkyňová, expressed herself in an audacious way through expressive gesture and extreme emotionality; above all through a painterly method of stage design - in so far as nowadays this independent dramatic discipline can without prejudice be forced completely into the visual arts enclosure. Her deep emotionality gravitates towards the symbol and the striking sign, through which she literally binds the audience to a common vision of the performance. Nevertheless, the bloody embroidery on Marie's white shirt (Georg Büchner, Woyzeek, 1985) - just like the harsh contours of the military overcoats or provocatively obscene concepts for Gertrude and Ophelia in Hamlet (1984) - does attack subliminal levels of consciousness. The unity of set and costume - in which costume regularly dominates - becomes in the "action age" a still more important part of the production statement, and still more often guarantees the artistic and dramatic statement of a single personality. The rift between the two components and the simultaneous suppression of the role of the costume conceived in the 1930s programme of Miroslav Kouřil began to heal over in the 1970s. The instances where Jaroslav Malina has designed both set and costume amount to more than half his work for the theatre. The rpmainrW have hpen parried out in Cooperation with leading costume designers - Jitka Křižková, Irena üreitova, Joser jeiineK, Martin viseK ana Miroslav Melena. His most frequent team work has been with Helena Anýžová and Marie Franková. In the case of Anýžová, it has been as though Malina needed to confirm in his schemes her feeling for pastel colours and lyrical metaphor; whilst with Marie Franková, who builds on semanticising details (dramatic and grotesque), there has been an emphasis on unusual coloured composition. The possibilities of colour, especially its new and unexpected use, plays a major role in Jaroslav Malina's work. From the 1970s the personality of costume designers again - after around a half a century - began to come to the fore. Josef Jelinek's costume design - especially its otherness - was anticipated by that of the Bratislava school in Slovakia. If the Czech school reflected the architectural and rational tradition, the Slovak school, partly under Polish influence, absorbed greater qualities of imagination, expression, painterliness and irrationality (to use Vratislav Effenberger's division of the field of art into the rational tectonic and the imaginative atectonic, the tectonic is the domain of the Czech school). Jelínek made his mark with an inventive combination of unusual textiles into the patchwork compositional principle, experimenting with weaving technology and using special and often very complicated styles. Irena Greifová (trained as a sculptor) made use of an aggressively grotesque vision in her outstanding work with the directors Ivan Rajmont and Jan Grossman, in which the set designer was Ivo Zídek. Their creations for the theatre follow the stage action with maximum flexibility (the designs for Chekhov's Three Sisters [Ivan Rajmont, Drama Studio, Ústí nad Labem, 1982] - created out of screens which gradually disintegrate with the drama into phantom skeletons belong to the treasure house of Czech theatre). At the end of the decade the Žídek-Greifová partnership moved to the Theatre on the Balustrade in Prague, to put their signatures to Rajmont's work on Albert Camus's Caligula and Karel Steigerwald's Tartar Feast. In the case of Caligula they used drapery (for the set and the flowing costumes) and in The Tartar Feast a simultaneous set on different levels made from pales, as raw and hard as the heroine's black chemise or the Father's funeral garb. With the arrival of Jan Grossman, especially in his productions of Moliere's catastrophe, at the unstable construction of the stage floor which provocatively "splendid" pastel-coloured beings crossed without a care. The piles of books belonging to the writer Kopřiva in Largo desolato changing into chairs send shivers down our spines just like the hero's eternally white dressing gown: not grotesque functionality but disfunctionality is the driving motor of our imagery. In place of construction, deconstruction; ,/p a nirhirp nf the world in whose creation we share. or tne Bratislava Mcaaemy or reriormmy hus. uiicr b bucnuyiapriy is directly integrated with the dramatic persona - to such a degree that he anthropomorphises the scenery. The production of Leonid Andreyev's The Red Laugh (directed by Peter Scherhaufer, 1975) culminates with the splitting of a cupboard, the dramatic tension originates in the course of the actor's collisions with the stage furniture, in the course of the transformation of this object. In the 1980s Ján Zavarský formulated design is completed by Boris Mysliveček, enchanted by tne perioa ot tne 1920s, by light-weight coloured constructions, interlocking architecture, piling up new trompe I'oeil painted facades of the high-rise buildings of the present age. In Ludvík Kundera's version of Comenius's Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart (Peter Scherhaufer, 1983) the painter and graphic artist of altar pictures and existential themes, Milivoj Husák, combined - with a sensitivity towards the sphere of mysterious and surrealist chance - the world of his paintings and the world i of theatre and, just as Jaroslav Malina did elsewhere and otherwise, j offered this world to the theatre as a source of inspiration. < The overlapping of these projects consists in the choice of sign, with S efforts to stage the unconscious (a permanent component of the poetics of the HaTheatre). The production There Were 5 and a Half (Arnošt i Goldflam-Josef Kovalčuk, 1985, designed by Václav Houf) which took e place ten years before the first public post-totalitarian exhibition if of Czech informel (Old Town Hall, Prague, 1991) portrayed - as it were - j the same human situation encroaching on abstraction through i: an insistent statement about the dull cage of contemporary reality. That time the vulnerable square millimetres of Mikuláš Medek's landscapes, Jana Koblasa's Finis terrae, the bloodless panels of Jiří Valenta; this time /, dirty screens, dirty grey actors, dirty grey lighting. "In place of I a metaphorical reflex of reality, the object and chief theme of the production a became the reflecting subject, the inner world of feelings and visions." tí (the joint project PATHS, 1983-84). o The Theatre Goose on a String's "Project 1985 - stage readings ;y from the contemporary literature of the nations of the Soviet Union" :o was also focused on irregular space. Each of the eight evenings was ní differently composed, with a different relationship between actor and audience. The House full of Miracles (script by Karel Král, directed EC by Peter Scherhaufer, designed by Jan Konečný) conducted the :e audience through eight booths made of different materials and f) differently laid out. The space was changed, the audience manipulated; lu it was not just a passive observer, but a direct partaker; the subject of ci the action as well as the dramatised object; both a participant and :y. part of the setting for the rest of the audience. The stage design and ae the direction together tended towards a non-thematic theatre of sensation, towards communication witn tne auuienct hul um uk vaoi? u. amazement, but through harmony, through co-creation. Moreover, Jan Konečný (one of the main co-creators of HaTheatre's profile) tried through stage design - through the use of the sign - to mediate the philosophy of the production. His scenography is also tied to direction in a living way; he follows the projection of the actors' inner states with an analogously subtle apprehension through variations of the basic design symbol and changes in construction. Although at these moments he too puts himself in the current of "action scenography", he belongs to the generation preparing the new divide. Having studied as an architect at the Czech Technical University and with Josef Svoboda at the School of Applied Arts, he is attracted to the complex constructive solution and to new technological materials (metal, plastic, neon). For Radek John's Memento (directed by Josef Moravek, Hradec Králové, 1988) he designed a revolving cube of iron rods - occupying the whole stage and fixed to pivots - in which the actors in their unstable existence stood, fell and hung. The stage design became the driving force of the production and linked the 1960s feeling for a large visually dramatic form with a "new monumentalism". At the Prague Quadrennial of 1979 Jan Vančura in the Czechoslovak exhibit won the silver medal (no gold medal was awarded). Vančura, previously unknown, was a glassmaker, industrial designer and painter obsessed by the theme of the interiors of historic theatres. For this romantic character the stage was a kind of Aladdin's cave, full of illusionist beauty. An admirer of Friedrich Schinkel - at a time when this brief relationship had not yet generally matured - he created painted sets full of fictional architectural and three-dimensional details of historical and historicising environments, but clearly dated in our age. Through the shifting of shape between past and present he developed a style which in the Czech context was in advance of its time. His most important sets were for Handel's Rodelinda (Brno, 1984) and, using rich period detail, replicated fragments of late Roman architecture. The painted light sources on the left-hand side of the scenery were supposed to be illuminating the right-hand side - Vančura allowed the left side to remain in fictive shadow as a smooth grey surface, whilst he brought the right to life by a baroque trompe I'oeil method. Alienation, Illusion, disfunctionality. He was again awarded the silver medal at the 1983 Quadrennial by a clairvoyant international jury for his principle distinctive quality, a defiantly acknowledged decorativeness. It was actually Jaroslav Malina, with a strong feeling for future development, who was responsible for bringing this artist into the theatre. We can thus divide the scenography of the second half of this century into three parts. The first maintains a continuity with the classical compositional concept of modern scenic form, respecting or even giving precedence to the visual element. To this belongs František Troisier's late work, that of Josef Svoboda, Oldřich Šimáček and Květoslav Bubeník, and the early work of Vladimir Nyvlt: personalities who gave form to the 1950s and 1960s and at the same time brought the era of visually impressive stage design to a close. The generation of Jaroslav Malina set out on a revolutionary path with completely different priorities. The transitional 1970s thus come under the sign of this second movement, preferring chance, improvisation and a-typical theatrical spaces. Earlier classical approaches cease to be valid; the personal and individual standpoint, the ich-form, triumphs. The realities of art and of life, until now separated by an insuperable barrier, begin to interpenetrate deliberately. The work of Jaroslav Malina touches on the border area of both outlooks; for this reason the design quality is perhaps more important with him than with any of his circle - especially in colour and in painting itself, to which he continued to devote himself. The third part looks towards the 1990s, towards a new transformation of priorities; a common perception of design as an intentionally nostalgic and playful - even lethal - exploring. Everything is at the designer's disposal, the past stands as a resurrected storehouse of inspiration which can be drawn from without acknowledgement of any rules. This new feeling of reality also touches Jaroslav Malina. It can be observed not only in his "traditional" set design for Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost, but to some extent even in Miss Julie, which likewise relied on "retro-inspiration..." on a search for new - and at the same time old - sources of sensibility. 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