1c


Introduction

Barbara Day


In the centre of Prague on the evening of 17 November 1989, a student procession was attacked by
police. The procession was to commemorate the date in 1939 when the Nazis closed the Czech
universities; the attack was part of a power struggle between two factions in the ruling Communist
party. The aim of both was to ensure the continuation of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia;
that night saw the beginning of the end.

One student who escaped the attack, which took place on a main boulevard a few yards from the
National Theatre, made his way to a suburban fringe theatre. The ‘Junior Klub na Chmelnici’ is
scarcely a theatre; it’s a bare hall used as an occasional venue by rock groups, amateur shows,
provincial tours and avant-garde performers who were not welcomed by the authorities in central
Prague. On the night of 17 November, the student, whose home town was Brno, knew he would find
performers from Brno’s avantgarde companies Divadlo Na provázku (Theatre on a String) and HaDivadlo
(HaTheatre).

The two companies were staging a joint production which they described as a ‘living newspaper’,
Rozrazil (Break through); this ‘issue’ – so far the first and only – was ‘On Democracy’. The show
consisted of sketches, poetry, dance, and a short play, a semi-documentary – author uncredited –
called Tomorrow! about the beginnings of the Czechoslovak state. I had seen a performance the
previous October (in the meantime the production had been banned) and been struck by the
straightforward, factual treatment of themes which under the Communists had been ideologised, and
by the emotion of the audience’s response. On 17 November 1989 the response must have been still
stronger, for the student came onstage in the course of the performance to describe the drama he
had just witnessed in central Prague – quite a scoop for a ‘living newspaper’. Other students
telephoned their friends in the theatres, and by the next afternoon a meeting had been convened in
the Realistické divadlo (Realist Theatre) at which actors from the Prague theatres decided to
cancel further performances and read to the audiences a manifesto issued by the students and
theatre people.

It was not by chance that the first people to support the students were the actors and their
colleagues from the theatres. A network of theatre people who opposed the Communist régime had come
together over the previous two years – a network which ranged from such ‘official’ people as the
head of the theatre department in the state literary agency, through the ‘semidissident’
playwrights Daniela Fischerová and Karel Steigerwald, to the notorious jailbird Václav Havel.
Stealthy gatherings took place in the smoke-filled offices of the Realist Theatre. At meetings of
the Union of Theatre Artists, dramaturges risked their careers by demanding the inclusion in the
repertoire of plays by forbidden playwrights. (Goaded to a defensive reply at one of these
meetings, one bureaucrat found his unguarded words recorded and published in a samizdat newspaper;
cf Plays International, April 1989.) From the beginning of 1988 the atmosphere was confused and
sometimes threatening. In January 1989, when most people still thought it was impossible to stage
the work of a Charter 77 signatory, Josef Topol’s End of the Carnival was revived in the provincial
town of Cheb; in June, Topol was led onto the stage of Prague’s Vinohrady Theatre to acknowledge
the applause at the premiere of his new play, The Voices of Birds. And Václav Havel – although
under threat of another prison sentence – was everywhere that summer; attending a student revival
of Daniela Fischerová’s Dog and Wolf (banned for the previous ten years) at a cellar theatre in
Řeznická Street; taking the lead in a public seminar held on the highly ‘official’ premises of the
Writers’ Union (a sleight of hand by the playwrights which did not go unchallenged by the
authorities). These were the open manifestations of a new ordering of forces which was barely in
place when the secret police precipitated the events of 17 November.

The people from whom the first government of the new era was largely formed – and who held their
first meetings on the stages of the Činoherní klub (Drama Club) and the Laterna magika (Magic
Lantern) – included a high proportion of theatre workers. Amongst their tasks they had to ensure
not only the smooth stage-management of the massive crowds, but also that the content of the
meetings engaged the public’s interest and understanding. The handling of these spontaneous
demonstrations was the culmination of decades of theatre as a subversive force against a
totalitarian régime. Afterwards, Petr Oslzlý – de facto director of the Theatre on the String and
one of the organisers of the spectacles – described how the outdoor demonstrations gave him the
impression he was witness to one of the great theatrical performances of ancient Greece.

This unity of actor and action was found not only in Prague but across the country; the ‘striking’
theatre workers organised themselves into troupes with a mission to spread the news of the
extraordinary events in Prague – not only from their own stages, but from improvised platforms in
village halls and factory canteens. These stages were almost the only source from which ordinary
people could find out what was going on, since the old régime still struggled to keep control over
radio, TV and the press.

In the Czech lands, the use of theatre as a didactic tool dates back to the late eighteenth
century. There had been a lively theatre tradition in the Middle Ages, when a considerable standard
was reached in liturgical plays and sacred farces, but its development was interrupted by the
Hussite wars. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that Czech plays – usually adapted
from German originals – began to be performed by amateur groups of Czech patriots. Performances
took place at first in inns and halls, and later at matinees and on holidays in the established
theatres. The first permanent public theatre had been built in Prague in 1737, for the performance
of Italian opera and German plays; in 1781 Count Nostitz built an opera house known today by its
nineteenth-century title, the Stavovské divadlo (Theatre of the Estates). Drama, for the Czech
patriots of the early nineteenth-century ‘National Revival’, was central to their aspirations.
Translations into Czech, especially of Shakespeare’s plays (already known in Bohemia through
performances by travelling English players, but in the eighteenth century translated from German)
helped to prove it a language capable of elevated expression. But the first attempts at original
Czech plays were for the most part didactic and nationalist.

The situation did not change until the opening of the Prozatimní divadlo (Provisional Theatre) in
1862. Its building was a preparation for the Národní divadlo (National Theatre), a project which
had been adopted after the political disappointments of 1848. Now, at last, a permanent repertoire
in theatre and opera could be established; the Czechs had no golden age to be nostalgic about, and
the actors, musicians and theatre workers knew that it was up to them to create a Czech theatre
comparable with the theatres of other European nations. Bedřich Smetana led the opera company, and
The Bartered Bride was premiered in the Provisional Theatre in 1863; it was Smetana’s opera Libuše,
glorifying the history of the Czech nation, which opened the National Theatre in 1881. (The Czech
National Theatre is unique in having been paid for, not by the state or a patron, but by the people
themselves.)

The establishment of a permanent professional Czech theatre, opened the way for a new generation of
dramatists. In a late emergence of the realist movement, many of them wrote plays in a genre known
as the village drama, in which the writers used their knowledge of the traditions and way of life
of the Bohemian and Moravian countryside. Plays such as Maryša by the Brothers Mrštík and The
Farmer’s Woman by Gabriela Preissová are not only powerful dramas, but vivid evocations of the
society of the time, and of the struggle of the nonconformist – especially a woman – against
convention. The plays are still unknown to the English-speaking public, except for Preissová’s Her
Foster-Daughter – the source for Janáček’s opera Jenůfa (premiered in his native Brno in 1904).
Czech opera also prospered, and by the turn of the century opera and drama performances at the
Czech National Theatre were second to none in Europe.

By this time, there were many other professional Czech language theatres in Prague and the
provinces, as well as popular outdoor summer arenas frequented by the working class and country
visitors. These were non-didactic theatres, showing spectacle, farce, operetta, and the popular
genre of fairy-tale drama. There were also the šantány (a Czech version of the café chantant) where
peripatetic groups would perform songs and sketches sometimes lascivious and sometimes a little
subversive – in a room of a pub.

By the turn of the century the Czechs were confident in their cultural identity. They looked beyond
Austria-Hungary to other European countries and even America for contacts and exchanges. In music,
the work of Smetana and Dvořák was internationally known; artists such as Alfons Mucha and
František Kupka made their name abroad; whilst Czech architects and designers were unique in
rethinking cubism as an environment for everyday life. The nationalist cause no longer seemed so
critical; and although the literary cabaret came late to Prague, it appealed to the public of the
1900s and 1910s precisely because of its political independence.

Two great directors dominated the Czech theatre in the early twentieth century: Jaroslav Kvapil,
who introduced symbolism to the Czech stage; and Karel Hugo Hilar, who introduced just about
everything else. Kvapil, himself a poet and dramatist, did not see theatre direction simply as the
solving of technical problems, but as the work of an artist, combining the theatrical elements to
create a visual and aural experience. Hilar, who seized each new theatrical fashion and made it his
own, staged productions which shocked and thrilled Prague audiences. It was under Kvapil and Hilar
that (Czech playwrights first attracted international attention – František Langer with The
Outskirts of the City and A Camel through a Needle’s Eye, and Karel and Josef Čapek with R. U. R.
and The Insect Play.

However, in the years after the First World War the young avant-garde considered even Hilar’s
expressionist productions at the National Theatre to be old hat. They saw themselves as part of an
international movement and created the Devětsil, in its early years a left-wing group committed to
proletarian art, which drew its members from the fine arts and from architecture, from the theatre
and from literature. The Devětsil developed the idea of an art derived from popular entertainment
and everyday life, an art which would relate to the general public through allusion, invention and
metaphor, and to which they gave the name poetism. Poetism – ‘a poetry not confined to texts, but
of the five senses’ – was influenced by cubism, futurism and constructivism, and was a forerunner
of surrealism. The sort of theatre envisaged by the Devětsil owed more to film than to traditional
theatre; its material was to be drawn from the world around – from fairs, carnivals and street
events. The Liberated Theatre, founded in 1926, staged Apollinaire and Marinetti and Jarry’s Ubu
roi, as well as the young Czech writers of the avant-garde. But it was two student performers who
caught the popular audience: Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich who, with the composer Jaroslav Ježek,
presented topical revues full of satirical repartee and improvised word play, hot jazz and slow
blues. In their early revues V + W showed little interest in politics; but as the power of Hitler
and Mussolini increased, they began to take their themes from contemporary events: the Spanish
Civil War, the annexation of Austria, Hitler’s demands for the Sudetenland.

Another member of the Devětsil, E. F. Burian, dreamed of his own left-wing, avant-garde theatre,
which he founded in 1933. In Burian’s hands a text became a scenario, raw material from which he
could fashion a ‘many-voiced’ drama. His stage was small, with few technical facilities, and
economy was a necessity; the acting area was expanded by the dynamic use of different stage levels
and of lighting, film and

projection. The productions were assembled like musical compositions; music, dialogue and action
flowed like a well-written score. Burian’s most innovative productions were adaptations –
Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. In War, a montage of voiceband and dance,
Burian used Bohemian folk songs presented in an unfamiliar way to show that the strength and hope
of the nation was in its ordinary people. But when the Zhdanov doctrine became the official
cultural policy of Communism, Burian’s powerfully individual work was condemned by the left-wing
critics.

During the 1930s, the Czech theatre became source-material for the Prague structuralists, whose
research covered a broad field – linguistics, literature, aesthetics, sociology. In the theatre the
structuralists analysed the individual elements which make up a performance, and how they relate to
each other and to the audience. The Prague theatre, from the National Theatre to the avant-garde,
gave ample illustration of ways in which information could be transferred from one element to
another, could be conveyed by setting or by speech, by gesture or by sound.

The Czech lands were occupied by the Nazis in 1939. Voskovec and Werich were already in exile in
America, whilst E. F. Burian spent the war in the concentration camps. Although the theatres –
unlike the universities – remained open, they were restricted to an increasingly circumscribed
repertoire. After the war those who returned from exile and imprisonment threw themselves into a
renewed and hectic artistic life.

But the world had changed. It was the start of the cold war, and in February 1948 Czechoslovakia
came under Communist control. In the 1920s socialism had offered the artists ‘a whirligig, a
dazzling fairground, a kaleidoscope of thoughts, a celebration of new understandings, manifestos
and struggles’. But in the 1950s culture was too dangerous a weapon to be left in the hands of the
artists. The daring avant-garde of the pre war period now endeavoured to conform to the dictates of
their lords and masters, and the years which followed the victory of Communism were the most
sterile known in the Czech theatre. It was argued that as progressive ideas could now be presented
on the main stages, there was no need for satirical or experimental theatre. New plays were
expected to deal with the contemporary themes showing the building of socialism, the fight against
bourgeois morality, and the salvation of the ‘positive hero’. ‘Formalism’ was the great enemy, so
much so that theatre directors were afraid of showing any sign of originality in their productions
and adopted the most conventional interpretation. Numerous playwrights, critics, directors and
other theatre workers were forced to leave their profession, or chose to leave the country.

And yet, in 1955, from a small cellar bar in the centre of Prague could be heard the sounds of
rock-n-roll – ‘a daring word, and at that time pronounced in the same breath as the word
"imperialism". By some oversight on the part of the authorities, an amateur group had begun to draw
a popular following to the Reduta bar, reopened after it closure as a place of ill-repute. The
original bass player of the group was a young poet and artist called Jiří Suchý, who dreamt of a
topical theatre like that of Voskovec and Werich. He formed a partnership with the writer and
performer Ivan Vyskočil, creator of the ‘text-appeal’, and it was the enthusiasm of their audience
which led to the founding in 1958 of the Divadlo Na zábradlí (Theatre on the Balustrade).

Round about the same time, in 1957, the actor-director Otomar Krejča had been appointed to head the
drama company at the National Theatre. Krejča aimed at a theatre very different from the approved
optimism of socialist realism. With the dramaturge Karel Kraus and the designer Josef Svoboda, he
created something like a studio within the National Theatre, a place where writers and actors could
try out new ideas and ways of working. Krejča and Kraus sat down with three writers, two of them
inexperienced in the theatre: the older František Hrubín, and Milan Kundera, whose Owners of the
Keys (whilst still conventional in content) caused widespread admiration in 1962 for the
originality of its form. The third writer, Josef Topol had been a colleague of Krejča in E. F.
Burian’s theatre, where Midnight wind, a historical drama, had been produced. Now they collaborated
on two plays which took a broad view of contemporary life. Their Day (1959) shows the passage of
twenty-four hours in the community of a small Czech town, where the aspirations of youth struggle
against provincial narrow-mindedness. The End of the Carnival (1963) is set at the time of the
traditional shrovetide festival in a Czech village where, as throughout the country in the 1950s,
privately-owned land had been subsumed into a co-operative. It was a familiar setting in socialist
realist drama, but the treatment by Topol and Krejča, their portrayal of complex layers of
relationships and reactions, was anything but conventional. Both plays used all the resources of a
large company and a stage equipped with Svoboda’s sophisticated technology.

At the Theatre on the Balustrade, Jiří Suchý’s co-founder, Ivan Vyskočil, had engaged a young
stage-hand who had been working for a season with Jan Werich. Václav Havel had ambitions to be a
playwright, and with Vyskočil co-authored a hit, Hitch-hike, based on the cabaret traditions of the
small theatres. The series of satirical sketches spoke of contemporary man’s dependency on material
objects, and of the risks and challenges of a free life. Hitch-hike was too popular to go unnoticed
by the authorities, who forced Vyskočil’s resignation (and kept him under surveillance for the next
three decades). In 1962 Jan Grossman was appointed director of the Theatre on the Balustrade, and
Václav Havel became his dramaturge. Grossman had been a critic and author who in the 1950s had been
banned from publishing. He turned instead to theatre direction, developing his idea of a theatre
which did not offer solutions, but which put questions to the audience and challenged them to
respond. The repertoire included Czechoslovak premieres of Beckett and Ionesco, adaptations of
Jarry’s Ubu rai and Kafka’s Trial, as well as plays by contemporary Czech authors. In 1963 Grossman
invited Otomar Krejča to direct Havel’s Garden Party, and in 1965 himself directed Havel’s
Memorandum. If the authorities had been upset by Hitch-hike, there was more to disturb them in
these two plays. Havel presented onstage a micro-world which, in its parade of hypocritical
corruption, was only too painfully familiar. In The Garden Party, characters control and manipulate
each other by the use of linguistic conventions; in The Memorandum, the audience was reminded of
Alfred Jarry’s pataphysical machines, structures whose only purpose is to prolong their own
activity.

In the mid-1960s Otomar Krejča founded his own company, Divadlo Za branou (Theatre Beyond the
Gate). Krejča’s earlier experiments with productions using film and stage-machinery now interested
him less than long and arduous rehearsal with the group of actors which had followed him from the
National Theatre (one of the complaints levelled against Krejča was that he worked too hard, took
theatre too seriously, and expected other people to take it seriously too). The leading actors in
the company were Jan Tříska and Marie Tomášová, who had been Krejča’s Romeo and Juliet at the
National Theatre; and it was they for whom the central roles in Josef Topol’s Cat on the Rails, the
play which opened the Theatre Beyond the Gate, were written.

Cat on the Rails is essentially a two-hander, which suited Krejča’s wish to work closely with the
performers. It was also, in the context of Czech drama, a movement away from the analysis of social
themes to a more inward-looking, Chekhovian theatre (Chekhov is a key dramatist in Krejča’s
theatre). Évi and Véna are a recognisably ordinary couple from Prague on a day’s ramble which loses
them somewhere near a country railway station, from which they hope to make it back to Prague.
Interrupted only by a boy in flight from a local vendetta and his two pursuers, they pass the time
with games and reminiscences, until they touch on Évi’s longing – the desire for a settled life,
for a peace shared with Véna, for a family hearth. But for Véna such peace is no peace at all. The
‘hearth’ reminds him of an old woman he knew, who destroyed a magnificent historic fireplace to
have somewhere to put her cupboard: ‘From that time on, "hearth" is a hollow term – like a great
many heartwarming words. In due time, they will be joined by "love" when love will have been
totally wiped out.’ A few days before the premiere of Cat on the Rails, Krejča said of Topol in an
interview: ‘. . . he is convinced that the protagonist of contemporary drama is one who does not
swim with the time, who is full of doubt and uncertainty, who is always seeking.’

Following the Russian invasion in 1968, Cal on the Rails, like the rest of Topol’s plays, was not
seen on the Czech stage for twenty years. Topol, like his protagonist, did not ‘swim with the
time’. For a while he made a living as a translator, until, after he signed Charter 77, that too
was forbidden. An English translation of Cat on the Rails made in 1966 by Jiří Voskovec (of the
famous 1930s’ Liberated Theatre) who had been living in America since 1948.

The power struggle taking place in Czechoslovak politics in the mid-1960s was reflected in the
energy of Czechoslovak writers and artists. In the wake of the Theatre on the Balustrade and
Semafor several new professional theatre companies had started up, and even the established
theatres were performing the work of new writers. But these activities came to an end after the
invasion of 1968 and the ‘normalisation’ of the subsequent months. It was comparatively easy to
deal with playwrights and critics. Theatres were simply not granted permission to stage any play by
any writer on the black list, domestic or foreign, whilst the specialist theatre magazines were
closed down in the spring of 1970. The dynamic activity of the theatre was more difficult to
control; the nadir was reached in 1978, when a new Theatre Law made it impossible to set up a new
theatre company, or even to close down an existing one.

But unlike the post-1948 period, this was not a time of stagnation in the theatre. In the old days
some artists and writers had believed that Communism was the way forward, and efforts were made to
conform to the Zhdanov doctrine. Now, even the reform Communists, the ‘sixty-eighters’ had turned
dissident, and were for the most part replaced by bureaucrats who – opportunistically or
pragmatically – promoted Communism as the only viable form of government for Czechoslovakia.
Whereas in the 1950s artists like Burian had tried to conform to socialist realist principles, in
the 1970s and 1980s the ‘lords and masters’ were forced to suppress or contain the subversive
artistic spirit. The Theatre Beyond the Gate was closed and Krejča, after a brief period in a
suburban theatre, could only find work abroad. Topol worked as a labourer on the restoration of the
Charles Bridge. Grossman was banished to the border town of Cheb. Havel put himself beyond the pale
by open protest. Many other talented directors, dramaturges and actors were forbidden to work in
Prague (a policy which greatly improved artistic standards in the provinces).

Amongst the writers forbidden to publish was the essayist, novelist and dramatist Ivan Klíma. Two
of Klíma’s plays had been staged in Prague in the 1960s: The Castle at the Divadlo Československé
armády (Czechoslovak Army Theatre) and The Jury at the Komorní divadlo (Chamber Theatre). In both
cases critics pointed to the obvious influence of Franz Kafka, whose work had recently been allowed
to reappear; but dramatically, a stronger influence was that of Friedrich Dürrenmatt, an author not
yet published in Czechoslovakia. Games, which Klíma wrote in 1973, was translated into German and
performed in Vienna in 1975. It is an early example of the genre which became extensive over the
next fifteen years – samizdat: writing which could not be published officially, was typed in
editions of increasingly illegible carbon copies, and discussed in small, private groups.

The setting of Games is a party which is a microcosm of the society in which Klíma lived during the
early 1970s; a society not as conveniently divided into ‘Communists’ and ‘dissidents’ as the West
might have imagined, but in which any individual might find that the most mundane decision faced
him (or her) with a political or moral dilemma. ‘Life forces us to assume certain roles, to fulfil
other people’s expectations,’ wrote Klíma in the programme note to the first production in Vienna.
‘In games we fake seriousness. And for a while they allow us to avoid confronting our fate. But
finally our true nature glimmers through, and, for a moment, we see our real selves. Sometimes this
takes us by surprise, for the nature we catch a glimpse of seems totally unknown to us. Or we
notice, to our astonishment, that our true nature doesn’t exist any more; our role has absorbed us,
transformed us, we have already become a function of it . . .’ Later in the decade, as people grew
more skilful at dissimulation, their responses became increasingly cynical. The characters in Games
are still inexperienced, surprised most of all by their own emotional responses. Irena, who has
planned the party, anticipates it as an evening of escapism – a retreat to a lost innocence. But
there is an ugly event which cannot quite be put out of mind – the murder of a young girl whose
body was disposed of in a refuse cart. There is no bridge back to lost innocence; the games only
strip the characters of the conventions which have so far sustained civilised behaviour.

Games was the last play Klíma wrote under the conditions prevailing in totalitarian Czechoslovakia;
after that he concentrated on prose and novel-writing. This translation was made in 1989 for
Midnight Theatre Company, and directed at the Gate Theatre, London, by Derek Wax in the summer of
1990.

Klíma was one of those who had already made their names before the August of 1968, and who remained
on the blacklist unless they publicly recanted. Younger writers were dealt with more subtly by the
authorities; there was always the hope that they might prefer the considerable privileges of being
an officially approved writer, and avoid the humiliation experienced by their older colleagues. One
of the younger writers was Karel Steigerwald, whose tetralogy of plays about the Czech experience
(Period Dances, The Tartar Fete, The Neapolitan Disease and Foxtrot) were capriciously banned and
released throughout the inconsistent 1980s. Another was Daniela Fischerová, daughter of the
composer Jan Fischer, and in 1968 only twenty years old. Fischerová studied at the Film Academy,
and subsequently wrote a number of radio and film scripts. In 1979 her first stage play, Dog and
Wolf, was staged at the Realist Theatre in Prague; after few performances, orders came from the
City Council that the play was unsuitable for public performance and should close forthwith. In
1984 Fischerová wrote Princess T (Turandot) staged in 1986 in the mining town of Ostrava. In 1987
she completed Legend (started in 1981 ), a version of the Pied Piper story, also staged initially
in Ostrava.

Fischerová’s three plays belong to a genre typical of the Czech theatre of the 1980s; the
historical allegory, the adapting of familiar stories to deal with contemporary moral problems. The
action is set against a mythical background – seventeenth-century France, ancient China, medieval
Hamelin – overlaid with transparent layers of Central European metaphor. But the themes which run
through all three plays – themes of betrayal and of free will – are presented in realistic terms.
The characters are faced with concrete situations, which they have to resolve by their own
judgement.

The Czech title, literally translated as The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, has a double meaning; the
hour between dog and wolf is the twilight hour, a time of change and transience, of mutability
between one state and another. In the context of the play it is also Villon’s choice between the
antisocial, lawless existence of the artist and conformity with the establishment. Fischerová takes
several moments in time and weaves them onstage into a single ‘now’, so that at Villon’s trial we
find present both the murdered victim, as the counsel for the prosecution, and present-day
reporters with all their technological apparatus. Towards the end of the final scene, Régnier de
Montigny (the Wolf) demands freedom for Villon. Bishop d’Aussigny laughs quietly. ‘Freedom? There
is no freedom. I thought you knew that. Freedom is only a mask for necessity, and our task is to
serve that necessity.’ At the end the trial is not terminated but adjourned: ‘Here and now!’
exclaims de Montigny. Dog and Wolf was given its British premiere by the Rose Bruford College in
June 1993, in a production by the young director Petr Palouš from the northern Bohemian town of
Ústí-nad-Labem.

It was the topicality, the ‘here and now!’, which was the particular quality of Czech theatre in
the 1980s. As Petr Oslzlý described, the theatres became almost like ‘sacred circles’ within a
state of unfreedom – . . . from time to time, even in the big conventional theatres, an echo could
be heard, maybe in just a brief allusion, or in a single appearance, or even a whole performance .
. .’. Oslzlý’s Theatre on a String in Brno, surviving in an ill-equipped room of the city art
gallery, became the leading avant-garde theatre of the decade. Very often it was only the company’s
international reputation and its appearance at European festivals which saved it from being
absorbed into the State Theatre. Paradoxically, one principle of the company’s experimental work
was commitment to past traditions; believing that the history of Czech theatre had been distorted
by communist ideology, the company deliberately drew on original sources of nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Czech theatre. It also adapted texts of modern European classics which otherwise
were inaccessible to their young audience, and made links with writers banned from publishing, such
as Ludvík Kundera and Milan Uhde. As well as drawing large audiences of young people – who loved
the informal surroundings, extravagant language and acting, slapstick comedy and lavish use of fire
and fireworks – the company also put on unofficial extra-mural events: concerts, readings, art
exhibitions combined with performance. In the summer of 1987 they even held a three-week festival
in the Episcopal Gardens in the centre of Brno. Collaboration with other theatre groups, both local
and international, was important, and it was out of these co-operative, creative activities that an
opposition movement was born. It became a game – a serious game – to see how far back the
boundaries could be pushed. Alliances formed, far more intricately linked than the secret police
ever realised.

It was one of these alliances that led to the writing of Tomorrow ; commissioned by Petr Oslzlý for
a specific occasion – the seventieth anniversary of the founding of Czechoslovakia on 28 October
1988. For the last forty of those seventy years the Communist régime had presented their own
lacklustre version of how it came about; giving some marginal credit to Tomáš Masaryk (who became
the first President, but who spent the war years in exile) and the Czech National Committee abroad,
but none to their colleagues who handled the takeover of power in Prague. Havel and Oslzlý worked
on a script which would explain in clear terms what exactly happened in Prague on 28 October 1918,
and who were the main players. It was told from the point of view of Alois Rašín, who subsequently
became Minister of Finance, and whose policies helped to make Czechoslovakia one of the most stable
countries in Europe in the inter-war period.

Tomorrow was both didactic and prophetic. Scarcely more than a year later Havel, Oslzlý and their
colleagues found themselves acting it out in real life. Many of the elements of the velvet
revolution of November 1989 – the meticulous advance planning, the anticipation of the dying
régime’s reactions, the precautions to ensure calm among the population – are already there in the
text of Tomorrow! Rašín’s dialogue with his wife in the final scene reflects subsequent political
problems: the relationship of Czechs and Germans, the break-up of the ‘South Slav conglomerate’,
the low morale of a nation which had always relied on the state to look after its needs. There was
a personal note in Karla Rašínová’s reference to the Quay that was named after her husband, ‘but
not for long’; Havel lived in his family house on what was at that time Engels Quay, but which was
soon to become Rašín Quay again.

When the Czech theatre co-existed so closely with real life, where could it go next? When the
scenes acted on stage were reenacted in the streets, what could follow on stage? Petr Oslzlý
answered: ‘In Czechoslovakia in the last twenty years the theatres had taken over those activities
which were absent from ordinary life – free speech, free discussion, political debate. And now the
theatres had become again only theatres and no more. The activities which the theatres had taken
over returned where they belonged; to parliament, to the press, to television, to political
conferences, to the privatisation auctions. It is in these arenas that the great dramas are being
played out which will transform our society from totalitarianism to democracy. These have become
the Theatrum mundi, the setting for the great dramatic contest between totalitarianism and
humanity.’

In 1992, the Alfred Radok Prize was instituted, as a joint initiative of the Czech and Slovak
theatre communities. (Alfred Radok [1914-1976], a highly original theatre director from Burian’s
school, was marginalised and belittled by the Communists. In spite of the limitations imposed on
him, he had a great influence on the work of Otomar Krejča and Jan Grossman.) When the awards were
made in 1993, there was no outright winner in the section for new plays. But among the ten highly
commended entries (writers entered their work anonymously) were two by Daniela Fischerová and one,
The Innocent are Innocent, by a student of dramaturgy at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts, the
twenty-one-year-old Tomáš Rychetský. There is a line of succession in the Czech theatre which was
not destroyed either by the Nazi occupation or by forty years of Communist totalitarianism; it will
survive and surely thrive in the new state which is now the Czech Republic.



In: Day, B. Czech Plays – Modern Czech Drama. London, 1994. pp. v-xvi