10a


The Dynamic 1960s, Part One

Significant New Plays

Jarka M. Burian


The 1960s represent the high-water crest of Czech theatre of the twentieth century. The many
repressed talents of the postwar generation began to assert themselves as the contra-artistic
ideology and practices of the Communist regime entered a slackened phase after the death of Stalin
and other hardliners and, later, the official denunciation of the worst excesses of the Stalinist
era. As already indicated, notable creative work began to appear in the late 1950s. It spread and
grew in vitality in the 1960s and had the promise of a bright future embodied in the 1968 ideal of
“socialism with a human face,” the motto of the Prague Spring, the significant liberalizing
movement from within the Communist Party which we associate most clearly with the name of Alexander
Dubček.1

This liberalizing creative surge was cut off abruptly and harshly with the August 1968 invasion of
Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact armies under Soviet leadership. Fearful of the infectious spread
of democratic ideas and projects throughout its empire, the Soviet leadership felt compelled to
stamp out the Czechoslovakia experiment, as it had previously done in East Germany (1953) and
Hungary (1956). For Czech theatre, the experience was a trauma similar to those of 1938 and 1948;
once again, its organic evolution was, if not aborted, at least deformed.

The Czech theatre’s achievements, which reached world-class status by the mid-1960s, were the
products both of playwrights and of those who produced their works: theatre companies, directors,
and designers. I believe that this rich period of Czech theatre and drama may best be discussed by
focusing first on the new playwrights and then on those who embodied their work in the theatre.
This chapter emphasizes the notable plays of this peak era, with only occasional attention to how
they were staged.2

 As already suggested, many playwrights as well as other theatre people were in favor of the
socialist ideals underlying the 1948 change of regime, or at least sympathetic to the lofty moral
ideals expressed by the Communist Party. Before long, however, the very humanism that prompted the
intellectuals’ and artists’ rejection of a bourgeois capitalistic society with its seemingly
inherent disregard for spiritual and cultural welfare led them to become progressively distressed
by the realities of the new socialist order. The phrase that symbolized the liberating surge of
1968 known as the Prague Spring – “socialism with a human face” – implicitly condemned a regime
that had lost sight of virtually all human-centered values. The efforts culminating in 1968 in
Czechoslovakia were directed at restoring integrity and credibility to socialist ideals that had
been increasingly ignored over the previous twenty years.

The year 1956 was decisive in marking the beginning of the reversal of the march of dismal years of
forced social engineering. The denunciation of Stalin by Khrushchev at the 1956 Congress of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union sent powerful signals to the Czechoslovakian CP apparatus. In
1956, also, the Second Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union was held in Prague, and for the
first time several writers questioned or even spoke against certain policies and practices
affecting their profession as well as against certain general social abuses. From then until
roughly 1963 additional liberalizing measures alternated with arbitrary acts of repression: what
was given with one hand was taken away with the other. Nevertheless, increased opportunities for
artistic expression became available, and a degree of questioning of previously near-sacred
sociopolitical premises was tolerated.

Coupled with these gradual, tentative improvements was a growing awareness of and interest in
existential philosophy: the works of S¢ren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus and the
plays of Jean Anouilh, Eugene Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett became more available and could be
discussed, although rarely performed before the 1960s. On a less intellectual level, increased
interest began to be paid to the everyday personal problems of the ordinary individual as distinct
from schematic figures derived from ideological formulae. Although some Czech plays began to
reflect existential themes, the plays as plays still remained rooted in variations of traditionally
realistic forms throughout the 1950s. A few novels at least partly critical of life since 1948 were
published, and some Czech plays also reflected the growing spirit of questioning and skepticism,
although direct criticism of the regime or Party, or even strong satire, was not yet a feasible
option.

The plays of the late 1950s began to emphasize individuals rather than groups, and the individuals
are presented in relation to problematic issues within an established socialist context in
Czechoslovakia. Indeed, the characters are often identified as members of the Communist Party, and
on more than one occasion we are introduced to the world of Party membership – its duties,
conflicts of view, and internal stresses. Considerable indirect criticism is made of various
aspects of life under socialism and Marxist-Leninist principles, but the issues are resolved by
attributing faults and shortcomings to weaknesses of individuals rather than to the Party or its
ideology. Chekhov’s influence on the style of playwriting is strong, and a considerable portion of
the meaning of these plays is to be found in their subtext.

This section focuses on aspects of theme, characterization, and structure in the plays, leaving
detailed matters of staging to the next chapter. The Chekhovian mode is especially evident in a
1958 work, A Sunday in August (Srpnová neděle), by František Hrubín, a major poet and frequent
critic of official policies affecting him as a writer. The play evolved in collaboration with the
Krejča team at the National Theatre and was successfully produced in theatres not only in
Czechoslovakia but elsewhere in Europe. A landmark in the revival of significant drama during the
thaw following the official rejection of Stalinism, the play directs our attention to the private
and personal lives of the leading characters rather than to ideology or class struggle.

Nevertheless, the play also touches upon larger social realities. The central characters are
essentially misfits in the new socialist order, dilettantes who have subsisted on their feelings
and their wit. It is a play very much in the Chekhovian manner, taking place by a pond in a small
provincial town frequented by summer visitors from Prague. Essentially apolitical, the play has a
calm, seemingly listless surface but considerable turbulence and intricacy beneath it. The ambience
of a summer pond was captured impressionistically by Josef Svoboda’s use of scrims, projections,
and reflective surfaces. The main emphasis is on states of mind and spirit, the values and
attitudes one lives by. By way of resolution there is perhaps a suggestion that youth and/or
ingenuousness is more attractive and enviable than experience or even hard-won wisdom. In the late
fifties the play’s depiction of vulnerable humanity was like a breath of fresh air in a long-closed
room3.

Josef Topol’s Their Day (Jejich den), still another product of Krejča’s collaborative team in the
National Theatre, took up many of the issues of A Sunday in August. It was first presented in 1959
and was among the most performed and longest-running postwar Czech plays. The central concern is
again the conflict between values held by different elements of society. In Their Day, however,
values become polarized, and the tensions between the old and the new are harshly revealed. Topol
creates a relatively complex web of relationships: the plot deals with two families and their
offspring. Most of the characters feel alienated in a milieu of altered cultural values in the
post-Stalinist era. The elders for the most part represent a bourgeois grasping for security even
as their children grope uncertainly for ideals in the midst of disillusionment.

The play’s fragmented structure of action and dialogue reflected an impulse to break away from
familiar forms of Socialist Realism in playwriting. It was embodied scenically by Svoboda’s
innovative multiscreen projection system, Polyekran, which could almost instantly provide a
cubistic variety of images of a given setting. Reminiscent of A Sunday in August, the dialogue is
marked by a fresh contemporary idiom, broken discourse, and considerable subtext. Their Day catches
the rhythms and currents of its time, a period of uncertainty and tentativeness as the dogmas of
the establishment were increasingly questioned and youth was openly rebelling against the
hypocrisies of its elders.

Another group of plays of the late fifties and early sixties involved wartime situations, as if to
remind audiences of what they had to fight against and what they were fighting for. These plays
contain no criticism of the Communist regime, but rather an indictment of human failures to live up
to standards of honor and responsibility, failures still evident in all segments of society at the
beginning of the 1960s.

Perhaps the most successful and well-known of this group of plays was The Owners of the Keys
(Majitelé klíčů, 1962) by Milan Kundera (b. 1929), whose later novels were to make him
internationally known a decade or so later. Another product of the Krejča National Theatre
“workshop,” the play was still in the National Theatre repertoire as late as 1965. The action
occurs during the wartime occupation of a provincial Czech city. We are presented with a young
married couple living with the wife’s parents. The focus is on a crucial ethical dilemma: the
choice that the young husband must make between a life of relative security and insulation and
action that involves the sacrifice of others but serves a larger cause of the resistance movement,
of which he was formerly a member. He must choose between protecting his wife and her parents or
preserving the safety of his former comrades and their cause. Painfully, he chooses to rejoin the
resistance. Contrasting with the positive values of dedication to a larger humanistic cause is the
sharp depiction of the pettiness, greed, and instinct for self-survival of his wife, her parents,
and their neighbors. Indeed, their very flaws defeat his desperate efforts to save his wife at the
climactic moment of the play. The implication for the audience is the need to live according to
demanding ideals rather than for creature comforts and the security symbolized by the set of
household keys of the title.

Formally, the play is an example of straightforward realism with one striking exception – a series
of expressionistic interludes representing the inner state of the hero at the moments when he must
make critical decisions. Such moments were staged effectively thanks to Svoboda’s use of special
lighting effects in conjunction with mirrors to create a dreamlike interruption of reality. Even
the realistic actions employed the theatrical device of simultaneous action in the two adjoining
rooms of the setting; the rooms were placed on adjacent platforms that could be rolled up or
downstage. The play is an effective melodrama with ethical overtones, but its positive values are
offset by the schematic and predictable working out of its action and themes and (with the
exception of its protagonist) by its pamphletlike characters.

In the mid- and later 1960s, the tendency toward a diversity of themes and subject matter was also
evident in plays of ordinary people without direct reference to their political alignments or even
to a socialist context.

Josef Topol turned to the one-act form after Their Day, writing three short works in addition to
one other full-length play. The first short play, Cat on The Rails (Kočka na kolejích, 1965), was
again directed by Krejča, but after he had left the National Theatre and opened his own Theatre
beyond the Gate (Divadlo za branou) in Prague that same year. Two young lovers confront each other
at a seemingly ordinary but actually decisive moment in their affair as they linger by a rural
railroad stop. Finding no satisfaction in their societal roles, they focus almost exclusively upon
each other but sense an ultimate sterility and emptiness even there. While embracing they flirt
with the idea of death, and their caresses threaten to become aggressive, destructive. It is an
emotional form of Russian roulette, in which each has a finger on the trigger. The play ends with
no resolution, but with the distinctly existential suggestion that their lives are in their own
hands, from which one might infer that no social system is finally capable of satisfying the
complex, often tormented drives posed by the human condition.

Topol’s sequel, Hour of Love (Hodina lásky, 1968), was also presented by Krejča at the Gate
Theatre. A denser, less accessible play, it wrings the last variations from the encounter of two
lovers who have reached a dead end in their relationship. Having sought an ideal in love only to
have the inevitable sordid realities of life corrupt or frustrate that ideal, they appear to have
nothing else to give meaning to their lives. There seems to be no middle ground between absolute
fulfillment and bleak existential emptiness. The Anouilh-like theme would have been inconceivable a
few years before, in the early period of the new socialist regime.

Topol’s slightly earlier one-act play, Nightingale for Supper (Slavík k večeři, 1967), was a more
abstract and overtly symbolic, absurdist-influenced study of the inability of the ideal to survive
amid the materialism and cruelty of the everyday. The play begins with an ordinary incident, a
young man’s visit to his girlfriend’s home for supper. As the visit progresses, however, the visit
turns to a chill nightmare of the persecution and eventual destruction of the young man (whose name
is Nightingale) at the hands of the girl’s family, which comes to represent the forces of brutality
and death in the world.

Alena Vostrá’s (1938-1992) When Your Number Comes Up (Na koho to slovo padne) is similar to Cat on
the Rails in its existential focus on contemporary youth. It was first presented in 1966 by the
Drama Club (Činoherní klub), among the most outstanding of the new theatre ensembles formed in
reaction against the relatively inflexible repertory policies of most of the large state or
municipal theatres. Vostrá, one of the house playwrights of the group, depicted a rootless,
disenchanted cluster of young people who feel cheated by life and so find a perverse satisfaction
in playing rather malicious tricks on those less clever or perceptive than they are. Yet they are
unable to hide for long their gnawing sense of boredom and insecurity. Significantly, the play does
not moralize about the distinctly antisocial behavior of the young people but presents virtually
without comment a freshly idiomatic, almost improvisational view of Czech urban youth of the
mid-1960s.

This reluctance to render overt judgments marks several other plays produced by the artists of the
Drama Club. For example, Ladislav Smoček (b. 193z), another house playwright and the actual
initiator of the Drama Club, wrote Piknik (1965), an intense psychological study of the antagonisms
among a number of American GIs on patrol in a Pacific island jungle during World War II. Far from
being a propaganda piece, it is almost studiously apolitical, dealing with the dramatic
possibilities of man-to-man confrontations under the stress of fear and battle fatigue4. In keeping
with the Drama Club’s focus on the actors, the performance took place on a virtually bare stage
with a half-dozen bentwood chairs.

The Topol one-acts and these plays of the Drama Club focused on the un-heroic, private lives of
apolitical people. In Topol’s plays metaphysical overtones emanated from concentrated, often
elusive exchanges of feelings and attitudes which brought to mind the work of Marguerite Duras. The
works of the Drama Club, on the other hand, created on stage a sense of the immediacy of eccentric
life. At their weakest the Drama Club plays resembled acting exercises, appropriate enough in a
theatre devoted to the policy of emphasizing the contributions of actors; at their richest, the
plays provided suggestive, lively reflections of ongoing contemporary life in Czechoslovakia.

A distinct category of plays that emerged with the loosening of restrictions on theme and subject
in the 1960s consisted of adaptations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century folk plays with
biblical subjects. Realistically textured, wryly humorous, yet revealing genuine faith, such pieces
had the charm of primitive paintings and were another example of increased interest in apolitical
materials, although many undoubtedly read political significance into the attraction to faith and
things of the spirit inherent in these plays. The most popular of these folk revivals were the work
of Jan Kopecký (1918-1992), an influential critic, Ministry of Culture official, and university
professor in the pre-1968 years: in 1965 A Play of the Martyrdom and Glorious Resurrection of Our
Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (Komedie o umučení a slavném vzkříšení Pana a Spasitele našeho Ježíše
Krista) and in 1967A Play of the Star (Komedie o Hvězdě), dealing with the nativity story.


From 1963 to 1968 a growing momentum of broader cultural, artistic activity and increasingly
critical reaction to the sociopolitical environment became apparent. The rigged purge trials of the
early 1950s were formally exposed in 1963, and other absurdities of the regime revealed themselves,
chiefly its use of bureaucracy to control, if not suppress, creativity and critical thinking.
Moreover, the regime was exhibiting signs of uncertainty and even confusion. The eroding police
state, no longer employing draconian measures, became a challenge to the conscience and social
concerns of artists, inadvertently allowing them opportunities to present oblique, variously
camouflaged expressions of their views. Writers’ meetings reviewed the recent past and the guilt
shared by all for the gross abuses of the Stalinist period. Franz Kafka and Karel Čapek were
removed from the index of proscribed writers. Novels critical of life and society since 1948 came
out in increasing numbers5, and the Czech film renaissance of the mid-1960s – built on the same
critical view of the deformities of social and personal life created by the still-ruling
establishment – included several thinly veiled indictments of the contemporary scene among its
major works6.

Increasingly disillusioned by the realization that the dehumanizing flaws and evils formerly
identified as fruits of bourgeois capitalism were not only flourishing but acquiring cancerous
proportions in their supposedly enlightened state, more and more intellectuals and artists turned
away from politics to art in order to express their sense of having been betrayed. The revolt of
the writers culminated in the Fourth Congress of the Writers’ Union, in 196677. Speech after speech
denounced new censorship laws, the culturally crippling isolation of the nation, and the
deformations of power which had virtually destroyed traditions of trust, honor, and spiritual
health in society. When Ludvík Vaculík (b. 1926), a leading writer and spokesman for
liberalization, suggested that “not one human problem has been solved in the last twenty years” and
that “our republic has lost its good name8,” he was expelled from the Communist Party, as were
several others for similar statements, including the playwright Ivan Klíma (b. 1931). Other
playwrights, such as Milan Kundera and Pavel Kohout (b. 1928), were formally reprimanded.

The middle and late 1960s also witnessed a return of inventive, frequently harsh and powerful
satire as playwrights vented the frustrations and resentments of increasing numbers of the society.
Another, less readily definable set of dramas also emerged at this time – more poetic, even
visionary, employing a broad canvas for the development of their action, often turning to the past
to comment indirectly on contemporary issues.

The outright satires usually employed grotesque, absurd models or parables of social actualities to
underline the abuses of post-Stalinist Czechoslovakia, though their inventiveness and power carry
them beyond immediate time and place. The extent to which they pinpointed specific deformations of
socialist culture and doctrine varies, as does the critical detachment of their authors.

Václav Havel (b. 1936) became the best-known playwright in this group years before he undertook the
overtly political activities that made him Europe’s most notable dissident. In at least one broad
respect, Havel’s plays carried on the heritage of Karel Čapek. Like Čapek, Havel was drawn to
clashes between humanistic values and twentieth-century phenomena: advanced technology,
bureaucracy, materialistic positivism. His distinctive vision of the world as well as some
hallmarks of his style were already evident in The Garden Party (Zahradní slavnost, 1963), the
first of his major works. The play deals with a young man, Hugo, and his career. A seeming
nonentity obsessed by chess, he acquires experience as he works his way through a nameless
institution, finally reaching the top, but losing his identity in the process. The institution is a
grotesque establishment dedicated to inaugurating and liquidating equally nameless projects. In
doing so, it rejects logic and practicality in the name of tradition, authority, and empty phrases,
its wildly irrelevant thinking represented by cant and shibboleths. There are incidental hits at
routine bureaucratic follies and distortions of Marxist thought, but above all language here
becomes a system in itself, symptomatic of a world that utterly dehumanizes people9. Sheer cant
becomes a machine that jams, locks, or slips its gears; its infinite variations remain arbitrary
signs. The master in this world is one who possesses a cybernetic brain and an absolutely
interchangeable, componentlike identity – Hugo. Havel’s use of language most nearly resembles that
of Ionesco; what is stressed, however, is not the irrational absurdity of experience, but the
deadly nature of sclerotic, dehumanized thought and feeling.

In The Memorandum (Vyrozumění, 1965), Havel once again used an institutional setting never
precisely identified. The construction of the play involves a symmetrical arrangement of twelve
scenes representing the fall, rise, and neutralization of the central figure, a bureaucrat of
moderate status. Language is again a dominant element, but not quite in the same way as in Garden
Party. The emphasis here is on the machinations of a power struggle within the institution over the
introduction of a new “scientific” language (Ptydepe) designed for greater ef ficiency of
operations. The center of Havel’s concern, however, is not the power struggle, much less the
individuals it involves, but the momentum of the apparatus of the institution itself, of which the
new language is a symptom. Designed for maximum clarity of communication, the language is
grotesquely unusable. The central figure, a self-proclaimed would-be humanist, proves impotent and
ludicrous and is revealed as an unconscious hypocrite and phrasemaker. Once again there is
considerable incidental satire of office types and behavior, and once again Havel maintains a cool
detachment. Though The Memorandum is more farcical than Garden Party, the implications of its world
are genuinely grim. Obviously, the implications were inspired by life in Czechoslovakia, but they
can relate just as clearly to any technocratic society.

Havel’s next play, The Increased Difficulty of Concentration (Stížená možnost soustředění, 1968),
is a relatively more humanly oriented work. The satire is perhaps less sharp, its most evident
object being the absurdity of scientific attempts to analyze humans in the name of humanistic
goals. Here the central dramatic device is Puzuk, a sensitive, childish machine designed to
interview people. Whimsically, the machine seems more delicate and temperamental than the human
beings using it. The general theme is frustrated humanism in the context of banal domesticity as
well as technology, but Havel also satirizes humanism itself when it is embodied in rhetoric more
than in actions. The central character, a writer given to quasi-philosophical speculations about
human values and needs, finally stresses somewhat lamely the need to have needs. The ironic
embodiment of his abstract speculations is his romantic-sexual involvement with three women: his
wife, his mistress, and his secretary. None of the involvements is satisfactory, but each seems
essential to his sense of human identity. The play’s action approaches conventional comedy more
closely than the action in Havel’s other two plays. Its structure, however, reveals Havel’s
signature. He presents the action in cubistic fashion to convey the fragmented consciousness of
people. As scene follows scene, we realize that Havel juggles with time to make the scenes with the
wife parallel those with the mistress. Although we seem to be progressing normally, we are actually
jumping back and forth in time, witnessing deliberately repeated scenes with different characters.
The process culminates in a wild, surrealistic, Ionesco-like scene in which all the characters
concurrently enter and exit, shouting their lines in overlapping fashion. At the end of the play,
with the repetition of the opening lines (as in Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano), we have once again
arrived at the very beginning. Havel denied that absurdist theatre was part of his theatre’s
“program,” but added, “I have the feeling that, if absurd theatre had not been invented before me,
I would have had to invent it.”10

Several satires by other authors warrant mention. King Vávra (Král Vávra, 1964) by Milan Uhde (b.
1936) is perhaps most blatant in its use of a central grotesque model of the social scene. A king,
who resembles Jarry’s Ubu in his inherent coarse stupidity, has the special feature of donkeylike
ears that he hides under long hair. National policy decrees that everyone must have long hair and
that barbers are taboo. Gross deceptions and a corresponding ease of switching principles and
political allegiances anger the playwright. The play has a more emotive, darker tone than those of
Havel and gains immediate impact as a result, but the satire is not as consistent or as effectively
controlled. The use of songs and a loose, almost improvised, revue structure is traceable to its
director, Evžen Sokolovský of the State Theatre in Brno, who had a strong interest in Brechtian
theatre.

At the center of virtually all these satires is power: its intricacies, its terror, and yet its
seductiveness; its force of dehumanization, negation, and death. The environment of central Europe
– and of Czechoslovakia in particular – has seemed conducive to the practice and study of power and
the grotesque relationships to which it gives birth. As one observer noted, “In no other Communist
country, not even Hungary or Poland, have so many key personages moved between power and prison and
power again, between disgrace and rehabilitation and disgrace anew.”11  Many writers and other
artists explored the fascination and horror of humans being mastered by brute, irrational power,
especially the teasing suggestion that the victims may be responsible for the emergence of that
power or for maintaining its viability through their acquiescence. The parallel to the attraction
of many leftist artists and intellectuals to Communist totalitarianism is obvious, as Ionesco’s
Rhinoceros so imaginatively demonstrates.

Czech writers were of course familiar with Prague’s best-known author, Kafka, and several darkly
satiric plays of the 1960s present variations on Kafkaesque motifs on the workings of power. In
Ivan Klíma’s The Castle (Zámek, 1964) the title as well as the name of the central character, Josef
Kahn, derive from Kafka. The work is a realistically presented parable of how power crushes anyone
who is different or is an individual. The castle is occupied by what seems to be an academy of
notable artists and scientists who are utterly sealed off from the general population and
progressively reveal various aberrations and eccentricities bordering on madness. One of their
numbers has been killed. An outsider, Josef Kahn, arrives and is invited to take the dead man’s
place. He ultimately becomes a new victim, primarily because he asks questions and does not fit in
with the rest. Meanwhile, the previous death is officially investigated and solved. It was a joint
murder by the great figures inhabiting the castle, but the cream of the dark, satiric jest is that
the investigative process stops right there and no punishment is forthcoming official procedure has
been satisfied. Overlapping the completion of the investigation is a repetition of the killing, to
which Josef Kahn willingly submitsts12. The play is straightforwardly realistic, but much of the
action and motivation is deliberately vague, as if to suggest a controlled dream if not a
nightmare.

A starker, more direct satire suggesting humans’ complicity in their own destruction by a cryptic
power is the one-act The Maze (Bludiště) by Ladislav Smoček, of the Drama Club. First presented in
1966, the play deals with a man who, despite ample warnings, virtually talks himself into entering
a maze (seemingly with no exit) at a public park. Smoček successfully blends farce and fear,
violence and sinister humor, in portraying the victim’s fascination with the maze and the
gatekeeper’s ambiguous indifference to whether the man enters or not – until he virtually forces
the man in.

Another satire focusing on the motif of power is Pavel Kohout’s August, August, August (August is
Czech for circus clown), which had its premiere in Prague in 1967. It is a rather long and
belabored yet comic parable of a Chaplinesque circus clown who longs for a set of fancy show
horses, which he naively assumes will assure his glory. To qualify for the horses, he willingly
submits to a series of farcical public humiliations at the hands of a bored, sadistic ringmaster,
only to be confronted at the final blackout with a cage of raging beasts instead. The play, which
has an improvisational, revue format, is a dramatization of the thoughts Kohout expressed at the
1967 Writers’ Congress (after which he was reprimanded by the Party). He feared, he said, that “man
in this world, split by the interests of the powerful, is and will remain merely a walk-on who in
various costumes of various times will be pushed around the scene in various ways, without most of
those in the roles of walk-ons (as any director will confirm) knowing who wrote the piece and what
it’s about.”13


As I have mentioned, the plays of the middle and late 1960s also included a number of more
indirect, more speculative reflections of their time. Satire, if present at all, is secondary to a
broader view of the world which is essentially poetic in nature. The sheer complexity and
ambivalence of the issues and values in these plays are more pronounced than in the plays dealt
with so far. Moreover, some of these plays raise relatively broader questions regarding the essence
and the implications of the socialist revolution itself, as well as the society and culture to
which it gave birth. In form, these plays employ what might be called a flexible realism, or
impressionistic realism, and they tend to focus on groups of people rather than on individuals.
While their structure tends to be more casual than that of most of the plays already discussed,
they are not marked by any noteworthy departures from recognizable reality.

Josef Topol’s End o f Carnival (Konec masopustu) was first performed in Olomouc in 1963 as another
product of the Krejča-Kraus-Svoboda team; in 1964 they restaged it in the National Theatre as
Krejča’s last production there. Arguably Topol’s greatest play, it is especially interesting in its
employment of myth and ritual elements. On its secular, realistic level, the play deals with the
conflict between Frank King, a private landowner proud of his individuality and hard-won
achievements with the land, and the new social order that is imposing a policy of collectivism of
private property. Dominating the action are the masks and demonlike figures of an annual carnival
that represents the end of the old and the beginning of the new, the death that insures revival and
growth. A subsidiary theme lies in the groping attempts of several young people, alienated from
their community, to find a certain solace and security in love. Still another dimension is added by
the local barber who regularly stages the carnival entertainment; this rather cryptic figure
suggests the seemingly inadvertent malice, if not evil, of one who derives satisfaction from
manipulating the lives of others. All of these forces finally come together and contribute to the
disaster crowning the action of the play – the accidental killing of King’s retarded son by one of
the innocent young lovers who happens to be one of the masquers. The play has no clear-cut meaning;
its appeal and power reside in suggestiveness and various metaphoric levels of action involving the
earth, death, and ritual enactment.

The second of these less readily classifiable plays is The Heavenly Ascension of Saška Christ
(Nanebevstoupení Sašky Krista) by František Pavlíček (b. 1923), first performed in 1967. Based on
stories by Isaac Babel, it is every bit as tentative, if not as ambivalent, as Topol’s End of
Carnival in its attitudes toward the sociopolitical realities of its time. The action occurs in
1920 in the interior of a Catholic church situated in a part of Russia where Bolshevik troops have
been battling Polish troops in seesaw encounters along a constantly shifting front at a time when
the Soviet system has not yet eliminated all resistance. At the moment, the church is occupied by
the Bolsheviks during Easter week; the action spans Wednesday through Saturday. Nearly two dozen
characters and a rapidly evolving, seemingly random series of encounters make us aware of the
turbulence of the times, of the violence and cruelty accompanying the revolutionary spirit and its
attempts to stabilize the results of the revolution. Concurrently, we are aware of the charity and
sacrifices of individuals. As the action swirls on outside and within the church, a sense of
incertitude about the ultimate values of the revolution prevails. The decisive additional element
in this situation is an eccentric artist who, in the midst of the chaos around him, is painting a
series of murals in the church depicting Christ’s journey to the cross and His ascension. From his
painter’s scaffold, which hovers above the action, he observes and comments on what he sees, with
his observations ranging from outright skepticism about the value of the Bolshevik movement to a
speculation on its potential for the good of humanity: “God’s scourge – for good or evil, who can
tell?”

This is an unschematic, undidactic, truly ambivalent work with impressive imaginative scope – a
genuine teatro mundi. The fundamental theme, expressed primarily in the observations of the
painter, is the human obsession with raising oneself, an urge that forms the one immortal human
element. As the painter says, “Onward – one more grave – one truth at the cost of a thousand bitter
doubts – the eternal step between despair and hope.”

Ladislav Smoček’s Cosmic Spring (Kosmické jaro), first performed in March 1968, by the Drama Club,
was probably the last notable original Czech work to be performed in Czechoslovakia after the
August 1968 invasion, and its theme and perspectives are among the most all-inclusive of the works
under consideration. I include it here because it is more representative of the 1960s than the 19
0s. In tone and theme it is essentially an extended, open-ended “Essay on Man” in dramatic form, a
speculative parable transcending easy categories, including satire. As its central character
declares, “Everything that is, lies on the other side of optimism and pessimism.”

A country house is about to be demolished to serve the dubious ends of progress: the countryside is
being stripped for ore to feed a new foundry in the area. References to slag heaps and ash-laden
smoke are frequent. The dying master of the house is devoting his remaining hours to a concentrated
search for a rationale of life as he has perceived it. In the house (and suggesting a ship of
fools) are a motley group of eccentric neighbors and random acquaintances who, along with the
industrial cancer outside, seem to illustrate the humors, absurdities, and at times horrors of the
world that the dying old man would attempt to define. The play is a rambling, overextended, at
times confusing mixture of farce (the crowd) and metaphysical, poetic speculation (the dying man’s
soliloquies). Depth of characterization is distinctly secondary to the creation of a total, complex
vision of human beings in relation to each other and to the cosmos. Reminiscent of The Cherry
Orchard and Endgame in its sense of a terminal action, Cosmic Spring is also like Heartbreak House
in suggesting faith in the sheer continuity of life and human efforts to persevere.

The dying man (who in the abstract might remind one of Karel Čapek) reviews human gullibility,
greed, cruelties, and ignorance: “We reject God and know nothing, we believe in God and know
nothing.” He rejects the concepts of progress and equality, all organized systems of brotherhood,
and the human need for a “happy end.” Seemingly alienated from utopian socialism or any other
sociopolitical system, he does not settle for an easy nihilism. Rather, an attitude of sustained,
uncommitted alertness is conveyed, a view of life with open eyes and mind, no longer credulous but
not yet despairing – perhaps the most that might realistically be expected from a citizen of
Czechoslovakia in the twentieth century, and perhaps of our world. In the epilogue, as a home movie
of the old man is shown, his niece reads his last words, which end the play:


Project the light and shadow as a witness that I actually existed, that I wasn’t a phantasm, just
as all history has not been a sham, and continue to search out just what sort of creature I was.
Perhaps we’re rushing toward other worlds and eternity, who can say? Above me is a roof . . .
beyond it, beyond clouds and away from earth in all directions is space. Light reaches all the way
here from there. And I have light in me as there is light in a spider crawling over rough plaster,
casting a shadow. It’s imprisoned in us and doesn’t emerge. While my hair grows and so do my nails,
the air outside is cold as a mountain stream. Clouds are isolated, and you can see far into space.


Neither unqualified affirmation nor outright ridicule is expressed in this last group of plays. The
transition from the unambiguous moral imperatives of the 1950s to the abstract, apolitical, even
amoral ending of Cosmic Spring is a major one. Although the postwar Czech plays discussed in this
chapter almost always communicated an awareness of the specific ideological and materialistic
forces shaping the lives of their nation and its people, most of the plays remained humanistic in
their broader implications. At an informal meeting of Czech writers several months after the
climactic events of August 1968, Václav Havel made a statement that represented the attitude of
most of his contemporaries:


What should theatre do, actually? According to my opinion it should awaken in man his authenticity;
it should help him to become aware of himself in the full span of his problems, to understand the
situation in which he lives, to provoke him to think about himself. Next to this true authenticity
there exists, of course, authenticity that is actually obscurity, false, when theatre doesn’t try
to awaken in man a consciousness of his real problems but on the contrary helps his natural
tendency to solve these problems superficially or actually to lie his way out of them or bypass
them in the most varied ways. . . . At most, I can only help the spectator to formulate problems,
which he must solve himself14.
________________________________

1 The material in this chapter is based on my article “Post-War Drama in Czechoslovakia,”
Educational Theatre Journal 25:3 (October 1973): 299-317

2 For a critical survey of the postwar plays, see Goetz-Stankiewicz, The Silenced Theatre; and
Trensky, Czech Drama since World War II.

3 Less subtle and complex but equally interesting in its focus on personal relationships presented
within a contemporary context of social institutions was an earlier play, That Sort of Love (Taková
láska, 1957) by Pavel Kohout, who had been an enthusiastic supporter of the new Communist order in
earlier years. Dealing with the suicide of a young woman and employing several distancing
techniques, it is in effect a Brechtian treatment of a thoroughly un-Brechtian scenario: a
romantic, at times melodramatic love story with sociopolitical overtones arising from the
implication that the society itself may have contributed indirectly to the girl’s despair.

4 Smoček chose American GIs in the Pacific because of his close and positive contact with the
Americans who liberated Pilsen, his home, in April 1945.

5 The most pointed of the critical novels were Ludvík Vaculík’s The Axe (Sekyra) in 1966 and Milan
Kundera’s The Joke (Žert) in 1967.

6 Especially notable were Miloš Forman’s Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Firemen’s Ball (1967);
Ivan Passer’s Intimate Lighting (1965); Evald Schorm’s Courage for Every Day (1964), The Return of
the Prodigal Son (1966), Pastor’s End (1968); Jan Němec’s The Party and Its Guests (1966); and
Jaromil Jireš’s The Joke (1968), an adaptation of Milan Kundera’s novel.

7 The Resolution of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union in 1967 said: “A
society for which man is but the object of manipulation, such a society does not need culture. Even
a man who has become reconciled to manipulation...does not need culture; in fact he fears it; it
becomes uncomfortable to him even to the point of hatefulness” (Fourth Congress of the Union of
Czechoslovak Writers [IV. Sjezd Svazu českoslovenkých spisovatelů] [Prague, 1968], p. 13).

8 Quoted in Winter in Prague, ed. Robin Alison Remington, p. 7.

9 Of the realities to which Havel´s play alludes, a Czech scholar has written: “Bureaucratic
politics envelop even simple processes and acts...with a strange politico-economic mysticism while
transforming concrete objects and concrete persons into bureaucratic symbols and
hieroglyphics...Human qualities are replaced by an ideological and political scheme which is
manipulated to maintain the appearance of orderliness” (Jiří Cvekl, quoted in Vladimír V. Kusin,
The Intellectual Origins of the Prague Spring, p. 41).

10 Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace, p. 54.

11 Tad Szulc, Czechoslovakia since World War II, p. 13.

12 In his address to the Fourth Congress of the Writers’ Union in 1967, Ludvík Vaculík said, “The
first law of power is that it tries to maintain itself by reproducing itself more and more
precisely. Secondly, it becomes more and more homogenous, purging everything foreign to it until
each part is a replica of the whole and all parts are mutually interchangeable” (quoted in Winter
in Prague, p. 5).

13 Quoted in Fourth Congress, p. 41.

14 Václav Havel, in “Ještě jednou obrození?” (Yet Another [National] Revival?) Divadlo 20:1
(January 1969): 32.