10b



Josef Topol

Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz


VÉNA What are you afraid of?

ÉVI Nothing. Especially of nothing.


                                                                       Josef Topol Cat on the Rails


Josef Topol has been called the greatest poetic talent in the Czech theatre since the Second World
War. His genius was recognized when he was still very young and he had the invaluable attention and
co-operation of outstanding men like Otomar Krejča and Karel Kraus. It is impossible to predict his
further development but it can be said that his work, as it stands now, occupies a place in Czech
literature similar to that of Samuel Beckett in English and French literature: the poet-philosopher
struggling with life’s timeless questions and the craftsman re-creating the language of people
around him with inimitable precision.

In 1964, when Topol’s The End of the Carnival was produced at the National Theatre in Prague, the
path seemed clear for a Czech version of Beckett to make its entrance. However, Topol’s spiritual
kinship to the great Western poet of futility is by no means immediately apparent. It emerges
gradually. In fact everything about Topol seems to happen gradually. His particular way of
disclosing the basic problem of each play slowly, even hesitatingly, as if he were avoiding facing
it openly, can also be applied to his whole development as a dramatist. The plays which overtly
explore the absurd aspects of human life were written only after he had completed three full-length
plays which cover the spectrum from historical romanticism to contemporary realism.

Wind at Midnight – his first play, produced when he was in his early twenties – is a poetic drama
on a theme from Czech history modelled on Shakespeare’s history plays. It was immediately hailed as
the work of an outstanding poet. Much was expected from this writer’s future. It was felt that if
Topol would fully recognize the nature of his own talent, Wind at Midnight would turn out to be
‘only a modest prologue to the rest of his dramas.’1 Indeed, Topol worked out his responsibility to
his particular type of genius step by step until the moment when he, too, had to fall silent.

His second play, Their Day (1959), was about life in a small Czech town. Although there are
definite signs of Topol’s later ‘absurd’ style, Their Day is still contained within realistically
conceived family life. In this play the urgent questions about life’s meaning are still embedded in
a conflict between youth and age which masks their existential nature. The play could be said to be
about ‘the generation gap’ but in reality it is much more complex. The intricate pattern of
relationships involves a whole network of tensions between those grasping for security, believing
in making the effort to gain ‘firm ground under your feet,’ and those who ‘are always looking for
something and never finish looking.’ The climactic scene, a discussion between father and son,
crystallizes these tensions into an opposition between imaginative man who believes that a human
being is more than a bundle of bone tissue and biochemical reflexes and realistic man who believes
in science with its ‘logic, law and order’ and who considers symbolist painting and literature
‘charlatanism and irresponsible game-playing.’2 It is a problem that is as old as it is new:
Hamlet’s questioning spirit will always clash with closed mentalities whose rigid beliefs are based
not on knowledge but on ignorance slumbering behind a wall of clichéd thoughts and half truths for
popular consumption.

In Topol’s third play, The End of the Carnival (1963), this type of conflict has become the central
concern; but it has also become increasingly difficult to define. The complexity arises from the
intricate use of a dramatic device Topol had already touched upon in Their Day – the play within
the play, the mask pretending to express reality and the face under the mask.

A Czech critic reviewing the première of one of Topol’s plays introduced his remarks with a
quotation from a poem by Vladimír Holan:


Because she had glued on freckles and a wig

she testified how much more real a tree is in artificial light

Because we are not nature.

That is where our fear comes from,

fear of death ...3


If Holan had intended to write a poem about the ‘stuff’ Topol’s plays ‘are made on,’ he could not
have done any better. From The End of the Carnival on the playwright’s work pivots on questions
involving the nature of illusion, the nature of death, and the reality of ideas as opposed to the
reality of matter. All this, however, does not mean that Topol’s work is weighed down by
philosophical abstractions. In fact, it is most important that his plays be seen on stage and not
only read. Otomar Krejča, aware of how the author had prepared the theatrical possibilities of his
plays and how he had counted on the dynamic tension between his written dialogue and the bodies and
voices of the actors, used his talent to magnify this tension. He did it by ‘obstructing the words
with theatre;’4 by counterpointing the characters’ groping search for meaning with a gracefully
assured choreography of their bodies.

Once Topol had arrived at the theatrical economy of his three one-act plays, Cat on the Rails,
Nightingale for Dinner, and An Hour of Love (written between 1964 and 1968) he had moved into the
radius of Beckett’s and Pinter’s absurd worlds. The End of the Carnival (1963) seemed afar cry from
Beckett’s tramps. Cat on the Rails (1965) and Waiting for Godot, however, have much in common.
Nightingale for Dinner (1965), with its ritualistic inevitability, again reminds us of Pinter. As
in the latter’s The Birthday Party, for example, we have the feeling that we witness a kind of
timeless ritual – but a ritual without belief. This is not to be taken in the sense that these
playwrights regurgitate Nietzsche’s badly maltreated aphorism of God being dead, but rather in the
sense that, as they unfold one question after another, the possibility of finding any kind of truth
gradually seems to fade.

When Topol’s producer Karel Kraus, himself an outstanding literary critic, distinguished the
playwright’s work from the dramatists of the Absurd, he made one particularly important
observation: The Theatre of the Absurd, Kraus argued, does not really demonstrate the fundamental
situation of man – the incoherent, senseless nature of the world – but rather establishes it as a
given entity. It is therefore ‘the author himself who fixes the rules of the game.’5 This attitude
of inequality in relation to the audience remains alien to Topol who, like Beckett, entices – or
inspires – the spectator to follow the author to increasingly deeper, more rare field, yet at the
same time more universal levels of meaning.

At the end of the mysterious Two Nights with a Girl (1969), for example, the characters suddenly
stop in their high-spirited chase around the table, and each stands frozen in another place staring
in a different direction. Then one of them slowly asks: ‘What are we laughing at, we fools?’6 The
audience, having joined the characters in their uncalled-for merriment for some time, are likely to
stop laughing with a start. What indeed have they been laughing at? A kaleidoscoped performance of
a man’s confusions, disappointments, hopes and fears?

Because of Topol’s highly developed sense of the theatre, his plays will vary greatly with the
intellect and perceptions of a particular director. For our purpose they are best regarded as
magnificent works of dramatic poetry – a parallel to W. B. Yeats comes to mind – which refuse to
yield their full meaning no matter how often they are read or seen.


Like Harold Pinter, Josef Topol has an acute sensitivity for spoken language with all its
repetitions, unfinished thoughts, non sequiturs, pauses, and awkward formulations. Like Václav
Havel and Peter Handke he is, on the one hand, aware of the increasing alienation of words from
their original meaning, and on the other, of the concealed power of language to mould and change
man’s intellect and his perceptions. Havel attacks clichés bureaucratic, emotional, and conceptual.
His target is clear and we can take an intellectual delight in the precision of his attack. Topol
is more complex then Havel, and like Handke – but nonprogramatically and without the latter’s
intellectual aggressiveness – he takes on the whole area of language and communication as such. The
interesting thing is that this is at first hardly noticeable.

Topol’s concern with language is part of his general quest for the meaning of life or the nature of
truth. It seems to be just one of the natural results of his explorations of the human psyche. If
we think of Handke as arriving at his definition of man through studying his language, we might say
that Topol, more like Pinter, arrives at his definition of language through studying man. His
characters communicate in a defective, rambling, interrupted way which demonstrates how fine an ear
the author has for the average person’s language.

Yet, despite its deceptively realistic cadence, the language of Topol’s characters is not a mere
copy of the language spoken in, say, a Bohemian village or the streets of Prague. Without losing
its colloquial immediacy it constantly reaches down into the subconscious of the character and
reveals his struggle to understand himself and others. In Cat on the Rails, for example, we get the
following exchange:


ÉVI (Reproaching her lover for not wanting to marry and let her raise a family.) You are afraid of
your duty, that’s it. You just don’t want to face up to it.

VÉNA I’m not good enough for it.

ÉVI If everybody thought like that! What about actors?

VÉNA Oh, they just play it.

ÉVI Don’t you see the way things are organized? Some things you do for yourself. Others are – well
– written out for you.

VÉNA Who wrote them out?

ÉVI God. City Hall. How do I know?

VÉNA Nobody knows. They just pretend they know. Everybody pretends to everyone else. And nobody
knows a damn thing.7


We may notice that in the course of the conversation there suddenly comes a point when the words
seem to become transparent and we realize that the author is talking about something quite
different from what he seemed to be talking about. It is as if another dimension has appeared
behind the situation at hand and allowed us to look through the texture of the language, beyond the
place and hour at which the action takes place. Past and future open up and the next thing we know,
in the middle of a conversation on a rather banal issue, we are made to think about life’s
unanswerable questions, about the nature of time and the certainty of death, about the ambiguity of
love and the imperfection of man’s understanding of his fate. It is as if Topol put to our eyes a
pair of strong binoculars: every detail becomes magnified, almost touchable in its clarity and
closeness; then all of a sudden the playwright imperceptibly reverses the binoculars and we see the
same situation removed, merging with its context so that its details become blurred and only the
basic, abstracted outline remains. This change of focus, this mingling of realistic detail with a
mystical search for the nature of life, is the main key to Topol’s work.

To achieve this is, of course, not an easy task for a dramatist. Topol knew it: ‘Modern science and
technology have given power into man’s hands,’ he remarked. ‘Man can change the world into heaven
or hell. There are only these two possibilities. Everyone bears his responsibility. In such a
precarious situation man truly becomes the key: also ignorance and passive indifference can commit
great evil. And what should the poet do?’8 When Topol said this he was still very young.

It was during the painstaking rehearsals of Their Day at the National Theatre9 during the 1959-60
season that the young playwright had the invaluable opportunity of working with two outstanding men
of the theatre, Otomar Krejča, who directed, and Karel Kraus, who produced the play. As a closely
working team the three men kept polishing the play’s language and perfecting it to the smallest
detail, continuing their work even after the play had begun to run. It takes a great deal of mental
discipline and artistic assurance for a young author to stand such a test. But Topol stood it. We
are told that he changed some of the dialogue even after the eighty-fifth performance of the
play.10 It was during those months of intense work, supported by his own experience as an actor,
that the playwright developed the unique dramatic style we find in his later plays from The End of
the Carnival (1963) through Two Nights with a Girl (1969).


On the face of it The End of the Carnival (1963) is a realistic play about a village which is
celebrating the end of winter with a traditional masquerade. During the festivities an old problem
is revived – the tension between those villagers who have adopted commune farming and the old
farmer Král who has persistently refused to join the commune. In their high-spirited mood of
celebration and fun the masked villagers play a trick on Král by talking his feeble-minded son
Jindřich into playing the ‘corpse of winter’11 in their procession and letting them carry him
around in an open coffin. His father, appalled when he finds this out, punishes his son in the
presence of the assembled villagers. This humiliation awakens feelings of revenge in the child-like
youth and ultimately leads to his death. It is Raphael – a young man from town courting Král’s
daughter Marie – who accidentally kills Jindřich. At the end Raphael faces justice (something he
has been avoiding all his life) but also wins Marie who publicly confesses her love for him.

Taken like this, the play sounds like a work straight out of nineteenth-century German Poetic
Realism; or else, if we stress the subtle individualization of the characters, it might pass as a
Naturalistic dramatic reproduction of a locality; or else, if we read the entry on Topol in
Crowell’s Handbook of Contemporary Drama and find that the play is described as dealing with ‘the
life of the younger generation in the new conditions of cooperative-farm villages,’12 we are bound
to think that the play is a latecomer to Socialist Realism and we may doubt that Topol could find a
place on the roster of international playwrights. What kind of a play is it then? Why then has it
been produced most successfully in Germany as well as in France? Why – and this is even more
surprising – did its Prague producer Karel Kraus write a lengthy essay13 in which he spent several
pages distinguishing Topol’s work from the Theatre of the Absurd? Surely he would not need to do
this if Topol had merely written a study of Czech village life.

As we will see, in Topol’s work following The End of the Carnival, knowledge of the story tells
very little indeed about the work itself. Consisting of a complex field of relationships and
tensions, his plays contain a symbolic pattern that counteracts the realistic elements of the plot.
In this way we get highly dramatic and realistic incidents combined with an overall effect that is
symbolic and lyrical. It is as if throughout The End of the Carnival the audience were made to
witness how the raw stuff of life is transformed into a poet’s work of art under their very eyes.
Both the realistic and the poetic levels of the play have their focal point in Jindřich, Král’s
child-like son, who provides the tangible reason for the clash and at the end becomes its victim.

At one point Jindřich, surrounded by the masked villagers whose leader is dressed up in a Hussar’s
colourful coat, playfully borrows the Hussar’s sword and begins to draw an image of himself in the
sand. Studying his drawing, he comments thoughtfully: ‘It is as if I was alive but something was
missing’:


MASK dressed as a Hussar seizing the sword and pushing it with a thrust into the drawn figure.
This!

JINDŘICH catching his hand. What are you doing!

HUSSAR You are dead.

JINDŘICH Oh no, I have a wrinkle on my forehead.

two masks are bringing in the coffin without a lid

HUSSAR It’s time, your majesty.

JINDŘICH Ah yes. steps into the coffin14


The relationship between the named, identified villagers and the anonymous, unpredictable throng of
masks indicates another aspect of the tensions between the realistic and the poetic level of the
play. The three young people, for example, whose fate is at the centre of the action – Marie, her
brother Jindřich, and he lover Raphael – become for a brief spell members of the masked crowd and
merge with it beyond recognition. Indeed, the fact that one of them cannot be recognized for who he
really is turns out to be the cause of a tragic death. It is in the mask of the Hussar that Raphael
accidentally kills Jindřich. Earlier Jindřich’s image in the sand had been ‘killed’ by the Hussar;
later the living Jindřich is killed by the image of the Hussar with Raphael hidden beneath.

Each of the three young people joins the masks for the wrong reason: Marie in order to escape the
man to whom she will vow loyalty at the end of the play; Raphael in order to hide the identity
which he must fully confess in the final scene; Jindřich because he has the literal mind of a child
and does not grasp the difference between symbol and reality (he also takes the coffin balanced on
four shoulders for a horse) – a tragic confusion that brings about his early death.

To regard the play therefore as a Hegelian drama of social tensions where the old order (Král’s
belief in individual property) finally succumbs to the values of a changing world (the new
cooperative order) is about the same as interpreting Hamlet (as Brecht once did – playfully though)
as a work about the replacement of a rotten monarchy by a new progressive government. Czech critics
themselves are quite aware of the relatively small importance of the play’s sociological aspect.
Even in the program notes to the production at the National Theatre Karel Kraus stresses the broad
meaning of the play. ‘Where the social tensions between the members of the organization and its
structure as a whole have been solved, the existential tension between the complex and never
completely organizable world of the individual and the world as a whole emerges with increasing
urgency.’15 This, on the one hand, leads back to classical tragedy but on the other is directly
related to Ionesco’s plea that ‘if anything ought to be demystified, it is ideologies that offer
ready-made solutions ... Everything ought to be constantly re-examined in the light of our
anguishes and our dreams ...’16

This is precisely what Topol does in his next play, Cat on the Rails. He examines life through the
consciousness of two people’s anguishes and dreams and does not tell us whether a solution can be
found.


The first of Topol’s short plays, Cat on the Rails, was written in 1964 and produced in November
1965 at the Theatre Behind the Gate under Otomar Krejča’s direction. The play is essentially a
dialogue between two people who, though young, are not as young as they used to be (both are
nearing thirty). Nor is their relationship – limited to week-ends, when they go into the country
with rucksacks – as exciting as it was seven years ago when it began. Things have gone a little
stale all around. The action takes place late one Sunday evening when, after one of their habitual
weekends, the couple wait at a railway-stop for the train that is to take them back to their lives
in the city – her to her work as a waitress, him to his work as furniture mover and his life at
home under the daily influence of his nagging mother.

Their conversation as they wait is the play. Surrounded by the darkness of night they talk and fall
silent, play and attack, caress and tear at each other, reach out and push back, tell lies and
speak the truth – gradually unmasking themselves and each other until they sit exhausted on the
rails that lead back where they do not want to go. At the end of the play the roar of the
approaching train deafens the audience’s ears as the stage falls into darkness. The question of
whether the couple die on the rails or take the train back to town should not have worried critics
as much as it did. A prominent Czech critic, for example, feels that the end is absurd and not
worthy of the play because it contradicts not only its general meaning but also the character of
Evi, the girl.17 A German critic, on the other hand, regrets that this brilliant piece of writing
ends with facile tragedy like a cheap novel.18 Others, again, believe that the author intended an
open ending.19

Whatever the intention of the author, the ending is simply not that important. Whether the two die
there and then or go back to their deadly lives in town where ‘nothing is of any consequence
anyway,’20 does not change the fact that the whole play has been a show-down with what life and
death really mean. During their inimitable discussion – held (according to stage instructions)
while they sit, run, creep on the roof of the shack, balance on the railway track, try to light
cigarettes without matches, lie in each other’s lap or play games – they cover the spectrum of
human life. Take their exchange on the sources of joy:


ÉVI You could play tennis.

VÉNA Tennis!

ÉVI White trousers, racquet under your arm –

VÉNA Knock myself silly chasing that ball? And run after that white phantom until you go nuts –

ÉVI Oh well, if that’s all you see in it ... what is one to do with you? Your rob yourself of so
much beauty – and you don’t even know how.

VÉNA I got you – just enough for me.

ÉVI I’m cold.21


A little later Véna admits his ambiguous attitude to emotional commitment and the nature of
responsibility: ‘I would tell you that I love you, cross my heart, if I could be sure I wouldn’t
live till tomorrow.’ Or take the couple’s two-line aphorisms on loneliness:


VÉNA complaining that Evi is talking too much One should be alone.

ÉVI One is alone, anyway.


And then there is the act of waiting itself, that long wait for everything in life which does not
necessarily come:


VÉNA The train isn’t coming – I’ve got to do something.

ÉVI Does something have to happen all the time? Can’t we just be ... just like that?

VÉNA You can’t even wait just like that ... mouth keeps going.

ÉVI The way we used to go off to the country ... just take off – It was marvellous. It was quite
enough for us. It was beautiful.

VÉNA You know, you can lead a horse to water but one day the river’s dry.

ÉVI Oh, forget it.

VÉNA Well, stop needling me.

ÉVI As if I could needle you. Me!

VÉNA You sure can.

ÉVI I know, time seems too long when you’re with me now.

VÉNA God, how I love it – that long time growing longer ...

ÉVI Ah, pipe down!22


Composed like a work of music, with the same themes coming up in different keys in the three parts
(the author calls them ‘situations’), the dialogue gains in depth and urgency as both partners
become increasingly honest and bring to the surface the innermost traits of their characters, their
mutual relationship, and their lives as a whole. Three times the outside world intrudes and
distracts their attention from each other, only to bring them back with a redoubled intensity. At
the beginning of each ‘situation’ we get a snatch of the story of Ivan, a boy from a neighbouring
village who had been dancing at a barn dance with someone else’s girl, and was now being pursued by
the jilted lover together with the girl’s brother. At the beginning of the play Ivan and later his
two pursuers come rushing on stage, and the audience is informed about the incident at the same
time as Evi and Véna. Again, as in the case of The End of the Carnival, there is an additional
audience on stage. The difference, however, is that Ivan’s story turns out to be on the periphery
of the play and of no great interest to either audience.

As things proceed, the fortunes of those other lovers from the village dance become increasingly
incidental, even disturbing in relation to the main concern of the play. The author is well aware
of this: step by step he reduces the importance of these intrusions – both in dramatic intensity
and in the time period they occupy. When Ivan first comes rushing in order to hide in the station
shack, he literally steps on the couple in the dark and the play actually begins with a shriek of
physical pain from Véna, quite unrelated to the pain of living he will reveal in the time to come.
The pursuers, irate avengers in the first part, return in the second part with their tempers
considerably cooler. Showing unmistakable signs of the wear and tear of their unsuccessful pursuit,
they are anxious to get home irrespective of whether their mission is completed.

In the third part only the boy returns once again, very quietly this time the stage instruction
calls for a whisper – and very briefly. The representatives of the world outside have rapidly
diminished. Furthermore, while in the first part Evi and Véna discussed the village event for some
time after the pursuers had gone, the last appearance of the boy only triggers a bitter exchange
about their own relationship. The more acute the tension between the lovers, the less interested
the audience (and they themselves) become in the peripheral plot of the other lovers. However – and
here Topol is at his theatrical best – as our indifference to the village lovers grows, we begin to
regard the interruptions more and more as a kind of relief from the emotionally draining exchange
of the main characters. And as the dialogue becomes increasingly a question of life and death, we
need these moments of relief as much as the main characters need them.

One of the strangely magic qualities of this little play is that everything in it at the same time
is and is not. What seemed to be a plot turned out to be an inconsequential murmur from the world
outside; what seemed to be an indifferent wait for a weekend train revealed itself as a time of
reckoning with life. This same ambiguity applies also to the main characters: they are a couple and
yet not a couple; they live together but only on weekends; they sleep together but never in a bed;
they cannot face the thought of the future with each other because, as Véna puts it, ‘We are each
other’s past. We remind each other of each other.’23


Nightingale for Dinner was written in 1965. The English title does not convey the ambiguity
inherent in the original Czech title, Slavík k večeři. In English we might think of an exotic
dinner party where song birds are served stuffed with delicacies; the Czech connotation is quite
different. Besides meaning nightingale, ‘Slavík’ is a fairly common Czech name, and to have Mr
Slavík to dinner is as likely an occurrence as entertaining a Mr Brown or Mr Smith in an
English-speaking country. The fact that Slavík, the song bird, can be had as a dinner guest or a
dinner bird gives the Czech title a semi-sinister ring.

This one-act play has again a very simple plot: Mr Slavík has come to have dinner with a family
consisting of Father, Mother, Son and Daughter. In the course of the evening he gradually realizes
that his hosts intend to kill him and bury him in their garden among the graves of their many
previous dinner guests. At the end of the play, Father and son perform the killing job upstairs
while Mother and Daughter, regretfully but calmly, wait below.

The theme of the unsuspecting stranger who is murdered has been used before. We may remember George
Lillo’s The Fatal Curiosity (1736), in which a long absent son is taken by his parents for a rich
traveller and killed; or Zacharias Werner’s German melodramatic tragedy The Twenty-Fourth of
February (1810), a variation on the same theme. With The Misunderstanding (1944), Albert Camus
attempted – not very successfully perhaps – a twentieth-century ‘existentialist’ version of the
same theme. Another variation is the German writer Tankred Dorst’s play The Curve (1966) where two
mechanics make a living from repairing cars wrecked on a dangerous curve on a mountain highway; the
drivers are buried with pomp and circumstance in their rock-garden cemetery.

In all these versions, however, the author provides some way of explaining the motivation for the
murders. Usually it is economic: in the case of Dorst’s work an additional psychological element of
destructiveness is present. Not so in Topol’s play. Like Pinter’s The Birthday Party, it does not
provide motivations and reasons for behaviour. An audience which looks for a rationally explicable
story will fail to be satisfied by either Topol’s or Pinter’s play.

Beginning with what seems to be a concrete picture of average life – a family dinner with a welcome
guest – Nightingale for Dinner (1965) is neither about a dinner nor about a murder. In fact the
dinner and the murder merely frame the action: one ushers it in, the other concludes it. The play
provides a poetic model of man’s awareness of being and dying; his uncertainty about what is real
and what is a dream; his experiences in getting used to the fact that he will never know why he was
born and why he must die; his surprise at being able to experience the joy of life in the very
moment of realizing the inevitability of his death – his slavery to but also his victory over time.
This sounds, of course, very much like Beckett. But it also harkens back to the works of great
writers of the past giving expression to the timeless tension between man’s dreams of freedom and
the fetters of reality: we may remember Calderón’s La vida es sueño, Cervantes’ Don Quixote,
Shakespeare’s sonnets and The Tempest, or Kleist’s Der Prinz von Homburg.

When the curtain opens, dinner is almost over (though the dishes and glasses remain on the table
throughout the play) and the play begins with one of the miniature ‘audience on stage’ scenes in
which Topol excels. The family is watching while Mother is dancing with the dinner guest to the
music of a shaky record player. A moment later the needle gets stuck and the same notes are
repeated over and over again, forcing the couple to go through the same steps. Nightingale offers
to stop the record but his partner won’t let him because, after all, he is ‘the guest.’ There is a
shouted conversation but no one makes a move to stop the unbearable repetition until the dancers,
accidentally knocking into the table while passing, cause the needle to take a jump and the tune
continues. The period of relief, when things again move on in their old order after the suspension
of time is over, is punctuated by three remarks made by the ‘audience’ – the non-dancing members of
the family. Father says: ‘Well, there was such a lot of screaming and now, you see, it’s all done.’
The Son who had been beating out the repeated bars on his thigh, begins to yawn and asks: ‘What
now?’ The Daughter gets up with the words: ‘The comedy is finished.’24 These same words, although
later they are spoken in Italian, are part of her very last verbal comment in the play. After that
she only hums a quiet tune.

In this way the play is introduced by a miniature grotesque – or, if you like, absurd – version of
its own theme: the eternally moving pattern of growth and decay has been arrested; time has come to
a stop. How has this happened? The dinner guest who bears the name of the exquisite song-bird –
perhaps, though we are never explicitly told, he is a poet – has come to bring the gift of
never-fading beauty. His hosts, however, fail to make an important distinction: that between the
real timelessness of a dream of beauty and the deceptive timelessness of repetition. The moment of
timelessness created by the repetitive sound of a mass-produced gadget is referred to at the end of
the play with the same words as the actual killing of the song-bird.

The members of the family that ‘kill the dream of beauty’ have no names. They are rigidified in
their roles as Father, Mother, Son, and Daughter, and go through the gestures sanctioned by habit
with the predictability of automatons. The Daughter sits on the Mother’s lap, the Father tousles
his Son’s hair, the Son gulps down the rest of the food from other plates. As they tell their
visitor about their lives, their complaints and petty aggressions toward each other take on growing
proportions. Nightingale can hardly get a word in edgeways and is limited to monosyllabic
reactions. They use their guest, as they admit themselves with increasing honesty, as ‘a live piece
of stage property,’ as ‘a mirror into which we can look.’25

As the evening proceeds the dinner guest begins to feel increasingly uneasy. The merry atmosphere
at the beginning has given way to a feeling of anxiety and guilt. The visitor begins to try to
justify his existence by complying with anything that seems to be asked of him. This process is
surprisingly close to Kafka’s work. From an everyday, ordinary situation we are led by forces which
we cannot fully grasp to face questions of crushing magnitude. Objects attain an oppressive
quality, and we move with increasing uncertainty through a forest of strange signs.

One of these signs is a bouquet of flowers which Nightingale brought for the hostess. As she looks
in vain for water to put them in, a discussion ensues about whether the flowers need water at all
because they are probably not real. The visitor claims twice in the course of the play that ‘they
were real when I brought them,’ but the Daughter is sure they are artificial. The Mother discovers
them to be real about half way through the play, basing her conclusion on the fact that a fly has
settled down on a blossom, and surely ‘it wouldn’t sit on an artificial one.’ At the end, when
Nightingale is killed upstairs, the Mother, plucking petals from the flowers, hides her face in the
bouquet. The Father’s final words to the Daughter are ‘Think about the flowers. – You are singing
to yourself? Why?’26 These are also the very last words of the play. The remark can be taken as a
reference to the care needed for a new grave in the garden – a task usually entrusted to the
Daughter; but it also refers to Nightingale’s bouquet – the one tangible (and perhaps living) proof
that he had been there. The Father’s reminder of the flowers is immediately followed by the
Daughter’s song. Why does she sing?

What are we to make of this play which Czech critics came to regard as Topol’s ‘unsuccessful
journey into the Absurd?’27 If we tried to cap it with a definitive symbolic interpretation, we
would be behaving as the Mother with Nightingale’s flowers: we would look for a proof of its
artistic ‘reality’ outside its own nature. There is, however, one scene that seems to contain the
central core of the play. As the death of Nightingale becomes more and more an accepted fact, there
ensues a discussion between the Father and the visitor about the reason for living. It is the only
time in the play that Nightingale talks at any length. In essence the two points of view are
reflected in the following comments:


FATHER You are a nightingale, the king of singers, but you too depend on who is listening to you
... For one it may mean heavenly delight! And for another? A delicious little tidbit, something to
sink his teeth into, nothing else ... though we walk on the ground the ground walks on us the same
way, that’s why we are worn out in the evening and have worn boots! – We breathe the air and the
air breathes us, we spend life and life spends us ... You play a game and the game plays with you.
Or doesn’t it? ...

NIGHTINGALE And if you love a human being? silence; they look at each other If you love one, with
your whole soul – silence If you love – ... With a human being it’s different. Nightingale
approaches the Daughter Why is it different, why? Why is it different?28


This question rings in our ears when we leave the theatre. If, as a Czech critic suggests, we take
the figure of Nightingale as representing ‘man’s eternal dream of beauty and happiness; a dream
that must always die when touched by everyday life,’29 we will have found an interpretation that
‘works’ on all levels. But we are also closing doors which the playwright is desperately trying to
open. A play that equates literal-mindedness with death in life does not deserve to be systematized
by interpretation. Besides, Topol’s hero goes to his death with the words, ‘And whatever might
happen, it will be a dream from which I will awaken.’30 This semi-grotesque self-assertion reminds
us as much of Kafka’s Hunger Artist as it does of Beckett’s clowns, constantly busy in asserting
and proving their existence. Besides, Topol warns us of tugging too resolutely at the play’s veil
of mystery: he subtitles it ‘a Play in a Dream.’ His next work, An Hour of Love, takes this process
a step further. Once again simple, even trivial events, acquire a metaphysical dimension and become
mysterious, awesome signs. It is here that Topol’s kinship with Beckett is most in evidence.


An Hour of Love (1966-7), Topol’s third one-act play, recasts the theme of Cat on the Rails, but
reduces it to essentials. Again there is a couple at the centre of the action but they are no
longer anchored in a specific setting as were Evi, the waitress, and Véna, the furniture mover.
Called El and Ela - man and woman – they can no longer be related to any specific social context.
Rather they live, like Beckett’s characters, in a vacuum of space and time. It is as if their
relationship were abstracted from any incidentals; the murmur of the world outside that had
interrupted Véna’s and Evi’s wait for the train has fallen silent.

The plot is so simple that it can hardly be called a plot at all. The setting is a room where Ela
lives with her ailing aunt. At the beginning of the play her lover El arrives with the news that by
order of some authority – the nature of which we never find out – he will have to leave for good.
The lovers have only one more hour in each other’s company. Just before the end a message arrives
that cancels El’s departure. When leaving he assures Ela that nothing has changed. He will be back
as usual. Their last hour of love has turned out to be repeatable; a link in a monotonous chain.

The play is all about the way the two people spend what they take to be their last hour together.
As in Topol’s two other one-act plays the stage action and the duration of the play are equal. The
audience is made to experience with painful accuracy how the moments pass – one after another, as
the lovers harass each other, each trying to experience the other fully for the last time.


ELA My God, how much time we have! How much time we still have! All those seconds!

EL Only people that are desperate count in seconds.

ELA And criminals. When I say three I’ll shoot. One, two, three –

EL. rocking his head from side to side four, five, six –

ELA Seven, eight, nine, ten –

EL One, two, three –

ELA Four, five, six –

EL Seven, eight, nine –

ELA Ten. –Twenty seconds with you. motions him to be silent No, it’s a pity!

EL pity, a pity, a pity –

ELA Stop it! Rises and walks about the room

EL If we keep silent it doesn’t go so fast?

ELA I’m sure it goes more slowly.

EL But the clock’s ticking.

ELA stops the clock No more.

EL It’s getting dark.

ELA (lights the lamp on the table) No more. sits on his lap

EL Your heart is beating.

ELA That I can’t stop. –That keeps measuring my time! That keeps measuring our time!

EL We get older by seconds, by minutes, and by days.

ELA Now we are still young. One more hour!

EL No more. Not a whole hour. Now only –

ELA interrupting him You aren’t supposed to count! ...31


Two elements in the play interrupt the couple’s painful awareness: the call of duty and their
dreams. The former takes the shape of Ela’s elderly Aunt who, lying behind a partition in the same
room, can hear everything, and joins into the conversation at the most inopportune moments. She
complains about her doctors (but has already outlived two of them), incites Ela to play tricks on
El (whom she dislikes), comments on life (for which she seems to have all the answers), and above
all, interrupts the ‘hour’ by constant demands for her medicine, a cup of tea, or a drink from the
bottle El has brought as a present. Although Ela feels ‘tied down’ and responds to these duties
with obvious weariness, she knows that ‘‘if I am alone, I cease to exist,’32 and anchors her life
in these daily duties which make her measure time in terms of meals and doses of medicine rather
than in minutes that carry away youth.

The other element that permits the couple to escape the prison of time consists of those moments
when their imagination takes over and they roam freely through past and future, telling of dreams
and fears, dreams within dreams and hopes. The action is broken up into little plays within plays
as the characters recount their dreams or re-enact scenes from the past-the day they met, their
first experience of love, moments of particular crisis. We are never quite sure whether these
things actually happened, or how much they have changed in the characters’ minds by being retold
and reshaped during their relationship. We hear about El’s nightmare of trying to hide from irate
pursuers on a tiny island with only a single tree on it (a dream which the aunt immediately
interprets with ‘Women’s Column’ platitudes); we hear about Ela’s horrifying waking dream of being
stuck in the earth head down after falling from the lofty heights of a tree. At other moments the
lovers re-enact their first meeting: Ela, having swum across a river to dare another man who used
only safe bridges, meets El on the other shore and entrusts herself to his care. Or else we witness
their first night of love which was spent rather uncomfortably because Auntie was, as always, close
by. But then she went to work next morning and the lovers had the whole day to themselves.

In the course of the intricate blending of past and present, imagination and reality, we see Ela
gradually get physically weaker, as the certainty of being loved, which gives her the self
confidence of being able ‘to walk along the edge of an abyss and not get hurt, ‘begins to wane. On
the other hand the Aunt – in whom we gradually begin to recognize the inevitability of dying, of
the flesh relentlessly taking precedence over dreams – becomes stronger and more youthful. Toward
the end of the play, in the course of which she actually appears only twice, she has become a young
woman sitting before the mirror with loosened hair. It is now that El tells the Aunt of his
realization that the freedom without which he had thought he could not live does not exist. After
some time ‘A man finds out that he carries his cell with him ... drags it around everywhere, does
not take a step without it, sleeps and eats and loves in it, and can’t escape it ...’ This is not
news to the rejuvenated Aunt. With a knowing smile she retreats behind her partition.

When at the very end of the play El receives the news that he does not have to leave and
‘everything can stay the way it was,’ the lovers are unable to rejoice over this change which
cancels all the agony of their last hour together. It had been the last hour of their love after
all, as the Aunt’s voice sings softly from behind. The beautiful dream of timeless love is cut
short:


EL Time is not merciful. It breaks off in mid sentence. As it did to Hamlet: I can’t tell you any
more–And he dies.33

A dark play indeed. Surely the darkest Topol has .written. And yet so charged with human energy
that it affirms life in spite of stressing acutely its transitory qualities.


Topol’s next play Two Nights with a Girl, completed in 1969, was not published in Czechoslovakia.
On the surface it appears to be a play about a family (two daughters and two sons) who have just
buried their father. In the course of their deliberations about the past and the future two
visitors (or rather opportunistic intruders) arrive, falsely claim to be the late father’s friends,
and after causing all kinds of havoc, leave at the end of the play, having tried (unsuccessfully–a
better thief beat them to it) to steal the family jewellery. The family is left alone with their
father’s cryptic testament, with their momentary relief at having survived the onslaught of the
thieves, and with their recurring moments of confusion about the meaning of life.

This threadbare summary of the plot is, however, completely misleading. Two Nights with a Girl is
Topol’s most ambitious and complex play. It is a rare combination of slapstick and symbolism,
language play and philosophical insights. The movements of the actors are described with great
precision, so that the reader becomes aware that the playwright has conceived the play as a pattern
of movements as much as a pattern of words. The action takes place in a house and adjoining garden.
The room is crowded with a jumble of odd pieces of furniture and all kinds of musical instruments;
the garden causes the characters all sorts of physical difficulties, ranging from stumbling over
protruding roots to getting stuck in bogs and caught on low-hanging branches. Furthermore the stage
instructions establish a rhythmic pattern of night suddenly changing into day, and vice versa. This
pattern has no obvious relation to the actual passing of time but presents a dream sequence of
moods such as we find in Strindberg’s A Dream Play.

Despite the highly realistic surface action of Topol’s play we soon begin to realize that the
inhabitants of the house, the four children of the deceased musician-father, must not be
interpreted according to a handbook of psychology. On one level they seem to represent basic human
traits. There is Rosa, the rational daughter, who is trying to keep the family together but tends
to be deceived by appearances; Dolf, the self indulgent but loyal son; Emmi – the only one who
could manage their late father when he was in one of his ‘moods’ – the down-to-earth girl whose
common sense saves most situations and who always has food and drink stored in some hidden cupboard
when everything seems empty and everyone is almost starved. Last but not least, there is Rudolf,
the family’s ‘golden boy,’ who has inherited his father’s traits, his love of music, his wisdom,
and his ability to talk to his own dreams.

On one level the play could be regarded as an allegro or capriccio variation on the Waiting for
Godot theme: the family is trying to survive, until two strangers appear and shake their beliefs in
various ways. The strangers’ behaviour is alien and destructive: they not only steal jewellery and
food; they also try to make off with the big prize of life, ‘the fairy princess,’ the ideal
woman–but this venture is unsuccessful. The princess drives off in their car and they are left to
pedal on to other tasks on a borrowed bicycle. When they have left, the family is no further ahead
than Didi and Gogo at the end of Beckett’s play.

One significant aspect of the play is the author’s ability to give visual presence to even the most
subtle thought process or philosophical speculation. The best example of this is the concept of the
‘girl’ in the title of the play. It refers partly to a figurine which dominates the stage visually
from the very first moment. Later we hear that the figurine was brought for Rudolf’s benefit from
his brother’s tailor shop. We hear Rudolf converse with it, and his sister refer to it as ‘his
Girl.’ After the figurine has been burned in the garden, it is replaced by a living girl who moves
from one male character to another, bestowing her favours and representing for each what he wants
her to be. At the end no one gets her, and she makes off with the family’s jewellery in a stolen
car. Rudolf is the only one who grasped her essence – her changeable nature, her play-acting, the
impossibility of possessing her except for an instant. Was she life? – truth? – happiness?

All through the play we feel that we are walking through a forest of symbols and that the reality
we perceive is only a reflection of another reality. Realistic details – and there are many of them
– somehow disintegrate in the dream atmosphere of this double reality. The apricot tree in the
garden is suddenly referred to as a cherry tree, the spaghetti prepared on the stove never gets
cooked, the calendar seems to work backwards (Sunday comes before Saturday), a fist fight reduces
one of the characters to a twitching marionette; secondary characters appear in stylized fairy-tale
numbers – for example, the cast includes Seven Musicians with Wind Instruments, Seven Hunters with
Rifles, Three Men with Flashlights.

There is another aspect of the play which is very important: the linguistic. The playwright may
suddenly have two characters embark on a dialogue in which they play on words and concepts, reveal
the confusing power of language, and shift the meaning of the scene to an entirely different level.
Take the following example:


GIRL You stay here and can calmly go on playing–

RUDOLF Who? What?

GIRL For example love.

Rudolf laughs, makes her sit on his chair, and stands behind her

RUDOLF There are many cases in human life. It’s the third one that is important: With whom?

GIRL I am still staggering hopelessly around the first one.

RUDOLF Who of them, who of us.

GIRL I dread the fourth one when I get old.

RUDOLF Over whom, over what.

GIRL And you?

RUDOLF Without whom, without what, when you don’t stand before me any longer.

GIRL I know another preposition.

RUDOLF You mean behind?

GIRL I mean under.

Rudolf bends down to her, they kiss ...34


Although in English some of the sharpness of this grammatical analysis of life is lost, we
nevertheless see that the author is trying to explore and reconsider our relationship to language.
He makes us rediscover, like children, the mysteries of structures which have become so familiar to
us that we no longer notice them. As Ela says in another context to her lover: ‘She [the Aunt] has
become so used to you, that you no longer exist for her.’35 It is habit, smothering life and
gobbling up man’s existence like a ravenous monster, that Topol exposes in each area of his
mysterious poetic work.

In the eight plays Topol has written to date, the setting has changed considerably to accommodate
the variations on his themes. The early plays are historically defined and realistically localized.
Wind at Midnight takes place at a certain period during the Middle Ages and Their Day is located in
a typical small town in central Bohemia with its neon signs above the pubs doors, its stodgy living
rooms, its smudgy railway station with red benches and dust-covered flowers planted in wooden
barrels. Although Josef Svoboda, who designed the set, used a multi-screen projection process in
order to intensify the dramatic conflicts, the overall impact was a realistic one, ‘as if a camera
had shifted the view of a panoramic whole into the inside of several people on a certain Sunday in
a certain small town.’36

Topol’s third play, The End of the Carnival, which established him as a playwright of international
stature, still has a concrete setting – a village with its farm houses and fields, and its barber
shop. The stage here is reminiscent of a Breughel painting of a small community, half at work, half
at play, teeming with life and activity. In comparing this setting with Topol’s fourth (and first
one-act) play, Cat on the Rails, one finds a surprising difference. The action takes place at night
at a railway-stop – not a station but merely a stop somewhere in the country where the train passes
a wooden shack by a big tree, where someone may or may not be waiting. The stop is a strange, half
real place, its existence defined only for a few moments at a time, namely when the train stops and
unloads or takes on an occasional passenger. Afterwards the place sinks again into anonymity until
the next fleeting moment of identification when another train stops by.

No longer a Czech town with middle-class homes, no longer a village with farms and a dance hall,
but a place ‘in the middle of nowhere’ that has its reason for being only in having people arrive
from somewhere and leave for somewhere, in directions indicated only by two seemingly endless
rails. Moreover the number of characters is drastically reduced. Their Day has twenty-six, The End
of the Carnival twenty-five characters. The cast of Cat on the Rails consists of only five
characters, three of whom are on the stage only briefly and are of no central importance. Basically
the play consists of a conversation between two people.

Topol’s second one-act play, Nightingale for Dinner, moves the action into a home again. However,
it is not a home conceived as part of a village or town but rather a room sealed off from the
outside, where remnants of food remain permanently on the table, the only sound of the world comes
from a worn-out record player, and the view is limited to a piece of garden where visitors who
cannot leave – and none of them can – will be buried in a shady spot. The wide sky above the
village of The End of the Carnival where trees were swaying in the wind has given way to a
closed-off garden where nature is fostered as the guardian of death – shading and beautifying the
graves of men. The only other way out of the room is the staircase leading upstairs – an area that
becomes more and more sinister, as the certainty grows that this is where the visitor Nightingale
will be killed. The open railway station where one stops only in order to leave again has become a
locked prison with no way out.

The room in Topol’s third one-act play, An Hour of Love, does have a door, but whoever goes out
inevitably comes back. The only window is a mirror into which the girl makes a grimace at the end;
a symbol of the starry sky is flattened against the prison wall, a zodiac. sign – stage
instructions say – is painted on the partition from behind which the authoritative voice of the
Aunt crushes any notion of freedom. In Topol’s second full-length play, Two Nights with a Girl, the
room with its arbitrary assortment of furniture, its array of musical instruments which no one
plays, its adjoining garden illuminated by the straying flicker of a flashlight, its stripped
chandelier where only one bulb works, is, for all its seeming concreteness, a no man’s land of
human habitation, a place that neither is what it seems to be nor seems to be what it is. Like a
house in a parable it could be found almost anywhere at any time; its reality is the higher reality
of a symbol.

Topol’s relation to his stage has some similarity to Ibsen, who narrowed down his dramatic world
from the universal dimensions of Peer Gynt to the stifling rooms of The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm
and then expanded it again to the airy mountains of When We Dead Awaken. In his staging of Topol’s
plays Otomar Krejča revealed his understanding of the playwright’s changed expression; he realized
that the increased spareness of ‘realistic’ and localized detail required a more fully structured
inner rhythm. In his famous staging of Cat on the Rails, for example, Krejča achieved this rhythm
by using ‘the dynamics of the actors’ bodies as well as their language.’37 Especially where the
lovers fight and tussle, the director managed to work out a pattern of animal leaps, a fascinating
visual mixture of strength and brutal elegance.38


The mask, as Pirandello has told us, is a frozen form in which we constantly try to capture life
because we can only perceive life when it does not move. Kierkegaard, using an opposite image to
express the same thing, called life a white horse galloping past us on the other side of a high
fence so that we are at any one time only able to see a fraction of it. If we were to give a label
to Topol’s work, we might call him the dramatist of the mask. He uses masks in each of his plays,
sometimes explicitly, at other times symbolically. The ‘demasking’ process is a central theme in
this work. We are well aware of the ambiguous quality of the mask: it hides and reveals at the same
time. By concealing the identity of its wearer it releases him from personal responsibility and
ushers him into the amoral sphere of anonymity.

But just because of this release from law and order it reveals and frees certain suppressed
qualities; by sweeping away the borders of convention and habit it becomes a provocation to
intimacy and a new form of freedom. He who dons a mask no longer plays his habitual role; having
lost his set form of behavior he is free to let his innermost qualities come to the surface. In
other words, the mask may identify him as the man he really is. This is precisely what has happened
to one of the main characters of The End of the Carnival: Raphael, who, as a result of an action
performed while he was masked, must now for the first time in his life face up to individual
responsibility. In his case the mask meant a true identification.

The End of the Carnival is partly about a play within a play. However, not the players but the
on-stage audience wear the sign of the theatre, the mask. The events taking place in the village
are witnessed by the villagers who have masked themselves to celebrate traditionally the feast of
Shrove Tuesday, the end of the Carnival season. The audience in the theatre thus see not only the
events themselves but also observe the other audience the masked villagers – who are instrumental
in bringing about the catastrophe without being aware of their active part in it.

Faced with a sort of mirror image of themselves on the stage, the theatre audience are made to
observe an attitude common to most people in everyday life: that of a partly informed onlooker who
makes judgments on very scanty information, the scantiness of which he fails to realize himself.
What is shown on stage therefore is an event and at the same its interpretation by society. Unlike
Brecht, however, who instructs his audience carefully about the reasons for the events taking
place, Topol does everything possible to avoid evoking definite judgment. On the contrary, the
image of justice in his plays remains unclear. Because the playwright refuses to freeze it into a
certain form, to give it a mask of timeliness, it remains unreachable, even inconceivable in its
entirety, like Kierkegaard’s white horse on the other side of the fence.

At first glance Topol’s next play, Cat on the Rails, is a play entirely without masks. But its
staging at the Theatre Behind the Gate in Prague during the 1965/66 season proved otherwise. The
double bill announced an unlikely companion piece for the evening: Ghelderode’s farce Masquerade
from Ostend. As it turned out, however, the two plays were not strangers at all. Even before the
lights went down, fragments of taped conversations of Cat on the Rails were heard in the audience,
and as people were leaving, the main musical motif from Masquerade from Ostend accompanied them out
of the theatre. When Ghelderode’s play had finished, the masks taken off by the characters were
left lying front-stage in full view. During the second part of the evening two people were taking
off their masks metaphorically while sitting by a railway track in the place where the masks had
been lying before. At the end of the play, as the train for which the lovers had been waiting
approached, the rising roar of the engine mingled with the musical motif of Ghelderode’s play,
increased for a brief moment to an almost unbearable fortissimo, and then abruptly ceased, and the
stage fell into darkness.39

Topol’s third one-act play, An Hour of Love, was also staged in a play-within-a-play context. It
ran at the Theatre Behind the Gate together with Arthur Schnitzler’s The Green Cockatoo, a short
play about the French Revolution.40 Again this unlikely choice turns out to have been the result of
Krejča’s deep insight into the nature of the plays he worked with. The Green Cockatoo deals again
with theatre within theatre: an improvised play about revolution is interrupted by the revolution
itself. The fictitious action is ironically pierced by reality which spills into the artifact and,
by destroying it, proves its theme to be a fact.

Topol’s subtitle for the second play of the evening, An Hour of Love, is ‘a Dream in a Play.’ It is
as if the subdued trio of actors, taking up the theme from the symphonic treatment of Schnitzler’s
play, now gave an intimate variation on the subject of man’s imagination versus reality. The
important thing, however, is that the form of the imagination in Topol’s case varies with the
reality against which it wrestles. Schnitzler explores how man’s imagination wanted to oppose
reality by conjuring it, getting ahead of it, as it were. In An Hour of Love the characters try to
oppose reality by contradicting it, and the flights of their imagination take on various shapes in
the course of their struggle. Again and again Ela acts out her fancies to ward off the approaching
extinction of her greatest dream – the dream with which ‘everything stands and falls for her.’ In
the end this dream is crushed not by reality proving it to be no dream at all, as in Schnitzler’s
case, but – a more contemporary and grimmer image – by reality making it ‘change under [her]
hands,’ wearing it away ‘drop by drop, pebble after pebble.’41 Ela gives up her dream once she has
found that it no longer has a relation to reality and has become senseless for her.

In An Hour of Love the playwright is pushing the theme of the role of man’s imagination to its very
limits. Whether the play is as stark and hopeless as some Czech critics have found it, has to
remain an open question. Seen in the context of the three one-act plays, which I regard as
variations on a theme, it does not seem to reveal quite as dark a vision as they would have us
believe. Repeatedly the playwright imitates what Evi and Ela did by thinking up new ways of letting
the mind play its magic game and turning the tables on the finality of death. ‘Only death is real,
time is an illusion,’ says the Father in Nightingale for Dinner, to which his visitor, at the door
of death, responds with the impassioned question: ‘And if there is someone who turns it upside
down? Who realizes himself within the limits of time so completely that he makes death an
illusion?’42

Topol once gave us his definition of a happy man as ‘a man who lives in harmony with himself, who
realizes himself to the greatest extent, who really is.’ The playwright was very young then and his
formulation sounds obvious, if not commonplace. His definition of the opposite of this kind of life
is much better: He refers to ‘those who have simply got used to our world, who have settled down in
their own way, and not only do not know but never even ask themselves the question “why and for
which reason all this is. “43 Here particularly we see the spiritual kinship between Topol and
Beckett. Remember Estragon and Vladimir with their carrots?


ESTRAGON ... Funny, the more you eat the worse it gets.

VLADIMIR With me it’s just the opposite.

ESTRAGON In other words?

VLADIMIR I get used to the muck as I go along.44


At the heart of each of Topol’s works there is a tension between two ways of looking at life.
Generalizing, and therefore necessarily oversimplifying, we might call it the tension between the
man who collects answers and the man who collects questions. These two basic poles of the human
spirit have been called many names. The Greeks personified them by two gods; Nietzsche considered
these gods in turn the key symbols of modern western thought; Santayana told us that one cannot
exist without the other, because ‘unless irrational impulses and fancies are kept alive, the life
of reason collapses for sheer emptiness.’45

The problem of the tension between these poles of man’s inner life was central to Topol’s work from
the very start and grew with him, gaining in depth as he matured, paralleling his own development
as a man and an artist. When the playwright was twenty-three, he presented the problem with the
assured clarity of a young talent. For the ‘scientifically minded’ middle-aged Mr Dohnal of Their
Day all the answers to life have been provided because ‘nature has pulled it off from the
biological cell to homo sapiens,’46 and he can settle back into his self satisfied life without
aims and dreams, and the responsibilities that come with them. The playwright obviously encourages
us to write Mr Dohnal off as a negative figure and suggests that the sooner the young generation
struggles free from his influence, the better.

By the time we meet the next of Topol’s negative figures, the efficient village barber in The End
of the Carnival, the playwright is much less explicit. Smrt’ak (a nickname playing on the word
‘death’ – something like ‘Deadfella’ perhaps) is no longer an obviously destructive figure; rather
he is nondescript, average, and can be called ‘a villain’ with little more justification than any
of the other villagers. Everyone is in some way responsible for Jindřich’s death; Smrt’ak only a
little more tangibly so, since he provided the make-up and the coffin for the procession.

Still, Smrt’ak is the destructive figure of the play. The fact that the evil he spreads has become
less obvious is only due to the playwright’s matured vision. Having rapidly outgrown a tendency to
be too literal, Topol now moulds the figure with subtlety. Smrt’ak is a tidy man. He likes order
and takes every opportunity to urge others to do ‘one thing after another,’47 he deplores waste and
can get indignant when someone does not finish his drink; he himself hardly drinks (his excuses
vary from gall-bladder trouble to kidney stones); and anxiously sticks to all rules and
regulations. Even when he was a little boy (he has never left his native village) he was so well
behaved that he was chosen as altar boy for the church service.

Smrt’ak has few pleasures – the chief one is seeing others get into trouble. Of course he never
gets into trouble himself and quickly leaves whenever anything ‘stops being funny.’ In passing we
learn that he directs the local amateur acting group and does the casting according to his
knowledge of the villagers’ weaknesses and secrets. During the mask festivities, too, he plays the
role of the organizer. ‘It all depends on me,’ are his first words in the play. Even this feast of
spontaneous joy he wants to organize according to the rules of his own limitations – for he is
incapable of the sheer joy of living. For him the only enjoyable aspect of the masquerade will come
when he sees the tragicomic figure of Král’s son in the coffin: ‘and with that funeral procession
you wait until half past five when I close shop,’ he orders the masks, ‘that I wouldn’t like to
miss!’48

In Cat on the Rails, Topol recasts the same figure even more subtly. Determined to work out the
character to the last detail, the playwright has moved him into the centre of action. Véna is a man
who knows that ‘whatever I can’t get my hands on gives me trouble.’ He is literal-minded and unable
to see beyond factual evidence. Evi puts it in her own perceptive way: ‘When you laugh you cry! –
What do you do when you cry?’ Of course Véna never cries, perhaps because he thinks that there must
always be a reason for everything. When Evi tells him a story about an actual event, he frets: ‘So
why do you tell me that? Where’s the moral lesson of the story, where?’ He cannot grasp the girl’s
impulsive joy, he cannot join her in her dreams because he has no inner harmony. There is a dark
animal in him which he calls ‘the mole,’ and he is ‘never sure who of the two is really me, the one
who enjoys or the one who destroys.’49

El of An Hour of Love is Véna’s kindred spirit. He too abhors heights of any kind and when Ela,
re-enacting a scene from the past, pretends to be standing precariously on a high rail, he shouts
at her just as Véna had shouted at Evi when she had climbed on the roof of the railway shack. None
of the men can understand the desire to seek heights even if it involves danger. ‘I love heights! I
love heights!’50 calls Evi perched against the sky. ‘My God, what sense does it make?’51 grumbles
El when Ela is balancing on the back of the sofa.

In An Hour of Love Topol has penetrated even further into the recesses of human nature. After
having given ‘the mole’ in man the upper hand in Nightingale for Dinner and letting it destroy the
messenger of joy, he now faces it in An Hour of Love with redoubled intensity. At one point Ela
drapes herself in a table cloth with a flower pattern. At first El prefers these flowers to real
ones ‘because they don’t grow. And what doesn’t grow, doesn’t change.’ But when the penetrating
voice of the Aunt informs him from behind the partition: ‘What has got life, has got death,’ El
draws a ‘‘logical’ conclusion: ‘So only that which is not alive remains forever? That which is not,
is eternal?’ Whereupon he shouts at Ela to ‘take off that table cloth. Take off that eternity.’52
El misses Topol’s significant distinction between merely living, and really being. Drawing his
literal conclusion, he arrives at the closed door of an absolute statement. He fails to grasp
Nightingale’s dream about making death an illusion. Neither would he be able to follow Santayana’s
thought that ‘literalness is impossible in any utterance of the spirit, and if it were possible it
would be deadly.’53

When Topol wrote Two Nights with a Girl he no longer tried to represent ‘the enemy of life’ in one
character. The destructive and life-denying quality becomes less tangible and much more widely
suffused. At various moments each character seems to share in this quality. It could be summarized
as materialism and greed, an inability to perceive beauty, a refusal to try – with all the
imperfections of trying – to arrive at some form of truth. In other words, it is lack of
spirituality. The quality appears most obviously in the two intruders, the Doctor and David, who
prey on the family’s material and spiritual resources.

However, unlike Smrťak, the quietly vicious barber of The End of the Carnival, these two characters
do not project a definite form of ‘evil.’ When Rudolf, assuming that David has taken off with the
Girl, calls him ‘a hired murderer,’ the Doctor quickly deflates this moral judgment: ‘You Romantic.
He is a common thief.’ Furthermore, as we find out a minute later, David is an unsuccessful thief.
At the end the two ‘thieves’ dejectedly depart, two sorry figures pushing an old bicycle, hiding
their faces in their upturned coat collars. The Doctor’s last words, ‘Night, the black cave of our
minds,’ pronounced as he leaves the threshold, sound strangely absurd. But not as absurd as
Figaro’s buoyant aria which resounds immediately afterwards from the record player. The dark forces
in man’s soul are crowded out by the irresponsible rhythms of a popular virtuoso theatrical
performance. Perhaps it is ‘all only play. And why not play for a while?’ as Rudolf tells the Girl
earlier. In play our dreams are released and perhaps only in play can we fill the empty silence
which follows our questions about the meaning of life.

In his note to A Dream Play Strindberg tells us that ‘Time and place do not exist. On a flimsy
foundation of actual happenings, imagination spins and weaves new patterns: intermingling
remembrances, experiences, whims, fancies, ideas, fantastic absurdities and improvisations, and
original inventions of the mind. The personalities split, take on duality, multiply, vanish,
intensify, diffuse and disperse, and are brought into focus. There is, however, one single
consciousness that exercises a dominance over the characters … ‘54

These words could well serve as an introduction to Topol’s most profound and, in its exquisite
combination of histrionics and philosophy, his until now most challenging play, Two Nights with a
Girl.55 From The End of the Carnival on Topol has established himself as a playwright-poet who
keeps asking the eternal question: ‘What is life and what does it mean? Who is man and what does he
mean?’ And although he knows that this question can never be answered, he bravely sets out to
ponder again the nature of good and evil, happiness and sorrow, hope and despair. ‘They don’t
understand you,’ Rudolf says to his figurine-ideal once she has come to life and wins all the games
everyone tries to play with her. ‘They all approach you with sheer reason, they cut off your most
beautiful branches, the yellowish green ones, on which not even a bird perches because they break
when touched ever so lightly.’56

In this paradoxical image lies much of the secret of Topol’s play. By reason alone we find no way
to the ‘meaning’ of the play. Its logic is the logic of a dream; its reality combines the invented
and sensed reality of a dream merged with physical experience; its time and space become
questionable as abstract entities and exist only in the imagination of the characters. Strindberg’s
A Dream Play, in which he placed the whole of humanity on trial, ushered in the drama of the
twentieth century. Almost three-quarters of a century later a young Czech writer takes up the
heritage of the great prophet of tortured humanity and reshapes it for the generation that knows
Samuel Beckett.



In: Goetz-Stankiewicz, Marketa: The Silence Theatre. Toronto – Buffalo – London, 1979.


________________________________

1 Otakar Blanda ‘The Revolt of Youth’ Afterword to Josef Topol Jejich den (Prague 1962) 97

2 Jejich den 57, 60, 62

3 Jindřich Černý ‘Krejča: Schnitzler, Topol’ Divadelní noviny roč. 12 č. II 12 Jan. 1969 3

4 Ibid

5 Karel Kraus “Fin du carnaval” de Josef Topol, Etude précédée d’un aperçu de la dramaturgie
tcheque depuis 1945’ in Jean Jacquot ed Le Théâtre Moderne 11: Depuis la deuxième guerre mondiale
(Paris 1967) 305-6

6 Topol Zwei Nächte mit einem Mädchen tr Lydia Tschakert (Universal Edition Schauspiel,
mimeographed, Vienna 1972) 227; (original Czech title: Dvě noci s dívkou)

7 Topol Kočka na kolejích in Divadlo (Feb. 1965) 93

8 Otomar Krejča ‘Director’s Note’ Jejich den 4

9 Topol was the youngest Czech author ever to have a play performed at the National Theatre in
Prague (see Krejča ‘Note’ I).

10 Ibid 5

11 Topol Konec masopustu in Divadlo (May 1963) 14

12 Michael Anderson et al Crowell’s Handbook of Contemporary Drama (New York 1971) 105

13 Kraus “Fin du carnaval” 297-314

14 Konec masopustu 14

15 Karel Kraus, Program Note to the opening performance of The End of the Carnival on 14 Nov. 1964
at the National Theatre in Prague, reprinted in Svědectví 7 No. 25 (1965) 127

16 Ionesco Notes 143

17 Sergej Machonin ‘Kočka na kolejích’ Literární noviny roč. 14 č. 50 II Dec. 1965 6

18 Rolf Michaelis ‘Einsame Masken’ Theatre heute Jg. 7 Nr. 7 (1966) 18-19

19 See Burian ‘Drama in Czechoslovakia’ 307; Tynan ‘Theatre abroad’ 112.

20 Kočka 91

21 Ibid 87

22 Ibid 89, 92, 96

23 Ibid 94

24 Topol Slavík k večeři in Divadlo (March 1967) 81

25 Ibid 84

26 Ibid 19, 82, 85

27 Jan Císař ‘Čas lásky a smrti’ Divadlo (Feb. 1969) 37

28 Slavík 90, 91

29 Císař – ‘Láska a smrt’ 38

30 Slavík 91

31 Topol Hodina lásky in Divadlo (Oct./Nov. 1968) 60

32 Ibid 62

33 Ibid 65

34 Zwei Nächte 213-14

35 Hodina lásky 61

36 Krejča ‘Director’s Note’ 7

37 Machonin II Dec. 1965

38 The main actors, Marie Tomášová and Jan Tříska, have been widely acclaimed for their meticulous
performance. They also acted the leading roles in An Hour of Love and in Krejča’s internationally
famous staging of Romeo and Juliet in Josef Topol’s innovative and outstanding translation.

39 Cf Leoš Suchařípa ‘Člověk je stejně sám’ Divadlo (March 1966) 7-8

40 These two plays, together with Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Zdeněk Mahler’s adaptation of
Nestroy, The Rope with Only One End, were all performed by Krejča’s ensemble of The Theatre Behind
the Gate as the Czech entry at the annual International Theatre Festival in London, England, in the
spring of 1969.

41 Hodina lásky 68

42 Slavík 90

43 Kraus ‘Masopustní tragedie’ Divadlo (Feb. 1965) 22

44 Beckett Waiting for Godot (New York 1954) 14

45 George Santayana ‘The Comic Mask’ Soliloquies in England (New York 1923) 137

46 Jejich den 62

47 Konec masopustu 12

48 Ibid 7, 12, 50

49 Kočka 89, 91, 93, 94

50 Ibid 89

51 Hodina lásky 68

52 Ibid

53 Santayana ‘The Comic Mask’ 139

54 August Strindberg, Author’s Note to A Dream Play in Six Plays of Strindberg tr Elizabeth Sprigge
(Garden City, NY 1955) 193

55 It is unfortunate that at the time of the completion of this book I had not had the opportunity
to read Topol’s most recent full-length play Sbohem Sokrate (Goodbye Socrates) which was written in
1976 and is circulating in typescript in Czechoslovakia as an item of Edice Petlice.

56 Zwei Nächte 213