Leading Creators of Twentieth-Century Czech Theatre

Jarka M. Burian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415866187
• eBook ISBN: 9781136465857
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

In this invaluable and detailed presentation of the leading creative figures in a richly innovative and dynamic period of Czech theatre, Professor Jarka M. Burian provides us with insightful portraits of the directors K. H. Hilar, E. F. Burian, Alfred Radok, and Otomar Krejca: of the famous Voskovec and Werich comedic duo; of the scenographer Josef Svoboda; and of the playwright, now President of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel. There are also briefer studies of numerous other directors, designers, and actors. The author, a Czech-American theatre scholar and practitioner, has been a frequent on-site observer of Czech theatre since 1965. He is directly acquainted with many of the major artists and the most notable productions that have made Czech theatre internationally famous.

1

K. H. HILAR

Let us honor and praise Hilar’s great work, without which I absolutely cannot imagine progress in Czech theatre.

E. F. Burian¹

Karel Hugo Hilar was the single strongest Czech director during the last twenty years of his life.² Along with Karel čapek he brought Czech theatre to world attention as Czechoslovakia itself began to experience national independence after World War I. Unlike many modern directors, Hilar never worked in small theatres or studio facilities; his more than seventy productions were equally divided between Prague’s two largest Czech theatres, in which he was not only chief director but also chief of all drama activity, which is to say that he had final word concerning which plays would be performed and who would direct them. From 1910 through 1920 he established an outstanding reputation at the Municipal Theatre, a large, modern theatre in the Vinohrady section of Prague. Then, leaving Vinohrady, he assumed the leadership of drama production at Prague’s National Theatre, a position he held until his death in 1935.

Born in 1885 and coming of age at the turn of the century, Hilar was part of the far-flung movement that rejected realism as a meaningful artistic mode. Obviously influenced by the symbolists, yet inherently eclectic and too vigorous a man of the tangible world to reside in a passive aestheticism, Hilar may most nearly be related to the expressionists. To be more precise, his artistic evolution reflected various characteristics of expressionism, modified by his own distinctive temperament and talents. In the broadest sense, his creativity – without losing its urge toward striking expressiveness – developed from a primary concern with provocative theatrical effects to a more thoughtful, probing exploration of the complexities of human experience.

From the perspective of the more than sixty years since his death, his work overshadows that of his predecessors and contemporaries, and it anticipates in many ways the work of his most notable successors. The directorial excitement of men like Alfred Radok and Otomar Krejča owes much to Hilar, and even the earlier, avant-garde directors like E. F. Burian, Jindřich Honzl, and Jiří Frejka acknowledged and drew from Hilar’s pioneering effects. Hilar and his work are like a massif, in relation to which the work of Jaroslav Kvapil, his most important predecessor, forms the foothills, and the work of later major directors forms lesser though striking individual peaks.

Hilar was born in southern Bohemia but grew up in Prague, where he had a traditional education that centered in literature and pointed to a career as a writer or critic. Although a student of classical philology, he most closely affiliated himself with the symbolist and decadent movements of the early 1900s, finding particular attraction in the works of Barrès (on whom he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation), Huysmans, Laforgue, Wilde, and Strindberg of The Inferno period. Before he began work in the theatre he had already served as editor of a series of volumes of contemporary literature and he had seen his own poetry, fiction, literary criticism, translations, and theatre reviews published in periodicals and books. His theatre exposure was not restricted to Prague but included Berlin (where Brahm and Reinhardt were producing), Munich, and Paris; in Prague itself he had the opportunity to see many important visiting companies, such as the Moscow Art Theatre under Stanislavsky in 1906.

It was, therefore, as a literary person with a sophisticated acquaintance with theatre from the audience side of the footlights that Hilar came to the theatre at Vinohrady as a secretary and reader in 1910. Although he claimed that he never wanted to be a director – if anything, a playwright – he directed his first play there in 1911. Two years later, Hilar assumed the post of dramaturge. In 1914 he capped his swift rise by becoming chief of drama at what was Prague’s second most prestigious theatre. During the next six years – which witnessed World War I and its attendant social and political upheavals – he consolidated his power at Vinohrady by ridding the theatre of its operetta ensemble and by staging a series of productions that took Prague by storm and brought the Czech theatre into the mainstream of contemporary European theatre. His achievements at Vinohrady made him the obvious choice to head drama at the National Theatre when that most esteemed, representative national stage needed a strong successor to Jaroslav Kvapil, who had resigned in 1918.

When Hilar took over leadership of drama production at the National Theatre in 1921, he was at the peak of his powers. He had made the Vinohrady theatre Prague’s most vigorous and successful theatre, one that overshadowed the aimless, erratic work of the National Theatre following Kvapil’s departure in 1918. Much later, in retrospect, after a seemingly unending series of erosive conflicts with actors, staff members, and politicians and government bureaus related to the National Theatre, he expressed bitter regret at having made the change. At Vinohrady he had virtually complete control of every phase of operations and worked with a corps of loyal, enthusiastic actors and other personnel. At the National Theatre he experienced chronic frustration, which had its most dramatic (and perhaps psychogenetic) embodiment in 1924 when he suffered the first of his two strokes. He was disabled for a year and a half, after which he returned a nearly broken man. Nevertheless, he went on to a final phase of creativity during which he staged some of his most deeply moving productions before suffering the second and fatal stroke in 1935.

Hilar embodied the Craig ideal of autonomous, absolute directors (or ‘Theatre Artists’), like Reinhardt or Meyerhold, who use all production elements, including the script, as raw material for a unifying, creative vision embodied in a production marked by theatrically striking, imaginative exploitation of stage space, lighting, and dynamically expressive acting, all of which are closely controlled and sensitively orchestrated by the director. Like most significant, innovative directors of the early twentieth century, with the possible exception of Stanislavsky, Hilar rejected the theatre of naturalistic or Meiningen-like illusion. By temperament and instinct he also had little interest in a theatre of psychological complexity or nuance, witty or philosophic conversation, nor (despite his early flirtation with the decadents) in a theatre of symbolistic atmosphere. Instead, Hilar saw theatre as a Dionysian or perhaps Baroque rite, a full-blooded, provocative, vibrant celebration. His instinctive histrionic, hyperexpressive sense evolved and manifested itself in various forms, sometimes in grotesque distortions, sometimes tamed and camouflaged in his more restrained ‘civilism’ period after his stroke, but it never really left him and it distinguished his personal style of expressionism from those of others. Some indication of his vision is evident in an essay entitled ‘Direction as an Expression of World Outlook’:

What do we actually mean by the style of a production? . . . [Is it] even in the best sense a mechanically refined blend of taste and truth, form and convention? or is it . . . something different, higher, spontaneous, and, in the poetic sense, passionate, which, like ecstasy, creates the higher truth of a performance, which invests it with suggestive power . . . which adds to theatre that force as a result of which an actor ceases to be an actor, a flat a flat, a spectator a spectator, but all fuse in one feeling, a feeling of dramatic ecstasy in which the participants forget their everyday existence and essay a higher, that is, artistic, experience?³

In the same piece Hilar speaks of liberating theatre from the rigid forms of the past century and ‘returning theatre to its Dionysian origins, making it once again a pulsating cosmos . . . an image not only of a world already finished but one that is only now emerging.’⁴

For Hilar, theatre was essentially self-justifying, certainly not a servant of any ideology or other extrinsic cause, yet it achieved its highest purpose when it reflected or, better, resonated with its time and public. Theatre needs to sense the inner atmosphere of its time, to feel its pulse. The director must transform his art in the spirit of his age, to join ‘the mentality of the poet with that of the public.’⁵ The ideal was

a community in which poet fuses with spectator, director with poet, designer with actor, and the theatre aesthetician with this entire circle that burns with dramatic enthusiasm. [Then theatre may become] the highest expression of the world view of its time and nation.⁶

Such sentiments, partly inspired by patriotic enthusiasm for the newly independent state of Czechoslovakia, reached their peak in the early postwar years. Perhaps the least politicized of all Czech directors, he was primarily an enthusiast. When he spoke of helping change the world, Hilar was speaking of inexplicit, ecstatic, aesthetic values rather than sociopolitical, much less Marxist ones. It is in that sense that the following must be interpreted:

It is necessary to stage Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ so that the spectator . . . would flee the theatre in horror and only he would remain who understands that this scene deals with a question concerning his whole life. He either dies or decides to live. If he decides to stay alive after our scene, he must work with us to better the world, and we with him. That is the point of our acting and staging concentration, our design and entire program. To create a world and its evolution together.⁷

Hilar’s personality was as striking as his productions, and he was less noted for a systematic, organized grasp of his multiple responsibilities than for obeying the impulse of the moment. A large man, well over 6 feet tall, he was afflicted with a slight speech impediment that often produced an inadvertently comic lisp. There were other inconsistencies or paradoxes: ‘life fatigue and steel nerves . . . an aesthete with peasant robustness . . . a dandy [in attire] whose features resemble those of an antique mask, in which the deep melancholy of velvet black eyes conflicted with the crooked smile of a satyr.’⁸

One of his favorite actors, Ladislav Pešek, recalled his early impressions of Hilar, before his first stroke:

Hilar: a locomotive! . . . An overheated steam boiler, with steam under extraordinary pressure escaping through the cracks. Or perhaps a strange, huge clown. There is strength in his expression, perhaps barbaric, but powerful.⁹

Other contradictions were evident. He was not of the people, but a loner, yet one who needed the approval and applause of the public. His affinity for the Dionysian and elemental was balanced by his equally genuine gift of rational, literary control, just as his most extreme expressionistic productions had their anchor in recognizable, tangible realities rather than mystical or surreal abstractions. Jiří Frejka, an avant-garde director who later became a young associate and eventual successor of Hilar at the National Theatre, neatly defined his cultural orientation: ‘His school is Shakespeare, not Goethe, not Marx. That is, a stormily individual faith, not an objectified, harmonized, sweetened bourgeoisism, nor faith in social justice and revolution. He is always alone.’¹⁰

When Hilar began his directorial career the Czech theatre was in a period of stagnation. It had passed through successive phases of naturalism, genre historicism, psychological realism, and lyrical impressionism, the last two brought to a considerable distinction by Jaroslav Kvapil (1868–1950), Hilar’s most illustrious predecessor and amicable rival as leading Czech director. Kvapil had done much to bring Czech theatre into the twentieth century. In staging, he rid the stage of operatic settings and the dead conventions of naturalism and Saxe-Meiningen, and in dramaturgy he championed Ibsen and Chekhov over Sardou. He was perhaps most celebrated for his Shakespeare productions; in fact, his most impressive achievement was the staging of a cycle of sixteen Shakespeare plays in the spring of 1916 at the National Theatre, as confirmation of the international stature of the Czech theatre and a thinly veiled sign of the Czech pro-Allied feeling in the middle of the war.

Kvapil’s theatre, unlike Hilar’s, was one of suggestive moods and lyrical harmony, of intimate, poetic realism. Clearly influenced by Stanislavsky, he encouraged acting that sought inner realism over external declamation, that explored critical states of soul but in doing so achieved a degree of subjectivity that often threatened the clarity of overall form. It was, moreover, a theatre that had its greatest interest in the work of a few great actors, above all Eduard Vojan, whose Hamlet in 1905 attracted interest from the rest of Europe. A production would key on Vojan or a few other actors, while Kvapil devoted most of his attention to the atmosphere, which was usually understated, tasteful, lightly stylized, harmoniously blended, and slightly academic. The staging carried signs of Appia’s influence in its simplification of forms and poetic lighting, but, as later critics pointed out, it didn’t have the es...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• ROUTLEDGE HARWOOD POLISH AND EAST EUROPEAN THEATRE ARCHIVE
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Introduction to the series
• List of plates
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 K. H. Hilar
• 2 The liberated theatre of Voskovec and Werich
• 3 E. F. Burian
• 4 Alfred Radok
• 5 Otomar Krejča
• 6 Grossman, Macháček, Schorm: three major Czech directors of the late twentieth century
• 7 Josef Svoboda
• 8 Twentieth-century Czech scenographers in the interwar era
• 9 Czech scenography since 1968: a younger generation
• 10 Czech Hamlets of the twentieth century
• 11 Václav Havel
• Coda
• Notes
• Selected bibliography
• Index