Trial by Theatre

Reports on Czech Drama

Barbara Day

• Publisher: Karolinum Press, Charles University
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9788024640686
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Théâtre

The motto "Národ sob?"—"From the Nation to Itself"—inscribed over the proscenium arch of Prague's National Theatre symbolizes the great importance theater holds for the Czechs. It also belies an extraordinary history of subversion, repression, and an enduring capacity for reinvention. In Trial by Theatre, Barbara Day sets that story in its political and sociological contexts, painting a vivid portrait of the evolving nature and importance of Czech theater that illuminates the nation's history more broadly.Drawing on a range of oral and written sources, as well as her unique personal experience of cultural and historical events in Czechoslovakia from the 1960s to the 1980s, Day offers a sweeping view of Czech theater, its colorful personalities, and international connections. Her story details: the days of the National Awakening in the nineteenth century, when theater took the place of politics, becoming an instrument of national identity in the hands of the revivalists; theater as a symbol of independence during the Nazi occupation; its survival of Socialist Realism and Stalinism and subsequent blossoming in the "Golden Sixties"; and theater's essential role in Prague Spring and beyond, when for two decades theater operated in provisional spaces like gymnasiums, bars, trade union halls, art galleries, and living rooms. Trial by Theatre culminates in the Velvet Revolution of 1989, a year that saw the installation of Václav Havel—a playwright—as the first post-Communist president of Czechoslovakia.

IV LIBERATION, VICTORIOUS FEBRUARY, AND WHAT BECAME OF THE AVANT-GARDE

BRIEF WINDOW: 1945–1948

“Say what you will,” wrote Milan Kundera of the period after 1945, “the Communists were more intelligent. They had a grandiose programme, a plan for a brand-new world in which everyone would find his place.”¹⁰² When in 1945, in a deal between Stalin and the Western powers, the Red Army liberated Czechoslovakia by advancing from the east,^* the Communist politicians, led by Klement Gottwald, came back from Moscow with high aspirations and the knowledge that they had an obedient and lethal network on the ground. President Beneš and the government-in-exile, on the other hand, returned from London bruised and exhausted by their struggle to get Czechoslovakia’s rights recognised by the allied powers. Beneš entered his country from the East, via Moscow, in the wake of the Red Army, and for several months the government sat in Košice in eastern Slovakia. Fearful still of the German presence in the Lands of the Bohemian Crown (and under pressure from Moscow), Beneš obtained Western approval for laws ordering the expulsion of the historic German-speaking population.^†

Czechoslovakia had not suffered bombing raids like those in Germany, nor was her capital city razed to the ground as in Poland. Nevertheless, the war had been brutal. Armed (and unarmed) resistance had been crushed early on. Blood-red posters listing the names of those executed were regularly pasted up around Prague. In retreat, the German soldiers took their revenge on Czech civilians, including children. In retaliation, stray Germans and collaborators were caught and lynched by the Czechs. The Soviet liberators, meanwhile, had their own lists and abducted members of Russian families who had settled in Prague in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as selected Czechs and thousands of Slovaks.^* Most notorious of all were the “wild expulsions” of German-speaking inhabitants between May and August 1945, carried out by the local authorities, police, and zealous volunteers with the complicity of the higher authorities. After the Potsdam Conference the expulsions were carried out under the aegis of the Allies, but still in conditions of immense deprivation, violation, and suffering.¹⁰³ The brutality of war was carried over into peacetime.

Beneš was anxious to conciliate the meft, and through them the USSR. Right-wing parties were banned—not simply the far right, but centre right parties such as the Agrarians, an important force in the First Republic. The Beneš Decrees included a Nationalisation Act that came into effect in October 1945, confiscating without compensation all businesses with over five hundred employees. The theatres had been nationalised even earlier; whereas, after World War I, the cultured, intelligent, and wise Jaroslav Kvapil had been appointed head of the Ministry of Education and Culture, in April 1945 President Beneš appointed the no less cultured and intelligent, but unfortunately not very wise, Zdeněk Nejedlý (who had spent the war in the Soviet Union). One of his first actions (June 1945) was to cancel all the licences and permits granted to private entrepreneurs and impresarios and take the theatre as a whole under his own control.^† The Communists were riding high, and in the 1946 elections won 38 per cent of the vote. It entitled them to some of the key ministries—fatefully, the Ministry of Information and the Ministry of the Interior.

The theatres were already in a critical condition; ordered to reopen two days after the liberation in May, they had to rethink their purpose and their repertoire, until now determined by wartime conditions. Morover, Nejedlý’s abrupt withdrawal of concessions from private theatres left many actors and technical staff unemployed. One rich current of theatre life was gone forever: the German-language theatre. Dominant until the late nineteenth century, it had been pushed into second place by demographic and cultural changes. Back in November 1920, a band of Czech nationalists had forcibly taken over the Theatre of the Estates and thrown the legitimate German company into the street. (President Masaryk was so angered by this act of aggression, he refused to set foot in the Theatre of the Estates ever again.) Now, in September 1945 the Neues Deutsches Theater was renamed the Grand Opera of 5^th May (Velká opera 5. května) with a production of Bedřich Smetana’s Brandenburgers in Bohemia. Countrywide, the last traces of the old German traditions disappeared and their theatres were occupied by so-called progressive—and often ruthless—Czech youth.^*

Theatre people, even more than those in other spheres of life, faced accusations of having collaborated with the Nazis. One was Zdeněk Štěpánek, grandson (or great-nephew; the sources are not clear) of the robust nineteenth-century theatre entrepreneur, Jan Nepomuk Štěpánek. Zdeněk Štěpánek, a greatly respected leading actor and former legionnaire, was accused of having too close a relationship with top Nazis; banned from the Czechoslovak stage, he was not allowed to return for several years. The “King of Comics,” Vlasta Burian, who had been running his own theatre since 1930, was not so quickly exonerated. Some of his sketches and songs were allegedly anti-Semitic, but there were other motives—such as envy—behind the charge of collaboration.^† He was cleared in a trial held in 1945 and in another in 1946, but at a third trial the secret police blackmailed Goebbels’s mistress, the film star Lída Baarová, into testifying against Burian. He spent three months in prison, lost his theatre and property, and above all his reputation. His name was cleared in 1994 (after research by the theatre historian Vladimír Just), long after his death. Lída Baarová, then in her late seventies, retracted her earlier testimony.^‡

The promotion of Czech identity and national values was no longer in the hands of the small stages that had been so courageous during the occupation, and many of them disappeared—including the Windmill (for a while Josef Šmída found refuge with Jiří Frejka in the Vinohrady Theatre). On the other hand, new small stages proliferated as young people who had been children at the start of the war found a release for their energy. These initiatives are largely unrecorded, as many of their participants emigrated after 1948 and the traces of their activity did not survive Communism.

Miroslav Kouřil, E. F. Burian’s designer, had been feverishly diligent during the war, and at the turn of 1944 and 1945 had founded the underground Revolutionary Trade Union Theatre Council. With the end of the occupation, convinced of the need for radical reorganisation of the theatre on the Soviet model, he used his wartime network of contacts to influence the fluctuating situation, earning the nickname “Richelieu.” He was not overjoyed when Burian arrived in Prague on 6 June 1945. Burian, who had swum ashore when the RAF sank the prison ship Cap Arcona with the loss of over four thousand lives, found his return to Prague an anticlimax. He had expected a hero’s welcome and carte blanche under the new dispensation, but Kouřil had made other plans in his absence. One of Kouřil’s initiatives had been to put together a group Obratník, “Turning point,”^* indicating the turning point between war and peace.¹⁰⁴ Based on principles of Soviet theatre management, the group had started work covertly in the last months of the war. Kouřil was (he claimed) expecting Burian to be grateful for a company that was ready and waiting for him. Burian, however, was not interested in a group of inexperienced semi-amateurs (and was dismayed to see how the real spoils had been divided during his absence). He returned to Déčko on Na Poříčí, now shabby and ill equipped. One of his first productions was Romeo and Juliet (September 1945), subtitled The Dream of One Prisoner, and incorporating songs he had learnt in the concentration camps. It did not appeal to the public, which preferred to escape from wartime memories. Déčko was in any case too small for Burian’s ambitions; for four months he took on the operetta theatre in Karlín, on top of three companies in Brno with plans for two in Olomouc and another in Zlín, as well as the management of the Zlín film studios. To this, he added editorship of the weekly, Kulturní politika (Cultural Policy), and a regular radio programme.

There was disappointment on all sides at Déčko. Audiences fell away, and Burian blamed the dissatisfaction in the company on the machinations of critics who (he claimed) would rather he had never returned from prison. The company that had remained loyal to the leader incarcerated by the Gestapo lost confidence in him, and the majority left in 1946. Burian engaged new actors, including the young Otomar Krejča from the steel-making town of Kladno: “Not only was [that Kladno actor] allowed to be there daily, sit there, watch, listen—he would be appearing on that very same stage on which War had been performed!”¹⁰⁵ Nevertheless, Krejča too left after one season. Jan Grossman, who worked with Burian several seasons later, recalled how he was full both of energy and misunderstandings:

Somebody who loved improvisation and changed from day to day, who loved people, hated people, had wonderful ideas, had no strength to realise them, had his team proclaimed the sort of theatre that is a collective… but actually… it was a dictatorship.¹⁰⁶

Obratník, spurned by Burian, was entrusted by Kouřil to Burian’s former student, the ambitious Zdeněk Míka.^* In the summer of 1946 the group toured Bohemia, using the back of a lorry as a stage and performing a political piece by Burian’s dramaturge Jaroslav Pokorný, Behold the City! At the end of the summer they settled in Prague as the Young Pioneers’ Theatre (Divadlo mladých pionyrů); later, on Party instructions, they moved to Zlín^† as the basis of a permanent ensemble. Here, as the Theatre of the Workers (Divadlo pracujících), they became part of the Communists’ re-education process. Míka seized his opportunity, invited his comrades to Zlín, and implemented a Stalinist repertoire. In 1947 he directed The Shoe Factory, an “exposure” of the pre-war “brutality” of the capitalist Baťa family based on a novel by the overlooked (and vengeful) advertising artist Svatopluk Turek.^‡

Another company that had been operating clandestinely before the war ended was the semi-amateur group Youth Drama Studio (Dramatické studio mladých) from Pelhřimov in southern Bohemia, led by the brothers Oldřich and Lubomír Lipský. Their satirical production The Broken Trilogy had been widely performed clandestinely; in June 1945, it opened at the Smetana Museum and was an immediate success. Oldřich Lipský wrote of how the production had been built out of the poverty and disillusion of six years of war: “The Broken Trilogy, a conglomeration of rags, waste paper, little ditties, old scabs, and whatever lacks sophistication.”¹⁰⁷ The group found a permanent home in the Artists’ Union and called themselves the Theatre of Satire (Divadlo satiry). They were joined by the poet Josef Kainar and the musician Harry Macourek who had been touring their own illegal wartime cabaret in the Ostrava region. Macourek was still a student at the Conservatoire, where his sister was part of a four-woman modern dance group; they too joined the Theatre of Satire. Their second production, The Armoured Circus, was compiled by the company out of sketches, songs, gags, and dance. Within a circus framework, jugglers and acrobats, clowns and bareback riders satirised the brutalities of war and its aftermath—the Nazi leaders’ escape to Argentina, the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima. More cabaret-style productions followed; sometimes with loosely connected items, sometimes with a more consistent theme. Those who worked there included the director Alfréd Radok; designer Josef Svoboda; and pre-war choreographers Nina Jirsíková and Laurette Hrdinová. The small theatre was always full, and Harry Macourek later recalled that there had been something of a Dada atmosphere; it was a centre for young artists who held exhibitions in the corridor and gathered at the tiny bar. Looking back from the dark Stalinism of 1953, the Slovak specialist in small-form theatre Ján Kalina wrote defiantly:

The progressive, daring, innovative Theatre of Satire, in spite of all its mistakes and formalist tendencies, was a platform for aggressive satire against reactionaries at ...