The Contemporary Czech Play

Alena Zemančíková   

Over the last decade, the original play has established itself on the stages of Czech theatres as a natural part of the repertoire. Independent theatres are the pioneers in producing original texts, but regional theatres subsidised by cities and regions are taking the risk of presenting original plays with far greater ease and acclaim than in the previous decade.

The independent Theatre Letí has played a fundamental and tenacious role in the advancement of contemporary playwriting, offering creative residencies for playwrights and annually organising the Mark Ravenhill Award for the best production of a contemporary play. Eligibility is limited only by the age of the text, which cannot exceed ten years, and the requirement that the play transcends the staging approach of the theatre for which it was created and can be transferred to another venue. Productions of both Czech and international plays are eligible for the award. An Award for the Best New Czech Play is also offered by Svět a divadlo (World and Theatre) magazine’s Theatre Critics’ Awards.

The National Theatre in Prague offers creative residencies in the Studio for New Drama, where selected authors work with financial support and the possibility of consultations with dramaturgs from the National Theatre. The aim is to arrive at a completed dramatic text over the course of the season. The program demonstrates that announcing a playwriting competition is not the only productive way to assist new plays on their way to the stage and that promising emerging playwrights benefit from ongoing development and some certainty of outcome.

The subject matter of contemporary Czech plays responds to the emptiness of the political system, global exploitation, the ethics of scientific and technological development, gender issues, fears of climate change and unresolved housing difficulties.  Biographical plays consistently arouse interest, even if today’s selection of protagonists is guided by somewhat different criteria compared to the earlier emphasis on showcasing key figures opposing the Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes.

Playwrights, Subject Matter and Style

I have selected the most recent plays by the selected authors, which offer a fundamental demonstration of their thematic interests and distinct styles.

Lenka Lagronová (1963) is an established author of intimate dramas centred on women, whose works have been performed across all types of theatres for years. The play Z prachu hvězd (From the Dust of Stars) is a poetic testimony to profound loneliness and the absence of security. The play references a folk ballad about a dead man who comes for his bride, but also depicts the eternal, metaphysical search for the meaning of existence and the possibility of deliverance from earthly martyrdom.

David Drábek (1970) is another established author. His dramatic farces, such as Kanibalky aneb Soumrak starců (Cannibals: Twilight of the Old Men) and Jedlíci čokolády (Chocolate Eaters) bring current topics of social discourse to the stage in a hypertrophied and travestied form. He is inspired by various manifestations of pop culture.

The plays of film director and playwright Petr Zelenka (1967) deal with his protagonists’ most ambiguous moral and ethical stances. The drama Elegance molekuly (The Elegance of the Molecule) deals with the world-renowned Czech biochemist Professor Antonín Holý, discoverer of a number of antivirals, including medication used to treat AIDS. It depicts the self-contradictory personality of an excellent researcher, gifted with scientific intuition and the capacity for international collaboration, who is ridiculously conservative and conformist in private and almost insensitive to the fate of those close to him. The protagonist of Beckham, named after the phenomenal English footballer, is a tabloid journalist; the play deals with the trade in famous names in an environment of tabloids and advertising.

René Levínský and Roman Sikora, a pair of playwrights born in the same year (1970), represent the voice of the November 1989 generation. Sikora’s plays offer a radical critique of neoliberal capitalism and feature a language of the playwright’s own making with distorted grammar and syntax that is itself a metaphor for the mechanical inevitability of the events that befall one who had a completely different vision of their life and success. In the comedy Zámek na Loiře (Chateau on the Loire), three leading experts serve the ruler’s wife for salaries far exceeding those available in their specialist disciplines in the chateau into which the oligarch has funnelled dirty money.

Jako lvi (Like Lions) is the story of a manager who sustains an injury in a fateful accident and, via a subsequent chain of events, loses his job and flat, goes into foreclosure and becomes homeless. Still, even in this humbled state, he continues to apply his neoliberal capitalist logic to the point of self-destruction.

In his comedy Dotkni se vesmíru a pokračuj (Touch the Cosmos, Press Space: Proceed), René Levínský, who trained as a mathematician, plays with the ethics of scientific research, specifically the field of genetics. In the spirit of classical comedy, he reverses meanings, speaking about the underpinnings of scientific research in banal language, while the characters approach the trivialities of everyday reality with a determined rigour.

A Molièrean inspiration is undeniable in the comedy Don Juan a já (Don Juan and I), where a sociopathic IT expert becomes an irresistible seducer with the help of artificial intelligence. Both comedies, with successful productions in established public theatres, are populated with characters drawn from the distinct types of classic comedies, where secret kinship relationships and happy endings or punishments “dropped from the sky” abound. Still, they also ask fundamental questions about contemporary civilisation.

In his best texts, Tomáš Dianiška (1984) draws inspiration from the lives of real historical characters. 294 statečných (The Magnificent 294) transports us to the centre of events relating to the assassination of acting Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich via a tangle of situations involving the ordinary inhabitants of a Prague neighbourhood. Transky, body, vteřiny (Trannies, Points, Seconds) is inspired by the fate of Czech athlete Zdena Koubková, who won the 400 metres at the Women’s World Games in London in 1934 and held two world records. It is also, of course, a tale of the cruelty of the sporting environment, where fair play is more legend than fact. Responding to the current discourse surrounding individuals unsure of their gender identity, the play follows Zdena Koubková’s interwar sporting career at a time when transgender identities were criminalised.

Another successful biographical play, Olga (Horory z Hrádečku) (Olga Horrors from Hradeček) by Anna Saavedra (1984), features the wife of dissident and president Václav Havel as its central character. The author is less interested in the autobiography of Olga Havlová than in the weight of women’s existence in proximity to prominent men. What made Olga, who did not accept the stereotypical roles of muse, helpmate or unpaid secretary, become a mother or build her own career, special? And what price did she pay for her substantive independence, criticality and unwavering support?

Texts by the youngest generation of dramatists depict a world that weighs heavily on the individual, especially as the capacity and will to solve their problems disappear.

In the poetic Les sebevrahů (The Suicide Forest), Kasha Jandáčková (1992) brings to the stage a dystopian vision of an ever more arid world with no genuine nature, in which a pair of protagonists is incapable of real, fulfilling love.

In the sarcastic farce Vyhubyt (Flat Out), Tomáš Ráliš (1997) addresses the unequal access to housing that leaves people trapped in debt and subject to extortionate working hours. A pleasant middle-class existence is bought at the cost of adherence to unwritten rules about car ownership, dogs, plastic surgery procedures and careers. The only thing that doesn’t fit into such a life is children.

Ondřej Novotný (1984) established himself at the National Theatre Prague with a production of Otec hlídá dceru (The Father Watches Over the Daughter), which begins with a father’s banal trip to the playground with his daughter. Confrontations with his wife, friends and even passersby ensue during this everyday event. In the second half of the play, the situation is reversed and the ageing father is being cared for by his daughter. The play deals with the topic of male carers in a society where women carers are seen as natural and commonplace. This perspective addresses generational and gender issues in a fresh manner.

David Šiktanc (1987) wrote Jidelní vůz (Dining Car) as a railway road movie about a man who regularly travels the same line in the dining car. In the real time it takes for the train to travel between two stations (in this case Prague and Ústí nad Labem, though the play can be performed elsewhere), everyday and extreme expressions of social life unfold in the dining car, permeated by the protagonist’s existential crisis. The phenomenon of train commuting is a common motif in the lives of the middle classes with whom the drama stands in solidarity and the chronotope of the dining car serves as a projection surface for a spectrum of social phenomena.

In Krajina se sklady (Landscape with Warehouses), Marie Nováková (1989) explores the memory of place in proximity to border towns and international highways. Workers from Eastern Europe are de facto interred in a windowless warehouse complex. The history and ideologically distorted myth of border protection, the displacement of German residents, World War I prisoner camps, border prostitution and modern slavery intersect with the events that play out at the turn of the new year.

David Košťák (1991) is the author of plays that often deal with childhood, some of which are written especially for young people. In the sci-fi play Nad rozlitou mléčnou dráhou (Over the Spilled Milky Way), an astronaut returns to Earth, where his daughter awaits him, after years in space. While the astronaut has not aged, the daughter is now old enough to be his mother. Through this lens, the eternal themes of family relationships and the question of fleeing responsibility are addressed with originality and without sentiment.

Contemporary Czech playwriting offers a snapshot of a Central European country with a pro-Western orientation under the strain of neoliberal capitalism. Instead of calls to take up arms (i.e., for nature conservation or gender equality), it presents fears and frustrations. For many playwrights, a natural comedic flair is a valuable device. The older generation has already established itself on international stages, while the younger generation looks to position its voice in a once again divided world.