summary 6/2011
This issue opens with a further instalment of the annotated translation of Georges Didi-Huberman’s essay “Images – Despite Everything”, this time entitled by Miroslav Petříček “Images as Fabrication”. In the section “Horrors and Bodies” it is accompanied by Jiří Adámek’s article “Bedazzlement by Swift Bodies” which refers back to this year’s Tanec Praha festival, namely to the productions Children by Nigel Charnock, A Few Minutes of Lock by Édouard Lock and Sutra by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. The section “The Circus is Alive” follows, where Tereza Frýbertová writes about Spartacus by Théâtre La Licorne, mounted at the Divadelní svět festival. In her essay “Poetics of the Northern Circus (Cirko Helsinki Festival)” Veronika Štefanová reviews the productions Wear It Like a Crown by Cirkus Cirkör, Rautakeuhko by the WHS company and Motet by Gandini Juggling; Michal Zahálka (“Elevated with the French”) looks at the first year of the Trutnov festival Cirk-Uff and at the productions Pfffffff by Compagnie Akoreacro and Le Poids de la peau by Lonely Cirkus. In his essay “…X, Y, GRAND C” Karel Král writes about the production Le Grand C by Compagnie XY. The section is wound up by two interviews: “To Get to Know the Spectator in the Third Row” with Henrik Agger and Jesper Nikoljaff from the Cirkus Cirkör and “We Take Pains that Nobody is a Soloist” with Antoine Thirion from Compagnie XY. The section “A City Among Cities” is completely dedicated to Ostrava and it is made up of the essays “Shadows of Ostrava (The Season at the Moravian-Silesian National Theatre)” by Tereza Sieglová and Lenka Dombrovská’s “Ostravian Theatrical Patriotism”. The section “Records for the Second Time” is the final part of the extensive portrait of the Slovak National Theatre’s repertoire in the 2010/2011 season by Martina Ulmanová, titled “National and Record-breaking…” In the section “Terrorists and Asia” Michaela Mojžišová writes in her essay “Silk and Terrorists” about the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro and Dana Silbiger-Sliuková (“When East Meets West…”) looks back at this year’s Edinburgh Festival, writing about the productions A Thousand and One Nights (directed by Tim Supple), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (directed by Stephen Earnhart, adapted from the novel by Haruki Murakami), The Peony Pavilion (directed by Li Liyui, National Ballet of China) and three Asian adaptations of Shakespeare: The Tempest directed by Tae-Suk Oh and performed by the Korean Mokwha Repertory Company, King Lear directed by Wu Hsing-kuo at the Contemporary Legend Theatre and Feng Gang’s Hamletian variation The Revenge of Prince Zi Dan (directed by Shi Yu-kun, Shanghai Peking Opera Troupe). The repertoire of the Komische Opera Berlin in 2011 is reviewed by Lenka Šaldová (“At the End of One Epoch”) on the occasion of the announced departure of its chief and director Andreas Homoki. The closing section “Absurd Gutter – The Games Are In” comprises Julek Neumann’s essay on the “revival” of the drama of the absurd in France (“Déjà Vu: Return of the Drama of the Absurd”) and an interview with one representative of this trend, the playwright Sébastien Thiéry, titled “I am not a Philosopher, I am an Actor”. Dana Silbiger-Sliuková writes in her essay “New Drama in Scotland” about the Traverse Festival 2011 and productions of the following plays: The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart by David Greig, Futureproof by Lynda Radley, Ten Plagues by Mark Ravenhill and Conor Mitchell, and The Dark Philosophers by Gwyn Thomas. Michal Zahálka (“Under the Weight of a Slap in the Face”) writes about the stage reading of Roland Schimmelpfennig’s play Peggy Pickit Sees the Face of God, published in this issue in a translation by Markéta Polochová. The Comedy Mix continues its cycle dedicated to Peter Cook and contains his sketches In the Bus and This Bloke Came Up to Me. The traditional comic strip by Hana Voříšková is entitled Up to Work Again.
A City among Cities This section is dedicated to the theatre of Ostrava. In her essay “Shadows of Ostrava” (titled in allusion to the popular music festival Colours of Ostrava), Tereza Sieglová looks back at the 2010/2011 season of the drama company of the Moravian-Silesian National Theatre. Among the season’s premières she particularly praises productions of Topol’s The End of the Carnival (Konec masopustu), Preissová’s Her Stepdaughter (Její pastorkyňa), Shelley’s drama The Cenci and the adaptation of Szczygieł’s book Gottland. The End of the Carnival was directed by Janusz Klimsza and Her Stepdaughter by Martin Františák, both of whom deliver classical texts in a way that is both traditional and at the same time contemporary and appealing. On the other hand, Shelley’s drama The Cenci has been radically modified and shortened by the young director Anna Petrželková, who transposes the plot to the present with Count Cenci as a fashion tycoon, which is also reflected in the “chic” set design. However, the theatre’s repertoire also includes productions aimed only at entertaining the audience which – for Sieglová – is not worthy on the part of a theatre whose name includes the epithet “national”. In her essay “Ostravian Theatrical Patriotism” Lenka Dombrovská writes about productions which take the Ostrava region itself as their theme. She restricts her selection to those productions based on original texts. A characteristic feature of these plays is exaggeration, together with a nostalgia for the times when Ostrava was the “Steel Heart of the Republic”. The use (almost to the verge of self-parody) of very characteristic Ostravian slang and the local style of speech are also quite typical. One exception to this trend is the play Godspeed! (Zdař Bůh!), a production from Miroslav Bambušek’s documentary cycle “The Paths of Energy” which uses the site-specific method to map out the exploitation of prisoners’ work under the past regime.
Roland Schimmelpfennig: Peggy Pickit Sees the Face of God Carol and Martin have just returned from a medical mission in Africa and they are staying with their long-time friends Frank and Liz. “It was an absolute disaster,” is the very first sentence of the text. As usual Schimmelpfennig blends several time levels together and he inserts commentaries by the characters into the script. From that first sentence we are thrown into a rapid vortex of short replies and dialogues that draws us inevitably to the realization that things are quite different from what they seem to be. In the course of the evening truths and secrets are told that the characters are perhaps afraid to even think of. It is in fact no wonder that the play is often compared to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. However, Schimmelpfennig has not written a psychological drama and the dominant feeling is more bittersweet than painful.
Petr Zelenka: Endangered Species As this year’s supplement for subscribers, the Svět a divadlo magazine has published a new drama by Petr Zelenka, premièred in November at the Prague National Theatre. Endangered Species (Ohrožené druhy) is the story of an ageing photographer and journalist Jeremy who, in spite of his lifelong idealism and intransigent attitudes, decides to enter the world of advertising. Zelenka is as ever ironic and he does not spare his characters, but this time he shows a bit more understanding for them and economizes on his absurd ideas. Endangered Species could be tagged as a commentary on the contemporary fashion of activism and protests against global capitalism. Although in the accompanying interview, entitled The Physicist, Zelenka expresses his overall sympathy with the Occupy Wall Street movement, for instance, in the play itself he is not ideological but focuses on the private lives of his characters rather than on political proclamations. However, as it turns out, this private life is inseparable from their actual worldview.