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After the Velvet Revolution
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11227 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1993 |
2,097 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
The air in Prague is still fresh with that peculiar relief of awakening from a nightmare. In the theater, as in almost everything else, there is a blend of energy and confusion, exploding into feverish activity combined with a pervasive uncertainty about the future. The new atmosphere of commercial pressure is affecting the theater profoundly and challenging the directors and writers who work for it. Little or no new work of interest is coming from former dissident playwrights, so brilliantly staged classics and foreign work and opera now dominate the shrinking number of stages in Prague.
Much of the uncertainty arises from a recent and fundamental change in the relationship between the theater and Czech society. Before 1968, even under the communist regime, the prewar tradition of Czech theater remained sound, rooted in the cultural inheritance of Western Europe. During the bitter years of Stalinist "normalization" after 1968, this altered radically. What the famous dissident Czech director Otomar Krejca calls an "instrumentalization" of theater took place; the traditional theatrical ritual acquired, almost in spite of itself, a multifaceted political surface.
Despite the oppressive regime, people could and did gather voluntarily in theaters, expressing a tacit anticommunist solidarity among the population and using theater as a source of public information not available in the government-censored press and TV. Writers like Vaclav Havel, Pavel Kohout, Ladislav Smocek, Ivan Klima, Pavel Srut, Daniela Fisherova, and others emerged with work grounded in a bitter opposition to the tyranny of communism. Classic plays by writers like Moliere were given new interpretations, with Tartuffe, for example, as a police spy.
The most important consequence of all this was that the stage began to acquire political thrust even where none was intended by performers or directors. Nevertheless, in the Stalinist environment, because the authorities were concerned not to appear "uncultured," they did not suppress the theater; the government attempted instead to impose an indirect form of control with bribery in the form of subsidies. Official and quasi-superstitious respect for the arts, much like that felt by Stalin himself, did have its dangers; artists were taken seriously by the authorities, which they have not been in the West since the last century. This meant occasionally perilous official scrutiny. Though the government, de facto, recognized the value of the theater as a kind of safety valve for resentment against the system, actors and directors were far from being in the position of "licensed fools," particularly with satirical
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