The Czech Stage: Freedom's Last Barricade

Repressive Communism may once again be ascendant in Czechoslovakia, but there is one facet of Czech life where liberalism remains strong. TIME Correspondent Horace Judson spent a fortnight in Prague studying its burgeoning theater. His report:

IN Prague this spring, the opening night of Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance brought unexpected and poignant audience involvement. Sophisticated Prague had thronged to the occasion --officials, diplomats, the liberal writers and intelligentsia. As they watched Albee's comedy of menace, laughter came in awkward places. For the Czechs, the plight of a suburban American family whose neighbors suddenly come to stay was transformed into an agonizing allegory of their national tragedy. When Harry and Edna arrogantly explain why they know their invasion is welcome, angry whispers swept the theater.

Albee's play has packed every performance since; it still touches off the same responses. To American eyes, the Czechs give Albee's Westchester an oddly Viennese aspect; the impression is compounded of walnut-and-fringed-lamps Gemuetlichkeit and the beard of the leading actor, which makes him look exactly like Sigmund Freud. But the play in Prague compares well with productions elsewhere. It is done with subtlety and panache as well as political relevance. These also happen to be the chief characteristics of Prague's extremely vital and varied theater.

Worldwide Repertory. For more than ten years, theater in Czechoslovakia has been a free-spoken forum for the forces of liberalization. Prague is a small city but it has 22 theaters playing more than 50 works in a repertory that makes not just Moscow but New York and London look provincial. The last month of the current season offered, in addition to A Delicate Balance, two other Albee plays, The Zoo Story and Everything in the Garden Arthur Miller is represented by The Price and The Crucible, Tennessee Williams by Kingdom on Earth, and Eugene O'Neill by A Moon for the Misbegotten. There was Anabaptist and King John by Friedrich Duerrenmatt, three Shakespeares, two Sartres, Sophocles' Oedipus, Brecht's Threepenny Opera, Shaw's Pygmalion, a Renaissance knockabout by Niccolo Machiavelli, a late 19th century melodrama by French Primitive Painter Henri Rousseau, works by Wilde, Sheridan and Moliere--besides three plays by Czech author Karel Capek and two carminative political satires by young Czech playwrights.

Even the slightest of the plays were produced with engaging theatricality, as in the swaggering bawdiness of the Drama Club's Mandragora, the Machiavelli farce. Czech acting at its frequent best combines an animal energy with the timing of aerial acrobats. Czechs make superb comedians, and have that highest comic skill--to slip with a flash of the eye into the tragic mask. Czech direction is passionately intelligent. In Architect Josef Svoboda, they have the most imaginative stage designer working anywhere today.

Perhaps the freshest play is Ptakovina, by Milan Kundera, who is one of those fighting to keep the writers' union committed to the liberalization program of 1968. Kundera's novel of Czech Stalinism, The Joke, has the directness of a fist in the face; it has been made into a film shown at Cannes this year. Ptakovina is a made-up word, literally "Birdtrick," meaning stupidity.

The play is a malicious sexual satire about a headmaster who seduces the mistress of the local political chairman. But Kundera gives the work countless double meanings aimed at conformists, informers, party bureaucracy and jargon, the security police and the Russian occupation. Played with snap and brass by a young experimental company, Ptakovina keeps audiences constantly off balance with laughter. But the most resounding applause comes without a laugh when the headmaster tells his own fiancee that he hasn't the heart to be a hypocrite any longer; that "I've lost my second face." "Better find it again," she warns. "It'll serve to mask your rage."

A second directly political play is The Jury, by Ivan Klima, another steadfastly liberal author. He puts onstage the deliberations of five jurymen in a criminal case. Slowly it becomes clear that a sixth juror has already been taken away for asking too many questions. Suddenly the remaining five see the accused for the first time. He has already been beheaded. As the jurors continue their deliberations, they come to the conclusion that the defendant was innocent. The play ends with the jurymen before the judge--where one after another they all vote "Guilty."

Plays like these are indirect in their message because they must be; yet at the same time they make far more vital theater than any straight anti-Communist polemic. In other responses to the Russians and to their native hardliners, Czech directors have repeatedly put on Western plays with themes of conscience and freedom. They have reached back for historical plays that echo themes of patriotism, power and treachery. The most arresting of these is King John, in the recent adaptation by Friedrich Duerrenmatt, which turns Shakespeare's melodrama into a brutal and very moving confrontation of activist idealism with the chill realities. Suddenly, also, there is great theatrical interest in the Hussites. Several plays have been put on or are due next season about this Czech religious reform movement that was savagely suppressed from outside. Thus the creative variety and resource of Czech theater is its greatest strength--together with the sensitivity of Czech audiences to political innuendo in the most unlikely places.

Such sensitivity is evoked even by a production of Chekhov's Three Sisters. It is the only Russian play now running in Prague: all others, as well as all those from the other four invading countries, vanished after the August 22 occupation. This Three Sisters has been conceived by the most powerful director in Czechoslovakia today, Otomar Krejca. He drives his Chekhov with a stringent pace, altogether against the languid convention, but with the curious effect of making the play's essential melancholia more sinister. "The times put ideology into every play one does," says Krejca. "The pain and skepticism of the three sisters our audiences feel as their pain."

Memories of Stalinism. How long the Czech theater will retain its excitement and freedom is a question. The Czechs remember, with increasing worry, the mid-'50s, when the iron rules of socialist realism decreed operettas about machine-tool plants with unintentionally hilarious arias about the deficit in the factory books. Yet the Czechs also remember, with hope, that the worst Stalinist repression of their theater lasted less than ten years. Arthur Miller's All My Sons was the last Western play to be put on in 1948, and in 1956, the year of Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin, it was Miller who opened up Western drama again--"on the pretext that Death of a Salesman was anti-capitalist," recalls one director. What Czech audiences took away with them was Miller's apotheosis of a simple man dehumanized in the service of faceless institutions, Capitalist or Communist.

At the same time, new writers began experimenting in new theaters. Vaclav Havel, one of the most fearless Czech playwrights, recalls how the new movement began. "We started in small rooms, with no recognition. At first it was half cabaret. The plays were no more than a libretto for director and actor. They might not have been directly political, but they confronted everyday realities and were a manifestation of freedom where there was no freedom. The unity of text, acting, directing, atmosphere and audience made a synthesis we can't recapture just by reading the plays now." Havel's best-known play, The Memorandum, throws bombs of anarchic humor at party newspeak.

The theater is seen as one of the few surviving areas of genuine freedom. Censorship has become severe for press and TV. Each day's Rude Pravo carries new pronouncements about how writers must back the party line. "But nothing has been censored on the stage --yet," says Frantisek Pavlicek, general director of the Theater in the Vineyard. Pavlicek himself, who has been working for liberalization of theater since the mid-'50s, is now writing a historical play about the struggle of the Czech nation for independence in the 13th century. Everyone expects a crackdown soon, but until the censor arrives, the Czechs are determined to make the most of their freedom of the stage. "Although conditions now revert to what they were before Dubcek," says Vaclav Havel, "only the face of power is the same, for the minds of the people are different." Recently, Havel visited the steel mills in Ostrava, talking to the unions there about the cooperation of workers and intellectuals in defense of the freedoms gained in 1968. The meeting was banned by the police and locked out by management, but was held anyway out of doors. Afterward, Havel spoke with smaller groups of students as well. "They haven't arrested me--not yet," he says. "As long as I am invited to these meetings, I will go."

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