Theft, Contestation and Affirmation in Contemporary Czech Theatre

Abstract

On 6 February 2005, five members of independent Prague-based theatre company Krepsko joined the cast of the National Theatre's production of Alois Jirásek's classic play Lucerna (The Lantern, 1905) for the performance's curtain call. Krepsko's ‘theft’ of applause, together with the performers’ subsequent confrontation by Lucerna's assistant director and encounter with police officers called to the scene, was captured on hidden camera and subsequently released on YouTube. This small event is densely laden with both local and broader significance. Krepsko is a company closely affiliated with the Czech nové divadlo (new theatre) scene, a self-governing sphere of production that exists in parallel to and differs markedly from the text-based, repertory theatre system, epitomized by the National, which has dominated Czech theatre production since the late-eighteenth century. The non-verbal character of much nové divadlo work has increased its mobility and led to affirmation from international audiences within and beyond Czech borders, yet foreign adulation often problematizes domestic reception. Pierre Bourdieu observes that within a field of cultural production ‘adversaries whom one would prefer to destroy by ignoring them cannot be combatted without consecrating them’ (1993: 42). In this context, Krepsko's ‘theft’ represents a playful assault on both the supremacy of the repertory system and silent treatment doled out by the mainstream press. The National's outrage is juxtaposed with the ‘Project of the Year’ award (2005) given to Ukradené ovace by Prague's … příští vlna/next wave … festival of contemporary art, demonstrating the extent to which new structures of affirmation are shaking the historically-constituted parameters of Czech theatre practice and challenging the nature and necessity of a national theatre in an increasingly post- or transnational context.

Notes

¹Unless otherwise noted, translations from Czech are my own.

²The Czech lands came under Austro-Hungarian control following the Battle of White Mountain in 1620. By the late eighteenth century, writes Benedict Anderson, overwhelmingly, ‘the nobility and the rising middle class spoke German’ (2006: 73). The Czech language, by comparison, was regarded by its detractors as ‘a debased peasants’ jargon’ that was firmly ‘on its way to oblivion’ (Agnew 1993: 51).

³Tragically, Lorenc died in a car accident in June 2006.

⁴The literal translation of Vangeli's ‘zasvěceného publika’ is ‘consecrated public’. I have chosen this translation because the adjective ‘zasvěcený’ carries the dual associations of the sacred and the scholarly (another translation might be ‘erudite’) also present in Bourdieu's terminology.