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Stavovské divadlo - Estates Theatre

12 Oct 1991

National Theatre Prague

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I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

Play/Drama

Translation

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Original Playwright - Josef Topol. Translated by James Naughton (British English). translated by Vera Borkovec (American English)

The play was written in 1976 in the timeless period after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia and before the establishment of Charter '77. It is a portrait of an ageing artist, the sculptor }ak, whose fiftieth birthday is an occasion for his friends and acquaintances to meet. We see }ak in both creative and a personal crisis, which is partly a crisis of his relationship towards his wife. With the greatest self-denial, Malva has hitherto filled the thankless role of supporting for life a man whom she once admired. In the course of the evening, however, she loses the last bit of faith in him and departs this life in what could be a sudden death, but is more likely a voluntary one. Other characters begin to state their failures in life as well, and Topol's well-known conflict between life and death passes through their interiors and results in a chain of victories for death. The Socrates of the doubtlessly symbolic title is the tame raven which left }ak's 'house of broken hearts' before the beginning of the play, tragically marking the story with the loss of direction of an afflicted generation.

Theatre Beyond the Gate, Prague

1968

Divadlo za branou

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I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

One Act

Translation

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Original Playwright - Josef Topol

In one hour El and Ela experience all the happiness and unhappiness, all the endurance and the boredom of their lives, their love and their death. El comes with the news that he has to go away, seemingly for ever. After the intense experience of this event comes an anticlimactic reversal - and disappointment. El remains, and the flame of love changes into the ashes of every day. Ela's Auntie, the decrepit old lady who lives with them, becomes the witness to and bitter commentator on the 'hour of love'. This one-act play is one of Topol's classics, written for Otomar Krejca's Theatre Beyond the Gate in the 1960s.

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I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

Translation

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Original Playwright - Josef Topol

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Divadlo na Vinohradech

1989

Divadlo na Vinohradech

Contained in: "Voices Of Birds And Other Plays" published by Xlibris Corporation 2000

978-14257800677

If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Play/Drama

Translation

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Original Playwright - Josef Topol

An elderly actor, famous for his performance as Lear, has a sudden stroke and is forced to live a quiet and balanced life to which he is quite unaccustomed. He meets two of his illegitimate sons and their mothers, but is unable to find a way of getting close to people, whom until now he has tended just to use. He can only relax in the company of a young girl who is working with him on his memoirs, and whom he finally marries, only to find that this time it is he who is used. The young woman declares he is the father of the child which she is expecting with her lover, and when she drives him to a despairing gesture, has him certified as incapable of looking after his own affairs. He is moved out of his villa into a neighbouring chateau - a psychiatric hospital, where paradoxically he finds spiritual peace at the side of his housekeeper and her backward son (who we find out at the end of the play is also his). Topol wrote this play in 1988, after more then ten years of silence. It was first performed shortly before the November 1989 at the Divadlo na Vinohradech.