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October 11th, 2008

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'What can I say? Life is a feast'

Jaroslav Dušek has been much more than a movie star in his two-decade career

By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
March 7th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO

Fast on his feet: Dušek's theater is spur of the moment but emerged from decades of refining and once confounded censors.

Everyone knows Jaroslav Dušek. At least, it seems that way when you are sitting with him at a table in a café. Passersby will smile or nod toward him, while a few more brave or drunken souls will attempt to engage him in a brief bout of badinage, something Dušek seems happy (and fully able) to supply.

Dušek is one of the Czech Republic’s leading actors, a ubiquitous presence on both stage and screen. In fact, it was difficult to find a Czech film from the past two years that didn’t feature Dušek in it somewhere. He was even the star of Czech cinema’s greatest money-maker of 2005–06, Doblba!

If Hollywood standards are applied, he’s an unlikely star. With his rumpled professorial mien (complete with a mad-genius fringe of red hair) and animate, analytical eyes, Dušek seems, at first glance, to be the type of rogue scholar one might see holding impromptu seminars over a table of drained espresso cups. There’s a wonderfully contained recklessness about him, as if he’s on the verge of casually demolishing his own theories. It’s this energy that makes Dušek an actor you can’t pry your eyes from when he’s at work.

To the manner born

A born-and-bred Praguer, Dušek might have been born in a trunk. His parents were both amateur actors who met while in a production. His father, Vlasta Dušek, eventually went off to do lighting for the famed Semafor theater, and remains, along with co-founder Jiří Suchý, the oldest remaining member of that company.

As a young man, Dušek hung around the theater with his parents and began writing plays while in school. Knowing early on that he wanted to be an actor, he applied for a spot at DAMU, Prague’s vaunted theater academy. “They declined to take me,” he says. “I was rejected for, ‘a lack of talent.’ ” This makes Dušek laugh — in fact, he almost seems inordinately proud of this rather myopic verdict. Perhaps because he has long been an acting teacher in great demand at that very institution.

His attempts to channel his enthusiasm into other fields of study were hardly satisfying, and he continued to be a secret creature of the theater. He immersed himself in drama, particularly in the works of Ionesco, Pinter and Dürrenmatt, and then finally struck out with a plan to form his own theater company dedicated to improvisation.

‘Pure improvisation’

Improvisation has a rich history in Czech theater. The famed revues/satires of Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich and at their Osvobozené Theater in the 1930s were filled with expert off-the-cuff business. Then there were the semi-improvisational monologues of Ivan Vyskočil at the Reduta in the 1950s.

In 1981 Dušek founded his Theater Vizita, where he at first took Vyskočil’s route and worked with basic stories that he could freely riff off of. “I performed that way for five years,” he says. “Then I decided on pure improvisation. No skeleton of a story, no structure whatsoever.”

In Dušek’s Vizita, risk is the medium. It is a theater subordinate only to whim and the moment, something that made life occasionally difficult for Dušek under the communist regime, where the unscripted was unimaginable. Yet, as a student of the Absurd, Dušek could enjoy the lunatic bureaucracy of it all. “You had to have permission to perform,” he recalls. “You needed to contact the minister of culture to get his stamp of approval. But, in order for me to create ‘permissible improvisation,’ I had to submit various rough plots and outlines that may never be used.”

An unlikely Czech superstar, the veteran comic aids in the wildly popular film Doblba!.

Vizita and Dušek survived the times, and he’s become a master of his craft. “It’s my main work,” the actor says. “It’s a theater open to every impulse.” This philosophy is shared by his occasional collaborators, from musicians to lighting designer Viktor Zborník, whose lights are just as adamantly ad hoc. “The rule among ourselves is ‘Nothing Spoken,’ ” Dušek explains. “There must be nothing that prematurely influences the direction that the performance will take.”

Even the titles of his performances are accidental discoveries often found while reading or picking up snippets of conversation: No Cakes Without Crying, Drowning in the February Thaw and the recent The Triumph of the Beaver Over Evil.

Vizita is the wildest arena for wordplay. And, although a playing area for Czech, non-Czech speakers can still appreciate Dušek’s physical comedy and certainly his mastery of making up songs. Vizita has played around North America and Europe successfully, occasionally with Dušek using an artificial language. In fact, one of his evenings of disciplined vamp won an award in Berlin. “Not that the Czechs took any notice,” he laughs.

On a screen near you

But fellow Czechs did start to take notice of Dušek’s career once he began appearing in films, and he’s created a nice little filmography for himself, working with many of the country’s leading directors.

From the Iron Curtain’s first loose threads to its downfall, Dušek appeared in two of Tomáš Vorel’s earliest works, Pražská pětka (The Prague Five) and the bizarre, entertaining little musical, Kouř (Smoke). He also appeared in Vorel’s fantasy Kamenný most (The Stone Bridge), which Dušek helped write. He’s made three films for Jan Hřebejk, as well as films with Bohdan Sláma and famed animator and surrealist Jan Švankmajer.

Where to catch Jaroslav Dušek

Divadlo Vizita
at Archa Theater
March 12 and 13 at 8 pm
190270 Kč
Nagano
at the Estates Theater
March 6 and 22
4501,000 Kč

It was in Hřebejk’s Academy Award–nominated Musíme si pomáhat (Divided We Fall) that Dušek won the attention of a larger audience, the people who now hail him from across restaurants. “I’m not interested in being in anyone else’s films at present,” the actor says with some exhaustion. “There’s been a lot of films over the last few years, and I would like to have a break.” He has, however, been working on a screenplay with a friend, which they have sent to a producer. But, for the time being, Dušek is happy being a man of the theater again.

Along with his evenings of improvisation at Archa Theatre over the past few months, he has recently seen the remounting of his and Martin Smolka’s newly improved opera, Nagano, a surreal take on the Czech hockey victory at the Winter Olympics in 1998. Produced by the National Theater and performed at the Estates Theater, Dušek, the piece’s librettist, is enthusiastic about the work. “There are many surprises,” he says. “No, not surprises — visions. Visions and Švejk!”

An older gentleman leaving the café suddenly notices Dušek and salutes the actor with a quip, and Dušek replies in kind. The attentive waiter arrives back with a dish of complimentary hors d’oeuvres, while the owner excitedly displays a comical ceramic scene of copulation at our table. “What can I say?” Dušek asks me rhetorically. “Life is a feast and enormous fun.”

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com

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