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September 7th, 2008
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All the world's a stage

Professional actors carve out their niche in the Golden City

June 25th, 2008 issue

By Chris McMorrow

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST
Divadlo Miloco artistic director Dan Brown is confident in the potential of English-language theater here.

Nancy Bishop Casting
Biskupský dvůr 4
Prague 1
Tel.: 222 319 409
Web: www.nancybishopcasting.com
E-mail: info@
nancybishopcasting.com

Divadlo Miloco
Tel.: 224 229 343
Web: www.divadlo.cz/miloco
E-mail: miloco@seznam.cz

FOR THE POST
Prague has been a top destination for the creatively minded for almost 20 years now, with countless English-speaking artists, musicians and actors having made the City of a Thousand Spires their home. A quick perusal of online events offers no shortage of expat bands, magazines, artist collectives, DJs and fashion designers. Why then is the English-speaking theater scene still on such an emergent level?  
“In order for an English theater in a foreign city to be stable, you need to have a stable local audience,” says Nancy Bishop, an American who has been here since the ’90s and now runs Nancy Bishop Casting. “Czechs have to come, and on a regular basis. … Expats are somewhat of a regular audience, but not enough, and it is too fluid.”
This may sound a little sad to the dozens of professional actors who have flocked to Prague over the past two decades in hopes of striking gold with the emerging English-language theater scene here. But Bishop and other stage lovers around the Czech capital are determined to help Prague-based, English-speaking actors find their footing and a steady paycheck.   
Scores of companies have formed, disbanded and come back together in a variety of incarnations over the years, each with its own approach to eking out a niche within the local theater community.  
“It’s funny to think how much it’s changed,” reflects Bishop. “There were periods of time [in the ’90s] when there was kind of nothing. Then there’d be little spurts of things.”
Bishop, however, gradually grew tired of the backbreaking work involved with creating an English-speaking stage environment here.
“You had to fight for everything,” Bishop recalls. “You had to fight for audiences, you had to fight for actors, you had to fight for money to do the theater.”
Now, as a freelance casting director who hosts workshops locally and abroad, Bishop is adamant about what it takes to establish a healthy English-language theater scene in Prague. She still believes it is possible, but not without a lot of dedication, money, good marketing and a bottomless cache of patience.
Expats who want to make a living on their acting skills alone have a hard row to hoe, especially since film production in the country has decreased over the years. Thanks to other East European countries offering tax incentives to film companies from abroad and an increasingly valuable crown, Hollywood hasn’t come calling as often as in the past.
Resident actor Matthew Blood-Smythe, who has been in Prague since 2003 and is one of Bishop’s clients, has been cast in a number of the films that have been made in the Czech Republic since he arrived five years ago, as well as a string of commercials.
But an abundance of film roles for the early-comers taught the wrong lesson, according to Blood-Smythe. “It was the dream,” he says. “It was kind of handed to them on this silver platter. They just learned that was the way —and it’s not the way.”
Regarding the current state of English-language theater in the capital, Blood-Smythe believes there is a real need to improve and expand it.
“It’s tough to get good quality; it’s true. And the audiences are small. There’s no money in it,” he points out. “You [usually] have to do something that is for tourists … with some well-known piece, where you advertise the hell out of it.”
But, Blood-Smythe adds, “That’s not what most people want to do. People who want to put up a show they wrote, that’s tough too, because you have to work on these scripts, change them, get feedback. You’ve gotta be hard-working enough to do it.”
Dan Brown, the artistic director at Divadlo Miloco, insists that a strong English-language theater scene playing to a steady audience of both Czechs and foreigners living in Prague is a real possibility.
“There are enough theaters and actors, and Czechs do go if it’s well promoted. I just think it takes a long time to build a theater scene in any language in any city. It takes years and years. It takes someone who realizes it’s going to be two steps forward, three steps back.”
To fully understand why the English-language theater community has difficulty drawing regular Czech patrons, one has to consider how firmly embedded theater is within the society. Prague boasts well over 40 theaters; they exist in almost every neighborhood in the city.
A brief fascination with the English language and an availability of empty venues immediately after the Velvet Revolution led to a large number of English-language theater performances in those early days. According to some, this ease of production did not necessarily benefit the community in the long run.
“In the early ’90s, the English-language theater shows I saw, most of them were very poor quality,” Brown says. “And I think part of it was a lack of good actors willing to do it. And what happens is somebody goes out to see a show, and it’s dreadful. Are they gonna go to the next show? They’re not.”
From 1998 to 2001, Brown was the artistic director for Misery Loves Company. Producers of original work, Brown vividly remembers the “nonstop hustle” required to stay afloat back then.
 “There are extra hurdles to overcome,” he says today. “It takes someone with really determined focus who’s able to put the energy into the production side of things.”
It’s been a slow process, but Brown has seen a little payoff.  Divadlo Miloco’s workshop production of Macbeth last summer played to sold-out audiences with only word-of-mouth publicity, and performances of the same show over Easter weekend of this year brought even more attendees. The company is hoping its next show, a multimedia piece entitled La Machine, playing June 26 and 27, will attract a sizable audience as well.
Undoubtedly, this is all good news for the English-speaking, Prague-based actor, but local professionals warn they still have a long way to go before they’ll finally feel financially secure enough to quit their day jobs.  
Chris McMorrow can be reached at specialsection@praguepost.com


Other articles in Careers (25/06/2008):

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