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Artifice wrecks

Layers of meaning in a Czech theatrical excursion to Poland
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
August 6th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
A leering Lear. Ivan Trojan plays the dissolute father in Zelenka's fine film.
Karamazovi (The Karamazovs)


Directed by Petr Zelenka
With Ivan Trojan, Martin Myšička, Igor Chmela, Radek Holub, Lenka Krobotová, Roman Luknár, David Novotný, Michaela Badinková and Andrzej Mastalerz
Petr Zelenka’s Karamazovi is a rich experience that demands multiple viewings, as his film works on so many levels simultaneously that it’s often difficult to sort through one’s warring responses. It is certainly a film about the continuing struggle to emerge from the administered drear of the Soviet era. But it is primarily a film about theater, which contains within it an examination of Czech theater’s historical response to Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. Most of all, it is a critique of theatrical artifice.
Having never written a play, Dostoevsky has nonetheless become one of the most staged writers in contemporary drama, and The Brothers Karamazov one of his most adapted works. (Prague has fairly recently witnessed both Peter Brook’s The Grand Inquisitor and Vladimír Morávek’s powerful Dostoevsky quartet from Divadlo Husa na provázku in Brno).
Zelenka uses as his text the famed film director Evald Schorm’s adaptation, which Schorm developed in the ’70s for Divadlo na zábradlí after he was banned by the authorities from making films (there is a television recording of na zábradlí’s production). In 2000, Prague’s Dejvické Divadlo reproduced Schorm’s version, which remains in the current repertory. The majority of Zelenka’s cast — Ivan Trojan, Martin Myšička, Igor Chmela, Radek Holub, Lenka Krobotová, David Novotný — are the very actors in Divadlo Dejvické’s production.
Zelenka frames a performance of the piece by having the Dejvické troupe travel to a theater festival in Kraków, though the performance venues will actually be situated in the dire Nowa Huta district, a junkscape of the former Lenin Steelworks. The actors, playing themselves, disembark at one of the factory sheds and begin to set up a rehearsal for Kamarazovi. No one is happy with the conditions. There is also some internal company friction as Novotný, who is to play Dmitri Karamazov, gets an urgent call that he’s needed for a film shoot back in Prague, and so contemplates abandoning his fellow artists in Poland.
As the actors assume their roles — Trojan plays both Old Karamazov and the Devil; Myšička, Chmela and Novotný his sons; Holub the epileptic lackey Smerdyakov; Krobotová plays Grushenka; and Michaela Badinková plays Katerina — they become a well-oiled machine on a defunct factory floor. Zelenka has chosen a Brechtian approach to the play, which is to say, an aesthetic distancing. The actors brilliantly exteriorize their characters’ motivations, never offering the psychological plumbing of Dostoevsky’s novel. As potent as the piece and the performances are (and this is Czech acting at its highest standard), it is played within a deeply emotional larger story of the factory’s maintenance man (beautifully played by the Polish actor Andrzej Mastalerz), who haunts the margins of the playing area, awaiting word of whether his young son will live or die in hospital.
The highly theatricalized guilt and remorse in the staged Karamazovi collides with the maintenance man, as the same gnawing feelings play silently in his eyes. His son was injured on his watch in this very factory days before. But was it an accident?
Zelenka’s setting fits perfectly the idea of the “menacing space,” a concept of contemporary staging that Arnold Aronson recently put forward in a book of essays on the 2007 Prague Quadrennial. Remarking on the current trend of staging theatrical work in decrepit spaces, Aronson writes that it “suggests decay, not only of the post-industrial world but of an effete, exhausted art form.” Something like this critique informs Zelenka’s film.
The Czech actors, wry rationalists holding little sacred, come face to face with the classic, tragic Pole, whose reality is too much for these costumed visitors to bear. When the awful truth of his son’s condition is revealed to him, the maintenance man dashes into a storeroom for privacy — only to be confronted with one of the Czech troupe’s supporting actors, who has bettered his own record of how many drinking straws he can cram into his mouth.
Krobotová guiltily observes a dramatic encounter between the maintenance man and his wife, but hurriedly takes shelter in a grimly comical puppet show about Dostoevsky’s epilepsy. Novotný accuses the maintenance man of being a hired actor, though he doesn’t understand the word “divadlo” or much else Novotný is saying. Kindred Slavs sharing similar languages, but little else, apparently. But Zelenka’s real point is, what are these superb conjurers of emotion, these actors, once stripped of their togs and personas?
Of the cast, Trojan is excellent both as Old Karamazov, the leering Lear of Russian literature, and as the Devil, who comes to the God-hating Ivan. It’s a great comic performance in the tradition of Schorm’s adaptation, famously played at na zábradlí by the comic actors Karel Augusta and Vlastimil Bedrna. The film’s commanding score is by Polish composer Jan A.P. Kaczmarek, who rightly won an Oscar for his Finding Neverland score a few years back.
Those seeking a refuge from trivial summer fare will find much in Zelenka’s Karamazovi.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (6/08/2008):

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