Models of Aesthetic Subversion: Ideas, Spaces, and Objects in Czech Theatre and Drama of the 1950s and 1960s
Keywords: Czech theatre
theatre of the absurd
Vaclav Havel
Pavel Kohout
Socialist Realism
Josef Topol
Jan Grossman
Otomar Krejca
Prague School

The 1950s and 1960s in Czechoslovakia witnessed a fundamental shift in the dramatic and theatrical realms. Following the Communist takeover of 1948, Soviet-inspired Socialist Realism became the official aesthetic of the Czech lands, displacing the avant-garde trends that had dominated the pre-war era. This normative aesthetic program demanded a party-minded ideological perspective (partiinost) and a certain level of accessibility to the masses (narodnost). After the death of Stalin, as the political situation began to thaw, various theatre practitioners began to undermine these Socialist Realist demands, widening the literary horizons by experimenting with a variety of trends, and ultimately sowing the seeds that would lead to the flowering of the Czech theatre of the 1960s. This thesis investigates the ways in which the Socialist Realist model for dramatic and theatrical expression was subverted on the experimental stages of Prague in the late 1950s and 1960s. Specifically, it analyzes the changing role of ideology, dramatic and theatrical space, and objects during this period. By the 1960s, the earnest, socialist ideology that pervaded Socialist Realism in its purported message to the audience had become a stale aesthetic model. In 1963, Václav Havel’s Zahradní slavnost couches this ideology in an absurd dramatic world, subverting and satirizing the didactic nature of Socialist Realism while simultaneously drawing from the Czech avant-garde and foreign trends like the so-called Theatre of the Absurd. Prague’s experimental theatre movement in the 1950s and 1960s, though certainly present on large stages like the National Theatre, primarily sprang from the city’s small stages. Both Jiří Suchý and Jiří Šlitr’s Semafor Theatre and Otomar Krejča’s Theatre Beyond the Gate managed highly innovative productions despite limited stage space. This was made possible, in part, due to their remarkable use of the off-stage and imaginary action spaces. In his article “Man and Object in the Theatre,” Jiří Veltruský notes that human actors on stage operate between two poles: highly spontaneous and highly determined actions. Socialist Realism, which offered its audience models of behaviour for their lives outside the theatre, reduced characters to types, limiting their perceived spontaneity, as they exist primarily to fulfill necessary narrative functions (i.e., the positive hero). In a sense, human beings are objectified. In his adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi, director Jan Grossman takes this to the extreme. By presenting the actions of his actors as highly determined, he reduces the human figure to a manipulated object. When Ubu oversees the annihilation of these beings, Grossman both parodies the Socialist Realist approach to characterization and offers a stunningly subversive rebuke of the Czech political culture. In this work I show how the innovative spirit of Czech theatre and drama of the 1960s represented an era of shifting aesthetic norms, which reacted to the strict, normative Socialist Realist trend of the 1950s, borrowed from numerous foreign and domestic trends both past and present, and developed unique techniques of their own in order to create impactful works on the stage and on the page.