(11. 4. 1945)
Studied dramaturgy and scriptwriting in the film Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts. Scriptwriter and dramaturge in the Barrandov Film Studios from 1973 to 1979, when he was sacked for political reasons. He then began an important collaboration with the director Ivan Rajmont at the Drama Studio in Ústí nad Labem, where in the 1980s most of his plays, written specifically for this acting company, were premiered. Not all his plays could be produced during President Gustáv Husák's era of "normalisation". From 1988 to 1993 he worked in the Theatre on the Balustrades as author and dramaturge, and from 1991 as artistic head. More recently he has been the author of opinion pieces in the daily press. Karel Steigerwald has written a number of plays for the theatre and radio, and the scripts for several řlms. A satirical and caricaturing exaggeration, parody, and an ironical aloofness are characteristic for his work.
List of plays:
Tatarská pouť, 1979, première 21. 6. 1988 Divadlo Na zábradlí, Prague
Dobové tance, 1980, première 17. 12. 1980 Činoherní studio, Ústí nad Labem
Foxtrot, 1982, première 22. 5. 1982 Činoherní studio, Ústí nad Labem
...a tak tu prosím, kníže, 1982, première 1982 Divadlo v Řeznické, Prague
Neapolská choroba, 1984, première 10. 4. 1988 Činoherní studio, Ústí nad Labem
Jak hlouposti narostly parohy, 1986, première 10. 3. 1986 Divadlo Jiřího Wolkra, Prague
Hoře, hoře, strach, oprátka a jáma, 1990, première 10. 1. 1991 Divadlo Na zábradlí, Prague
První kroky demokrata, 1991, première 1991 Mittelfest, Cividale del Friuli
O pejskovi a mačičke, 1994, première 14. 1. 1994 Národní divadlo, Prague (in co-operation with Ondrej Šulaj)
Nobel, 1994, première 17. 11. 1994 Národní divadlo, Prague
Marta Peschek jde do nebe, 1998
Otčina, 1998, première 18. 5. 1999 PraIské komorní divadlo, Prague
Hraj komedii (Tragédie hereček), 2000, première 20. 10. 2000 Festival "Divadlo", Pilsen (under the title Divadlo jako mor)
Horáková x Gottwald (Týden veselosti), 2006, première 19.3.2006 La Fabrika, Prague
Translated plays:
Hoře, hoře, strach, oprátka a jáma, English - Sorrow, Sorrow, Fear, the Rope and the Pit,
German - Leid, Qual und Angst, der Strick und die Grube
První kroky demokrata, English - The First Steps of a Democrat
Neapolská choroba, English - The Neapolitan Disease, Finnish - Le mal de Naples
Hraj komedii, (Tragédie hereček) Hungarian - Színésznök
Marta Peschek jde do nebe, German - Marta Peschek´s Himmelfahrt
SORROW, SORROW, FEAR, THE ROPE ANF THE PIT (HOŘE, HOŘE, STRACH, OPRÁTKA A JÁMA)
F 4, M 5
A dream
(The play uses themes from the life of Osip Mandelstam, as described by Nadezhda Mandelstam in her book „Hope against Hope“)
„´You old miseries, get out of my life,´was my starting point. I felt I had to write a play which would let me sort things out once and for all. It´s like waking up from a terrible, pataphysical dream. This was a movement which began with sacred social motives, and made such terrible inroads into our lives and our thinking. I wanted it to be something like an oratorium, a lament for the dead. If I had no taste, I would write that I was dedicating it to the fifty milion dead. I have tried to make something like a theatrical gesture – this is the end, it will never happen again. Because for me it really will not happen again, so let it fall from me.“ This is how Steigerwald describes what moved him to write this play about people and a society on the run. From Berlin to the Urals, from the Stalinist labour camps of the 1930s to the last assault of the East German refugees on the West German embassies of the main East European cities in the autumn of 1989.
The performance of this „oratorio“ in the Theatre on the Balustrade (premiere January 10, 1991, directed by Jan Grossman) was one of the most interesting and talked-about events of the post-revolution Czech theatre.
Translated into German and English (by Roger Downey and Stepan Simek). Performed in the USA (Seattle) and at guest appearances in Germany.
PLAY COMEDY - A Tragedy of Actresses (HRAJ KOMEDII -Tragédie hereček)
F 5, M 6
Steigerwald's latest play forms a kind of grotesque satirical pendant to the "oratorio" Sorrow, Sorrow, Fear, the Rope and the Pit. The theme here is the totalitarian past; the sarcastic tone of the author derives from personal experience of a decade in which coming to terms with this serious social problem not infrequently turned into farce. The acting world serves as a model of the whole of Czech society of the 1990s, a world which so easily transforms itself Protean-like and just as easily exchanges its values. The main characters of this "tragedy" are actresses. Once possibly famous (we can discern fragments from the biographies of Czech řlm stars of the 1930s and 1940s in their destinies), today, in this media-advanced age, they are, with the help of their superannuated admirers, trying to return to a place in the sun. Lála accepts the idea of arranging for the remains of her husband, a "national poet", to be transported from Paris, where he perished in grotesque circumstances. Zdenička, the poet's first wife tries to prevent this "from piety" and at the same time has to confront the flood of publicity evoked by Lída, her life-long rival, when she (Lída) decides publicly and in contrition to confess that during the worst of the Stalinist hysteria she demanded the death sentence for her imprisoned colleague Zdenička. When, after thirty-seven years, the two meet again it appears it was not Lída who denounced Zdeniaka, but - on the contrary - Zdenička who informed on Lída. Other characters then become involved in the game, willing to assist in the course of the media circus - both plots leading to the same absurd climax. Steigerwald plays with his characters in a Pirandellian way and endows them with an unusually grotesque language: contemporary vulgarisms mix with the lofty speech of media gurus and artificially deformed "computer language".
Translated into Hungarian.
MARTA PESCHEK GOES TO HEAVEN (MARTA PESCHEK JDE DO NEBE)
F 1, M 1
Let the author explain: “This play could be told as an anecdote about a dirty old man who doesn’t want to let an unpleasant woman into a space he might be guarding. The woman tries different means to penetrate the forbidden space. The old man is defending it as well as he can. Somebody else might be telling the same anecdote in a slightly different way: the woman is actually dead and her goal is the Heaven. The old man is sort of a guardian of the Pearly Gates. Those with a little bit more knowledge could say the anecdote reminds of different stories about Bertolt Brecht. I am saying it is a dark tribute to the Twentieth Century. It’s clear from all of this that it must be a comedy – only a comedy can bear all these different silts.”
German Translation with the title Marta Peschek´s Himmelfahrt – by Georg Escher.
NEAPOLITAN DISEASE (NEAPOLSKÁ CHOROBA)
F 2, M 6
A sociological science-fiction, a warning morality play and also a comedy which provoked salvos of laughter when it was first shown in 1988, four years after it was written, caused both by Steigerwald´s wit and the audience´s painful understanding. In the world of the not too distant future, where the action takes place, audience recognised not only a sharp and satirical picture of the totalitarian present, but also a vision in which the most pessimistic forecasts of social and other – for example ecological – developments are fulfilled. In The Neapolitan Disease, the short-sighted illusions of both the powerful and the powerless govern the world, and destroy and kill it with regularity.
The structure of what is Steigerwald´s most traditional theatre play consists of a picture of the world as it has developed after a nuclear catastrophe. The action takes place in a hospital in the middle of an overgrown wood, afflicted by an utter lack of medicine. A huge regression of thought and a loss of memory threatens the whole of the surviving human enclave which has returned to a sort of feudalism. The country is ruled from a Kafkaesque, impenetrable castle, and all its inhabitants serve the „elite“.
The self-annihilating character of this system is revealed by the story of a disease, with which the Chamberlain has come to the hospital to have cured. The doctors are faced with an insolvable problem: the disease they are supposed to be curing is ordinary diarrhoea, but the Chamberlain diagnoses it as an intersting venereal disease and asks for the relevant cure, which of course only aggravates the real illness. The doctors would be risking their lives if they gave him the proper cure. However, only one of them realises that if the Chamberlain dies, then all of their lives will be put in danger…
Translated into English, French, Italian, German and Finnish.
Not yet translated:
HORÁKOVÁ VS GOTTWALD – A WEEK OF MIRTH (HORÁKOVÁ X GOTTWALD – TÝDEN VESELOSTI)
5 men, 2 women, a Chorus
Karel Steigerwald's play (its subtitle We'll kill a woman, they'll be scared witless, they'll get used to it), is the third part of a project by the playwright and director Miroslav Bambušek called Persecution.cz. The project consisted of 6 productions and rehearsed readings; most performances were held in the industrial setting of the former aluminium foundry in Prague-Holešovice. The common theme of all the productions was the injustice in history and the preservation of historical memory. The project aimed at unveiling the causes, motives and consequences of human suffering, inflicted on both the Czechs and the Gemans by the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, the displacement of the Germans and then the communist regime.
In the four sequences of Horáková vs Gottwald – Arrest, Interrogation, Trial, Execution – we follow the fate of Mrs Milada Horáková and the development of one of the first and the most cruel miscarriages of justice under the communist regime. Milada Horáková (1901 – 1950) was a Czech lawyer and politician. After the 1948 Communist putsch she resigned her seat in the parliament and left political life. In 1949 she was arrested by the Communists and accused of high treason and espionage. In 1950 she was sentenced to death in a show trial (together with the so-called Milada Horáková group) and later executed. The sentence, signed by the first Communist president of Czechoslovakia Klement Gottwald (1948 – 1953) roused indignant protests from the democrats in the whole world. Gottwald as the individual bears main responsibility for the arbitrary lawlessness and reign of legal terror of that period.
In the play we observe Milada Horáková’s fate, but the production also recreates at least in part the atmosphere of the time, the mechanisms of arbitrary justice and, in a metaphoric image, the fate of the Communist president Klement Gottwald.
Karel Steigerwald does not present a realistic picture of either Milada Horáková, Klement Gottwald or anybody else, his play is no verbatim drama or documentary. Nonetheless we are confronted with authentic characters and real events (Milada Horáková's arrest first by the Nazis and subsequently by the Communists, her husband's escape from Czechoslovakia, Gottwald's role in the miscarriage of justice, unsuccessful appeals for clemency for Horáková's by prominent personalities from all over the world including Albert Einstein, and, at the same time, in Czechoslovakia countless petitions demanding her death...) The author, using dramatic hyperboles and metaphors, tries to present the essence and predominant traits of communist atrocity during early fifties. As a result some characters (such as the outstanding left-wing director E. F. Burian who became an ardent Communist after the war) are treated as symbols of their time. The way Steigerwald portrays them is not based on historical facts.
The character of Gottwald himself is not a genuine historical portrait of the politician. As the critic Vladimír Just says, the character is "a quintessence of Bolshevik and populist – affable, jovial, primitive, but above all, a gutless weakling". The play ends with his ironic message:
"We really quashed you, didn't we? But I certainly did not think that after these forty years you would be once more helping us to power..." This ending points out to the support still enjoyed by the Communist Party in the Czech Republic. The size of this support, Mr Just noted, is the measure of the chronic moral disease of the Czech society.
Presented as a part of the Perzekuce.cz project – La Fabrika, Prague, directed by Viktorie Čermáková, dramaturge Miroslav Bambušek, press night on March 19, 2006
SELECTED REVIEWS:
Steigerwald is not creating a realistic portrait of Horáková, Gottwald or anyone else. As with his history based plays such as Actresses (Herečky) and Grief, Grief, Fear, the Noose and the Pit (Hoře, hoře, strach, oprátka a jáma) he uses real history to create a new fictitious reality aiming to show – and in the best places showing – through a hyperbole, the „actual“ reality, in this case crimes of Communism.
Vladimír Just, Divadelní noviny
The sign for the word versus or against is not appearing in the play’s title by chance. There is no space for questions in the text, the play is delineated clearly and sharply and for a long time it would seem as a black and white morality. The Good (Horáková) and Evil (Gottwald) are two clearly separated worlds: maybe it should be said that the Evil looks more grotesque than fiendish and the Good is not unalloyed virtue, more of civic decency… The text is closer to the popular theatre with martyrs and their hangmen as opposing forces.
Kateřina Kolářová, Svět a divadlo 4/2006