Josef Topol (b.1.4.1935) is a Czech poet and playwright.
He became a reader for E.F.Burian Theatre only when 18. In 1959 he finished his studies of theatrology at Prague Academy of Performing Arts and started his carreer as a freelance writer. 1965-72 he was a director, dramaturge and co-founder of the Theatre Beyond the Gate, lead by the famous Czech director Otomar Krejča. Most of his plays were written and staged during this period. In 1972, after the Societ occupation, the theatre was banned and since 1977 when he signed Charter ´77 Topol had to work as a stonemason. He was also active as a translator of plays (under the name of one of his friends). After 1989 his plays (mainly End of Carnival) are being revived successfully on Czech stages.
CAT ON THE RAILS (KOČKA NA KOLEJÍCH)
F 1, M 4
tragicomedy - a play in three situations
A dialogue develops at night in a railway station between a young man and woman - two people who, as the cliché goes, can live neither together nor without each other. While waiting for the train which is to také them from another weekend together back to the city, their far from interesting jobs and their homes, they reveal a lot about their relationship, but also about themselves. Topol´s gift for combining realistic detail with sudden contacts with the existential dimension of life and death makes this play from the 1960s a timeless work.
Translated into English, French, German, Spanish and Russian. Into English translated by VOSKOVEC G. And Ch., into French translated by KRAUS K., HUENS J. C., into German translated by KRUNTORAD P., into Spanish translated by CAMARILLO, Félix Cortés. Into Russian by KOLOMIJCEVA Elena
END OF CARNIVAL (KONEC MASOPUSTU)
F 3, M 11, 11 mummers
play
Topol´s most famous work and the theatrical event of 1964. Directed by Otomar Krejča, play appeared in the National Theatre which was - at the time - contemporary. As well as being a realistic story about the love of a young Praguer, expelled from college, and a country girl, the doughter of the last private farmer in the village, it was also a tragically strong parable about the huge change in thinking and feeling which was gradually coming about in Czech society in the fifteenth year after the communist putsch. Together with the "ploughing up of barries" as the traditional slogan of the unhappy period of collectivisation went, the centuries-old moral order also disappeared, the basis of country society, nature and natural relationships. Just like the Lenten mummers, people put on masks so that they could merge with others and relieve themselves of their own responsibility.
The play had a very successful revival in Prague last autumn (Transteatral Production at the theatre DISK, directed by Stepan Pacl).
New translation into English by Gerald Turner. Translations into French, German and Russian are also available.
DIE STIMMEN DER VÖGEL / VOICES OF BIRDS (HLASY PTÁKŮ)
F 4, M 5
tragicomedy - an Opera for Actors
An elderly actor, famous for his performance as Lear, has a sudden stroke and is forced to live a quiet and balanced life to which he is quite unaccustomed. He meets two of his illegitimate sons and their mothers, but is unable to find a way of getting close to people, whom until now he has tended just to use. He can only relax in the company of a young girl who is working with him on his memoirs, and whom he finally marries, only to find that this time it is he who is used. The young woman declares he is the father of the child which she is expecting with her lover, and when she drives him to a despairing gesture, has him certified as incapable of looking after his own affairs. He is moved out of his villa into a neighbouring chateau - a psychiatric hospital, where paradoxically he finds spiritual peace at the side of his housekeeper and her backward son (who we find out at the end of the play is also his). Topol wrote this plaz in 1988, after more then ten years of silence. It was first performed shortly before the November 1989 at the Divadlo na Vinohradech.
Into German translated by WISTEN Eva, Into English translated by BORKOVEC Vera.
GOODBYE SOCRATES! (SBOHEM, SOKRATE!)
F 3, M 2
tragicomedy - conversations in two sentences (for Jiří Voskovec)
The play was written in 1976 in the timeless period after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia and before the establishment of Charter ‘77. It is a portrait of an ageing artist, the sculptor Žak, whose fiftieth birthday is an occasion for his friends and acquaintances to meet. We see Žak in both creative and a personal crisis, which is partly a crisis of his relationship towards his wife. With the greatest self-denial, Malva has hitherto filled the thankless role of supporting for life a man whom she once admired. In the course of the evening, however, she loses the last bit of faith in him and departs this life in what could be a sudden death, but is more likely a voluntary one. Other characters begin to state their failures in life as well, and Topol’s well-known conflict between life and death passes through their interiors and results in a chain of victories for death. The Socrates of the doubtlessly symbolic title is the tame raven which left Žak’s ‘house of broken hearts’ before the beginning of the play, tragically marking the story with the loss of direction of an afflicted generation.
Into English translated by BORKOVEC Vera, into English translated by NAUGHTON James, into Polish translated by WACZKÓV Yozef.
HOUR OF LOVE (HODINA LÁSKY)
F 2, M 1
one-act play - a Dream Inside a Play
In one hour Ela and Ela experience all the happiness and unhappiness, all the endurance and the boredom of their lives, their love and their death. El comes with the news that he has to go away, seemingly for ever. After the intense experience of this event comes an anticlimactic reversal – and disappointment. El remains, and the flame of love changes into the ashes of every day. Ela’s Auntie, the decrepit old lady who lives with them, becomes the witness to and bitter commentator on the ‘hour of love’.
This one-act play is one of Topol’s classics, written for Otomar Krejča’s Theatre Bezond the Gate in the 1960s.
Into English translated by BORKOVEC Vera.
NIGHTINGALE FOR DINNER (SLAVÍK K VEČEŘI)
F 2, M 3
one-act play - a play in a dream
A one-act play, Vaclav Havel´s favourite of his friend´s works. It is normally classified as belonging to the works of Czech absurd theatre. A family supper, to which Mr. Nightingale has been invited, has as tragic an end for the guest as the life of every man. It is only the prospect of death which gives life meaning...or vice versa.
Every speech in Topol´s black comedy acquires existential dimensions - a method reminiscent of Kafka, Pinter and Beckett.
When it was first produced in 1967, the play did not meet with great critical enthusiasm. The ensuing period of censorship did not allow Nightingale for Supper to become an inspiration for other playwrights.
Into German translated by POVEJŠIL J.l, SCHULZ G., into English translated by VOSKOVEC G. And Ch., into French translated by KEPEL Milan.
IL VERSO DEGLI UCCELI (DVĚ NOCI S DÍVKOU aneb JAK OKRÁST ZLODĚJE)
F 3, M 4
tragicomedy
Into Italian translated by SERVILI Mariana R., into German translated by TSCHAKERT Lydia.
MIGRATION OF SOULS (STĚHOVÁNÍ DUŠÍ)
F 1
monodrama
Into English translated by BORKOVEC Vera, into German translated by TSCHUI Eva,into English translated by KRAUZE Krystyna.