Goldflam Arnošt

Graduated in theatre direction from the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts in Brno in 1977. Whilst studying, he directed and played with the satirical theatre Evening Brno and after graduation was briefly employed there. From 1978 to 1993 he worked with Hanácké Theatre in Prostějov, which after moving to Brno changed its name to HaTheatre. He helped to created the poetics of this theatre, working there as director, actor and author. He is presently a director in theatres in Prague (Studio Ypsilon, Theatre in Dlouhá Street, Dejvice Theatre) and Hradec Králové (Klicpera Theatre); writes plays, teaches at JAMU; and occasionally acts in film.

Goldflam has written more than forty plays and dramatisations. His plays can be divided into two groups: in the first he follows a (non-illusive) theme of the conflict of generations and tries to capture the "spirit of history"; in the second he pays attention to the banal situations of life, exaggerating them and taking them to extreme positions. Characteristic for him is a feeling for embarrassment, grotesque realism and satiric exaggeration.

LIST OF PLAYS (selection):

Horror, 1981, première 14. 12. 1981 Studio Fórum, Olomouc

Biletářka (The Usheress/Ticket Girl), 1982, première 18. 2. 1983 Hanácké divadlo, Prostějov

Červená knihovna (Mills and Boon), 1985, première 1986 Reduta, Brno

Agatománie (Agathamania), 1985, première 22. 4. 1987 Viola, Prague

Písek /Tak dávno.../ (The Sand /So long...), 1987, première 5. 3. 1988 HaDivadlo, Brno

Lásky den (Day of Love), 1994, première 8. 4. 1994 CED-HaDivadlo, Brno

Sladký Theresienstadt (Sweet Theresienstadt), 1996, première 1. 11. 1996 Divadlo Archa, Prague

Já je někdo jiný (I Be Someone Else), 2001, première 25. 10. 2003 Klicperovo divadlo, Hradec Králové

Ředitelská lóže (The Director´s Box), 2003, première 10. 2. 2004 at the same time in Divadlo Komedie, Prague; HaDivadlo, Brno; Klicperovo divadlo, Hradec Králové (staged reading)

Z Hitlerovy kuchyně (From Hitler´s Kitchen - 6 one-act plays), 2007, première 10. 11. 2007 HaDivadlo, Brno

Ženy a panenky (Dolls and Dollies), 2008,  première 2. 3. 2009 Divadlo V Řeznické, Prague

TRANSLATED PLAYS:

Agatománie English - Agathamania

Biletářka English - The Ticket Girl, Norwegian - Den kvinnelige Billetkontrollor

Červená knihovna Danish - Mit livs novelle, Norwegian - Misseroman, German - Gartenlaube

Horror German - Horror

Já je někdo jiný German - Ich ist jemand anders

Lásky den German - Der Tag der Liebe

Modrá tvář German - Das blaue Gesicht

Návrat ztraceného syna German - Die Heimkehr des verlorenen Sohnes

Několik historek ze života Bédi Jelínka German - Aus dem Leben von Fritzchen Hirschl

Písek Russian - Pěsok

Smlouva German - Der Bund

Zkouška German - Die Probe

Sladký Teresienstadt English - Sweet Theresienstadt

Ženy a panenky English - Dolls and Dollies 

SLADKÝ THERESIENSTADT / SWEET THERESIENSTADT

10 men, 7 women, extras

This play is based on documents about life in the Theresienstadt ghetto, the biggest Nazi concentration camp in Bohemia. The main inspiration was the diary of the journalist Willy Mahler, not yet published for ethical reasons. The second source is a story about the shooting of a propaganda documentary giving the world a false idea that Jews were being cared for; this was the job of another prisoner, Kurt Gerron. (Mahler and Gerron both died in transports to the extermination camps.) In this free dramatic composition the two stories are interlinked. The řlming is supervised by the leader of the camp Rahm. The author views the illusions "made" by Germans, the illusion of Rahm who had "personally nothing against the Jews", and more importantly the illusion in which both the main characters live, from an ironical distance. Gerron's naiveté, the feeling of his own importance and his belief in favourable appreciation, and the romanticism of the apparently pragmatic Mahler, longing for his Prague love Marie, to whom he is "faithful in his soul"; the author is ironical mainly about self-deception.

This is not a documentary drama about Terezín, but more of an elegy about people deserted in the ghetto, abandoned people, torn from their homes, deceiving themselves and each other /.../ A play about the past within us, about the illusions we create for ourselves and to which we, whether prisoners in Terezín or any other ghetto, often succumb. It concerns the pain about which we would rather know nothing today. (Vladimír Hulec, Sladký Theresienstadt je dramatem o bolesti, Práce, 16. 11. 1996)

ŽENY A PANENKY / DOLLS AND DOLLIES

6 women

At the beginning, the new play by Goldflam pretends to be a probe into the life of a family made up of several generations, and exclusively of women. A seven-year old girl opens the play with a monologue introducing the audience to her dolls. But the grotesque, fake-motherly relationship she has with the dolls will soon introduce a darker theme of the play - the theme of power pecking order inside the family, manipulation linked to the hierarchy, and changes in these relationships as people get more mature and older. The "conversation" is gradually joined by the girl's teenage sister, cynical and rough, and their senile great-grandmother. The old woman is being chased away together with her weird stories about the old world by the mother of both girls who keeps venting her anger on her. But the mother herself is treated roughly by her own mother - the grandmother, obviously a woman at the peak of her power, is an "indispensable" ruler of the family.

A Doll is the sixthcharacter of the play; in her monologues she meditates on her existence condemned to immobility and represents the essence of female powerlessness and dreaming.

The five women go through situations brought in by family life and dominated by common meals. But, with the same spontaneity, they look into basic situations of life as such. Birth, illness, death (love is conspicuous by its absence) are seen through the perspective of five differently skewed attitudes to life. The relationships keep escalating in rough dialogues and contrasted soliloquies and litanies, prose morphs into verse, song and dance resulting in physical duels. The play featuring excellent characterization through language hovers on a thin border between reality and the Surreal, between slapstick and horror. Arnošt Goldflam in top form.
The premiere of the play - April 2009.

DÁMSKÁ ŠATNA / THE WOMEN'S DRESSING ROOM
4 women

Encounters and conversations in a theatre dressing room bring us an insight into the destinies of four actresses. A new man has just entered Marie's life. She's experiencing the first rapture and subsequent disenchantment when, just as she discovers she's pregnant, he rejects the child. Her colleague Truda, who has a small daughter, has been abandoned by her husband several times. The youngest, Klára, is naturally longing for good parts, a career and success in the theatre. The oldest, Líza, is sorting out the meaning of an actor's vocation at a general level. In all four generations it's possible to follow the often interwoven personal and professional problems the actresses come up against.

The play is in three acts, between which there is a passage of time (not precisely determined - roughly several months). The actresses' conversations take place in the dressing room before and during the performance, while they are getting changed, preparing to go onstage, or returning. The play also semi-reveals the normally concealed but attractive environment backstage at a theatre. The premiere took place on 17.12. 2005 at Klicpera Theatre Hradec Králové.

In this play we meet four actresses of different ages and differing acting skills. They are four colleagues, friends and rivals. With them, you will go through a long waiting for a role, exciting preparations for the opening night, everyday routine of performances and, most of all, their normal yet moving fate.

www.rozhlas.cz, 2.2.2008

Z HITLEROVY KUCHYNĚ / FROM HITLER'S KITCHEN
6 one-act plays

3) A Love Romance (2 men, 1woman) - Last war days in Hitler's bunker. Hitler sings a love song, regrets never having become an actor and decides to write a book of his jokes - Mein Witz. He's distracted from dictating his testament to a secretary by the news a delegation of 88 Czech Virgins arriving to be impregnated by the Führer in the same way as women from other defeated nations. When the naked Hitler gets ready to welcome them, a cow appears at the door.
4) An Ordinary Day (1men, 2 woman, 3 children) - Eva Braun is preparing a vegetarian lunch for Hitler complaining she has not as much fun with her partner as she used to. She urges Hitler to invite the miraculous doctor Mengele to Berlin to have a look at his shaking hand. Miss Braun has to go to Mrs Goebbels to borrow some onions. While the women are having a chat, Mrs Goebbels prepares couple of margarine breads for her children and Miss Braun returns home.

5) Playing the Death Game (5 men, 1 woman) - The bunker again: Goering, Goebbels and Himmler jealously needle each other while putting down claims for Hitler's succession. Hitler calms down their fighting and organizes a drill in eating Czech sweets with poison. Instead of sweets, he offers them real poison and his mates die in terrible convulsions. Hitler enjoys his April's Fool joke; dancing a South American dance, he plans his overseas trip.
6) Ende gut, alles gut (1man) - A carnival in South America. Old Hitler, called nowadays Adolfo Esperanza Muňoz reminisces about the success of his South American exhibitions and feels sorry to have spent "so much time on politics all these years ago." He specializes in paintings of Indians and half-breeds; his fiancée is also a half-cast. She has plenty of temperament, unlike late Eva. Hitler sees a scorpion and beats it to pulp with his stick while shouting obscenities in German. Soon afterwards though he's smiling again at the vision of an evening swim in the sea: Life is beautiful, Leben ist schön.
A brand new play. The world premiere took place at HaDivadlo/HaTheatre, on November 10, 2007.

Vitriolic sarcasm. I was afraid it was for informed audiences only, but I forgot dunces don't usually go to theatre. A resounding success! Also thanks to bravura performances by Petr Jeništa as an authentic Hitler, Jana Plodková as Eva Braun and Simona Peková as Mrs Goebbels.

J.P.Kříž, Právo 5.12.2007

AGÁTOMÁNIE (AGATHAMANIA)

into English translated by DAY Barbara

2 women

One of the director, playwright and actor´s best plays is a brilliant study of human powerlessness and anger. Two women are being questioned - apparently by the police of a totalitarian state. The first is a high-class prostitute for foreigners and people in high places, and a witness and informer on the second, which is being made to pay for having tried to help unhappy people around her, offering sympathy as well as practical help. With time, though, their gratittude has descended into uncritical worship and treating the woman like god on earth. Thus she bas become a victim of her own kindness, and now has no option but to protect herself from the vicious circle by escaping.

JÁ JE NĚKDO JINÝ / ICH BIN JEMAND ANDERS / I BE SOMEONE ELSE

4 men, 7 women

In the middle of a family idyll, when the children are at school and Anna and Pavel are planning their trip to the new aquarium, an excruciating insecurity comes over Pavel: can he go on providing for his family and sheltering them from danger? In a fit of horror he strangles Anna. And wakes up - to reality? His partner Tereza is so distressed by the dream Pavel tells her that she sends him to a psychiatrist. However, the Doctor and Nurse suddenly change into maniacal beings. Returning home, he is welcomed by Granny and Mama who take off his little bootees and listen with amusement to his wild stories about strangled wives, children, partners and mad doctors. Father gets back from work, evidently a Kafkaesque dominator, crushing Pavel with his love and hate. To show everyone at home he is grown up, Pavel reads aloud a Polish story for children - and is immediately "lost" in it, meeting the heroine, a childishly cruel little girl called Jadwiga. When he wakes from his fairy-tale dream, all the characters from his earlier dreams - or realities - are gathered round his bed condemning him. Pavel orders them out of the flat - and wakes up again: this time as an old man who cannot remember who the old woman looking after him is. It is Tereza, the mother of his children, who knows nothing about any Anna, let alone Jadwig. The aging Pavel tries again, by the force of his own strength, to wake from another dream, the most terrible of all - reality. All the characters from his dreams gather round his death bed - the hospital staff. In 2001 the play won 3rd prize in a competition for an original new Czech play for the drama company of the National Theatre.

Premiere 25 November 2003 in the Klicpera Theatre in Hradec Králové.

"It is difficult for an audience to tell reality and dream apart. For a long time Goldflam leaves us on the edge of our seats, rather like in a detective story. It isn't entirely clear what is true even at the end. In human life everything is relative and the borders between dream and reality very fragile. The hero himself says that every dream, even the most stupid, is better than real life... The play is a mixture of all the Goldflam ingredients: subtle humour, irony, exaggeration, absurdity, tragicomedy and life's mockery, which laughs back at us."

(Eliška Skokanová: Co je sen a co skutečnost, Hradecké noviny, 1. 11. 2003)

LÁSKY DEN / DAY OF LOVE

(or a gripping story of people who erred but pulled themselves together in time)

5 women, 1 man

The prematurely retired police spy Ctibor Melša assesses his life in front of the young post-woman Markéta. Melša's former love bursts into the flat, hot-blooded South American Conchita, a member of the Columbia drugs mařa. She too wants to assess her life and revenge the betrayal which Melša allegedly perpetrated against her. Other characters enter this sentimentally grotesque play. Melša's (female) neighbour Reisengebauer, and the (female) members of a rapid reaction unit, Melša's pupils from the police academy. All the characters come to terms with the sins of their past with due thoroughness. Their bizarre fates are meanwhile paraphrased by all the kitsch which the media and the resurrected sphere of degenerate literature daily hurl at their consumers. The fates of people who come together from all corners of the country, of the world even, in one housing-estate flat, has been fatefully influenced (or is being influenced right now) by meeting the central hero - retired spy and moral philosopher in one, Mr. Melša.

Goldflam benevolently communicates with archetypes of trash production, the dialogue meandering from the terse style of spy thrillers to domestic conversation. The relationship to minor literature, its inspirational source, is not done as parody, but rather as captivation in the Post-Modern way.

(Jaromír Blažejovský: Ta sladká lyrika útvaru rychle nasazeného, Rovnost, 16. 4. 1994)

Das blaue Gesicht (Modrá tvář)

(translated by SPITZBARDT Wolfgang)

tragikomedie

German • m: 4 / ž: 7

Die Probe (Zkouška)

(translated by SPITZBARDT Wolfgang)

aktovka

German, m: 1 / w: 1

Horror (Horror)

(translated by POSSET Johanna)

groteska

German

• m: 3 / w: 2

Mit livs novelle (Červená knihovna)

(translated by BUGGE Peter)

monodrama

Danish

• m: 0 / w: 1

Misseroman (Červená knihovna)

(translated by ŠMÍD, Vladimír)

monodrama

Norwegian

• m: 0 / w: 1

Gartenlaube (Červená knihovna)

(translated by TOMANOVÁ-WEISSOVÁ, Helena)

monodrama

German

• m: 0 / w: 1

Billettkontrollor (Biletářka)

(translated by ŠMÍD, Vladimír)

monodrama

Norwegian

• m: 0 / w: 1

The Ticket Girl (Biletářka)

(translated by DAY Barbara)

monodrama

English

• m: 1 /w: 1

Die Heimkehr des Verlorenen Zohnes (Návrat ztraceného syna)

(translated by POSSET Johanna)

drama

German

• m: 5 / w: 2

Tag der Liebe

(translated by SPITZBARDT Wolfgang)

drama

German

• m: 1 / w: 5

Bund (Smlouva)

(translated by AMBROS Peter)

drama

German

• m: 4 / w: 1

Not yet translated plays:

2 men, 1 wo

Arnošt Goldflam has several times turned to a theatre setting for his plays (The Ticket Girl, Debate with the Maestro, etc.). His second latest piece, The Director's Box, takes place in an old folks' home, where two forgotten actors spend long hours together. With both irony and nostalgia they remember the past and try as best they can to recall the odd moments when they were truly happy.

"I wanted to write about actors and their failings and faults, without emotion, rather about their human destinies," says Arnošt Goldflam, "and I also wanted it to be with hindsight, not those times full of action, but what remained of them. There have been three readings, in Brno, in Prague and in Hradec Králové and all of them were a great success, and people laughed a lot. I wanted it to be an audience piece, where people enjoyed themselves and where there would be a fair amount of transcendence."

Premiere 30 November 2004 in the HaDivadlo in Brno. The play has just been nominated for Alfréd Radok Award - the Czech version of Olivier Awards - in the cathegory of Play of the Year.

"The event of the Brno autumn was the Czech premiere of Arnošt Goldflam's Director's Box in the HaTheatre. His second latest piece takes place in an old folk's home where two old and forgotten actors spend long hours together. They recall the past, especially moments when they were truly happy. In Ondřej Elbel's production Ján Sedal is excellent as the more worldly-wise of the two. He is ironic, sarcastic, spontaneous. Maybe he invests much of his own life into the role (when he recalled how he "harried the theatre director", a tremor ran through the HaTheatre leadership in the front row); he pretends to be a thug, but in reality he badly needs his "gaffer", a role cut to fit Miloslav Maršálek. The trio is completed by a new reinforcement to the company, Jana Plodková as the nurse taking care of the two old men and at the same time the embodiment of their memories."

(Pavel Gejdoš, ČTK)

"....The heaviest weight of the evening is carried by Ján Sedal in the role of the self-centred, egotistic and cantankerous Eda. Eda evokes memories of his successes onstage and with women, but from the context it appears he is greatly exaggerating, maybe even making them up. However, diction in the style "every word a pearl" convinces his opposite number of his truthfulness, whilst he covers up with banalities, half-truths, stormy attacks and aggressive humiliating speeches. Sedal's delivery is precise and true to life, and he evokes a lively response from the audience. Even over Ruda's dead body Eda is unable to feel pity for anyone else. He is only sorry at having lost his audience, his spectator and, when needed, his foil. Even the rebellious gesture which he apparently once used to express his arrogant relationship with the director sitting in the box, and which he now repeats as though he were addressing the director of all human destinies, with all its isolated despair sounds hollow and theatrical. The declaration in the motto - "I like you, Ruda. I like you, Eda" - ironically convicts its bearer of the inability of feeling.

I consider The Director's Box at HaTheatre to be the most powerful stage experience the Czech theatre is offering this season."

(Milan Uhde, Divadelní noviny, 8. 2. 2005)

THE GOOD IDEAS EXCHANGE (BURZA DOBRÝCH NÁPADŮ)

The members of the audience represent participants in a talk shaw of sorts. They are supposed to formulate suggestions of how to improve the existing state of things. Actors sit among the audience and when invited by the M.C. they join in. One suggests to humanise the transports of death, a woman proposes to found a xenophobic organizations of mothers, an eduacated man suggests to refine words describing inhuman activities. The M.C. closes the debate as this being a very inspiring one and everybody sings a song in the end. In case a virtual member of the audience also joins the discussion it is acceptable provided the M.C. controls the situation. Only time limits this.