Jiří Homola (* 1974 in Kladno)
Jiří Homola graduated from the College of Education at the Charles University and now teaches German and English languages. He run an amateur theatre group and played in a rock band. Besides theatre plays he also writes novels and poetry. Only two of his plays were produced so far: Motýl v kostele [A Butterfly in the Church] (Divadlo v klubu Mlejn) and Krysy v podpalubí [Rats under Deck] (Divadlo Na cestě).
His play Homo sanctus was shortlisted for Alfréd Radok Playwriting Competition Awards 2008, a year later, he won both the 3rd prize and the Prague Radio Award in the same competition for his play A Night of the Wise Men.
Jiří Homola
A NIGHT OF THE WISE MEN
(NOC MOUDRÝCH MUŽŮ)
M 9
As the quite ironical title suggests, the play is set in one night in July 1944 at the transportation department at the concentration camp of Theresienstadt. This is at the time when the trains carrying people to extermination camps in the East were dispatched from there. The smooth running of the operation is ensured by the transportation department under Jewish Self-rule. The play tells the story of seven men looking for a scapegoat. On the eve of dispatching one of the trains, the department’s routine is interrupted by several chance events. A dog wanders into the “office”, a creature absolutely banned in the ghetto and whose presence is quite absurd as the animal should have been eaten long ago. A drunk SS officer wants to solve the situation on the spot. When confronted with violence, the Council of the Wise Men – whose task it is to help to kill fellow human beings by completing the paperwork, albeit with some inner turmoil – decides to take a stand and fights for the dog’s life. But the SS officer has a more entertaining idea: he strikes the dog from the list of those destined for the transportation train and asks the “wise men” for another name, the name of one of them, to replace the dog. Otherwise he threatens to send them all to the extermination camp. The lawyer Stein suggests to choose the victim by using a procedure similar to the court. Each man should charge one of the others designing him for the transportation train; the accused will have the right to come to his own defence. The decision will be made by a secret ballot by the whole committee acting as a jury. For a long time it seems that, for practical reasons, the oldest among them is to be the one to be thus condemned. But the extreme situation reveals not only the men’s baseness and instincts but also the remains of their human dignity, and the tragedy begins to get more and more complicated. Despite the play asking for the all-male cast, the author is not against having women playing some or all of the roles (including that of the dog). “Moreover, women representing male characters could add a certain absurdist, almost tragicomic feeling in which all the monstrous idea of the ‘final solution’ is shrouded making it very difficult to understand for many people up to the current day.”
The play was awarded the 3rd prize and the Prague Radio Award in the Alfréd Radok Playwriting Competition Awards 2009.
HOMO SANCTUS
M 6, F 1
A play in 11 scenes
The story is set in the Pope’s chambers at the St Peter’s Church in Vatican between Spring 1954 and Winter 1955. Both leading characters and the basic events of the play are based in history. Paul Niehans, a Swiss doctor, arrives to Vatican to treat the Pope Pius XII. suffering from heavy gastritis by applying his “live cells therapy”. He finds a man who, besides the physical illness, is plagued by the nightmare visions of the Second World War, returning all the time and exposing the old man’s conscience to heavy ordeal.
Pius’ papacy viewed against the background of the war is a very controversial subject until this day. But the play doesn’t strive to continue the endless polemics about the Pope’s guilt or innocence during this period. It is rather an attempt do de-mystify the Pope himself as a person, to show his human side that cannot be hidden even by the cloak of the Papacy. This contradiction is also part of the play’s title: homo means man, sanctus means saint. It is precisely the Pope as a person who has to deal all the time with this paradoxical confrontation to the extent that logically he can often be seen as a funny figure. We meet an old grumpy man, a fanatic of hygiene affected by the classical symptoms of the old age.