Julek Neumann
Julek Neumann graduated from the Academy of Performing Arts and worked for some ten years as an actor with Studio Ypsilon. Due to lack of acting opportunities there he took on the role of a director, playwright, play translator and a general stage hand (which came handy when he had to leave Czechoslovakia in 1984). He did motley of jobs in Vienna and Germany, directed, stage managed and acted in Antwerp and Austria, before becoming a radio producer with BBC World Service in 1988. In 2007 he returned to Prague to pursue his former theatre career.
Maureen McManus
Maureen McManus has been living in Prague for three years, and has recently co-written a play with Julek Neumann, called Irish Dancing Among Czechs (in Czech) for Divadlo Cheb, where it is currently playing in repertory. Her previous play, The Ladies Cage was produced at the Finborough Theatre in London (2007), and she has had poetry published in an assortment of UK and Irish poetry magazines, most recently in The Return of the Kral Majales, a Prague Anthology. She is currently working on a new play called Meyrink’s Women, and she is living in Prague.
Julek Neumann, Maureen McManus
IRISH DANCING AROUND CZECHS, or, MAUREEN CANNOT STOP WONDERING
(IRSKÉ TANCE KOLEM ČECHŮ čili MAUREEN SE NESTAČÍ DIVIT)
F 1
The director, actor and play translator Julek Neumann used the observations by his Irish wife to create this one woman show about Czech stereotypes and national character where the dancing is Irish and swearing is in Czech.
Maureen is Irish but she hates Irish dancing and folklore. Her husband, AJ, organized a lecture about Irish dancing in which he is supposed to speak and Maureen to provide the “authentic Irish background”. But AJ is late and Maureen starts the talk herself. And, as AJ doesn’t come, she moves from those things linking Czech and Irish people, via the explanation and presentation of Irish dancing all the way to a bitter self-reflection about both herself and her relationship with the world that surrounds her that morphs into an increasingly violent attack on Czechs and Czech society in general. Her rants start from the small observation of everyday life that she then generalizes to give a not altogether flattering image of Czech national character. The script offers the actress a range of opportunities to play with the audience including the final vote about the future fate of the protagonist.
As twenty years ago, the culture has thrown a life ring into the stormy waters of the mind. A self-doubting citizen with a sore soul finds it, for instance, when he goes to Cheb to see the new original play “Maureen Cannot Stop Wondering” written by the former exile Julek Neumann and his Irish wife. In the play, Maureen rants about the Czechs whose culture she had observed for two years and often is still not able to understand. The Czechs cringe as they become aware of the validity of some of the criticism. And then Maureen reproaches the Czechs: why are they permanently dissatisfied with everything since they are basically well off, and why do they attack themselves and each other in such a nasty way all the time? And that’s when a Czech person starts thinking.
Petra Kosová: Dvacet let po Sametu, Czech Radio Plzeň
http://www.rozhlas.cz/plzen/publicistika/_zprava/653110
http://media.rozhlas.cz/_audio/01029184.mp3