*30. 10. 1955
Real name: Zdeněk Petrželka
From
the end of the 1970s worked with the amateur group Unroadworthy
Caterpillar; was one of the founders of the theatre companies So-So and
Amateur Circle Brno, with which he worked as author and director from
1985 to 1990. Since 1989 has been working in the professional theatre.
From 1993 to 2002 worked closely with the Theatre on the Balustrades in
Prague. Drew attention to himself as a director by his fantasies for
the stage. He received the Alfréd Radok Award for production of the
year 1995 with his production Sister Anxiety (Dejvice Theatre, Prague),
for 1996 with the oratorio for actors Job (HaTheatre, Brno), for 1998
with Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas, which he directed for the
Tyl Theatre in Pilsen, and for 1999 with Thomas Bernhard's Theatremaker
(Theatre on the Balustrade, Prague). As well as his own plays, he is
author of numerous dramatisations, stage adaptations and collections of
poetry. A high level of literary sophistication is characteristic of
his dramatic work. Both in his text and his direction an interest in
detail is apparent, and a musical sense which projects itself into the
melody and rhythmatisation of language.
LIST OF PLAYS (selection):
/ Ananas, medium fox thriller 1959 (A Pineapple), 1986, première 17. 11. 1987 Ochotnický kroužek, Brno
/ Matka (Mother), 1987, première November 1988 Ochotnický kroužek, Brno
/ Park, 1989, première 18. 6. 1992 CED - Divadlo Husa na provázku, Brno
/
Komedie o narození (Nativity Comedy), 1989, première 20. 12. 1989
Státní divadlo Brno - Divadlo Husa na provázku - Dětské studio, Brno
/
Touha stát se indiánem (A desire to become an Indian), 1991, première
11. 2. 1991 Studio Marta - JAMU, Brno (using motifs from Franz Kafka)
/ Tutuguri, 1991, première 20.5.1991 Zemské divadlo and HaDivadlo, Brno
/ Buldočina aneb Nakopnutá kára (Bulldog or Banged-up Banger), 1992, première 18. 11. 1995 Klicperovo divadlo, Hradec Králové
/ Pokojíček (The Girls Room), 1992, première 17. 5. 1993 Divadlo Na zábradlí, Prague
/
Sestra úzkost /Polibky v polích/ (Sister Anxiety), 1995, première 13.
5. 1995 Dejvické divadlo, Prague (using motifs from Jan Čep and Jakub
Deml)
/ Betlém (Betlehem), 1997, première 10.12.1997 Klicperovo divadlo - Beseda, Hradec Králové
TRANSLATED PLAYS:
/ Matka Slovak - Matka, German - Mutter
/ Pokojíček English - The Girls' Room, Russian - Detskaja, Spanish - Camarín
MATKA / MOTHER
A social drama
4 men, 3 women
Mother
is more of a social drama in post-modern quotation marks - the genre is
shifted and ironized with historical hindsight. The configuration is
almost archetypal; the cheerless past of workers´dens meets the
pre-revolution reality of the decaying communist ideology which had
once seemingly offered hope and salvation. Cause meets effect, and
beginning meets end in a vicious circle of social demagogy and abstract
„revolutionary struggle", The bearer of ideas about a brighter future
is the workers´ leader, Zoban. Parasite and soap-box orator, hecomes to
a working-class family when he wants a good meal, supplies Father with
literature and employs Betty the maid as a leaflet distributor. The
Mother sees it as her mission to keep the family „traditions of my old
mother", imposing a strict order over the whole family without
exception - they have to eat together, wear black, and if disobedient
are locked in the cupboard, a family heirloom designated for the
purpose. Zoban causes a revolutionary break in Mother´s „traditions" by
starting to eat before the others, and thus unleashes a series of
peculiar „accidental" deaths. At the end of the play, literally over a
pile of corpses, Zoban and Mother seal a lethal new alliance of
„revolutionary ideas and tradition" with a passionate kiss.
The
play´s strongest dramatic device is its language, which reflects the
mental state of the characters to perfection. A conglomerate of
decaying remnants of dialect, slang and politico-ideological jargon, it
creates unexpected, higly precise and often funny constructions and
associations. Pitínský also uses well-known quotations, ironically
slanted and inserted into altered contexts. However, the play´s cruelty
(many of its ciritics talk of cynicism) and the strange inner
monstrosity of its characters - human mutans - prompt not only nausea
and disgust but also a strange kind of sympathy. These are living
beings, after all, deeply unhappy in their deviance.
Pitínský's
story attracted me by its simple, archetypal look at humanity. When we
are trying to do "good" for ourselves and the others, and the others
don't understand it as we imagined, if they don't accept and submit to
our "good", we stay bitter, offended, vain and in the end aggressive,
although we are dealing with our own blood relatives. After having met
the author reminiscing about the main impulse to write his play, about
his mother making him eat because he might die otherwise, I calmed down
and realised the play has a general message and doesn't need a
political context to survive.
(Juraj Nvota,
director of the Slovak premiere of the play, writing for the programme
brochure of the International Theatre Festival Divadlo 96 in Pilsen.)
POKOJÍČEK / THE GIRLS' ROOM
A short poem about rain
2 women, 3 men
Pitínský's
The Girls' Room is inspired by Kafka's Metamorphosis. However, the
perspective is reversed. The action takes place in a cramped high-rise
flat in front of the little room into which the eldest daughter of the
family, Marie, has locked herself. No-one can enter the room. The
housing-estate family of The Girls' Room is anaesthetised by a banal
apathy, by absurd, almost ritualistic family stereotypes, and memories
which show clear traces of "high-rise living". The pile of corpses
(here all three siblings, Marie, Jifií and Lída) is only the visible
side of a death which is in such conditions latently present the whole
time. What seems irrational in the characters' behaviour is really only
the result of their "fatal" contamination. As in exaggerated symbolism,
the little room in which Marie locks herself is a symbol of protected
territory; emotionally, an area of childhood cleanliness, of quiet,
ordinary happiness threatened by the degenerating surroundings. After
the death of their children the arrogant parents take it over and "make
it comfortable". Marie, isolated in the little room, is the "only one
alive here" as Victor, Lída's suitor, says, intuitively recognising the
rottenness in the family. On giving a verdict over the dying Lída, who
has just killed her sister out of jealousy, he disappears in confusion.
An
almost too eerie concentration on the mysterious circumstances around
the little room and the absent, always expected Marie, gives the action
a tension associated with horror movies. Unlike Godot, Marie really
does arrive in the end.
(Marie Reslová: Co se stalo v Pokojíčku, Svět a divadlo, 1993/4)
/.../
the most important quality of the play: Pitínský's disjointed
linguistic expression, grasping the vagueness of the family's
vegetating, of a way of life whose common denominator is banality as a
total "loss" of meaning, as the slavery of habit, as an internally
anesthetizing factor, murderous only in the second place.
(Zdeněk Hořínek: Redukce a plnost, Literární noviny, 17. 6. 1993)
BULDOČINA ANEB NAKOPNUTÁ KÁRA / BULLDOG OR BANGED-UP BANGER
2 women, 10 men
In
three acts of a marionette spine-chiller, reminiscent of a Baroque play
for puppets with a chivalrous theme, we follow the story of a family in
trade and the peregrinations of the son of the family Emil to Germany
and back in search of work. The family is in renowned for the
production of slate in the region. But it murders its customers and
preserves them in the cellar in tallow. They have amassed a thousand
corpses. The son Emil, a record-maker in the production of slate,
leaves to go dealing in neighbouring Bavaria. When he returns řve years
later to his native Bohemia with his bride Katti, he discovers that the
corpses have begun to bully and terrorise the family. His mother goes
mad from the spectres. Emil can lift the curse from the family as long
as he produces for the spirits of the corpses the slate they ordered.
Emil fulřls the wishes of the corpses. However, Katti leaves him and
his mother dies. Emil kills his father, the origin of all evil, and
dies himself. In the strikingly stylised language of the play Pitínský
mixes dialects from the Chodsko and Hana regions with archaic Czech
from the National Revival and Secession periods.
Linguistic
tangles of dialectical elements, garbled accounts of every kind of
varied phrase and the author's legendary neologisms create an
environment for the no less bizarre story of "slate production" in the
Czech lands.
(Marie Reslová: Jan Antonín Pitínský - Buldočina, Týden, 1. 4. 1996)
Bulldog
spins grotesquely horror-style dreams in which the murderous scenes of
pilgrimage pictures and ironic variations on stories of the National
Revival like the Bagpiper of Strakonice hammer on the gates of the end
of the 20th century.
(Zdeněk A. Tichý: Kamenné loutky kravaty nežádají, Mladá fronta Dnes, 22. 11. 1997)