Smoljak Ladislav

Czech film and theatre director, actor and scriptwriter. He applied to study at an art academy but failed the admission process. He went on to study physics and mathematics, and later worked as journalist and scriptwriter. Together with Zdeněk Svěrák he founded the Theatre of Jára Cimrman (Divadlo Járy Cimrmana in Prague), named after fictitious genius. Smoljak wrote scripts for and directed several films; these became very successful among the Czech public. In the 1990s, he wrote on his own two plays for other theatres in Prague - The Anthem (Hymna), A Small October (Malý Říjen), Jan Huss: Alia minora.

 

 

LIST OF PLAYS (selection)

/ Akt (The Nude), with Zdeněk Svěrák, 1967 première 4.10.1967, Divadlo Járy Cimrmana (JCD)

/ Vražda v salonním coupé (A Murder in the Saloon Compartment), with Zdeněk Svěrák, 1970, première 14.5.1970, JCD

/ Posel z Liptákova (A Messenger from Liptákov), with Zdeněk Svěrák, 1977 première 20.4.1977, JCD

/ Lijavec (The Cloudburst), with Zdeněk Svěrák, 1982 première 22.1.1982, JCD

/ Dobytí severního pólu (The Conquest of the North Pole), with Zdeněk Svěrák, 1985, première 25.10.1985, JCD

/ Záskok (The Stand-in), with Zdeněk Svěrák, 1994, première 4.10.1994, JCD

/ Švestka (A Prune Tree), with Zdeněk Svěrák, 1997, première 12.11.1997, JCD

/ Hymna aneb Urfidlovačka (The Anthem), 1998, première 27.3.1998, Studio Jára, Prague

/ Malý říjen (A Small October), 1999, première 15.4.1999, Divadlo Na zábradlí, Prague

/ Afrika (Africa), with Zdeněk Svěrák, 2002, première 5.10.2002, JCD

/ Hus: Alia minora Kostnického koncilu, première 26.11.2009, Divadlo Na zábradlí, Prague

 

TRANSLATED PLAYS:

Dobytí severního pólu: English - The Conquest of the North Pole (in progress), Polish - Zdobycie bieguna północnego przez Czecha Karola Niemca

Dlouhý, Široký a Krátkozraký: Polish - Długi, Szeroki i Krótkowzroczny
Posel s Liptakova: Polish - Ogniwa I i II
Vyšetřování ztráty třídní knihy: Polish - Dziennik lekcyjny
Akt: Polish - Akt
Němý Bobeš: Polish - Bobek niemowa czyli czeski Tarzan

Vražda v salonním coupé: German - Mord im Salonsoupé

Záskok: Bulgarian - Zamestvaneto

Malý říjen: Hungarian - Kis Oktober

 

Jára Cimrman - Ladislav Smoljak - Zdeněk Svěrák

THE CONQUEST OF THE NORTH POLE

(DOBYTÍ SEVERNÍHO PÓLU ČECHEM KARLEM NĚMCEM)

5 men

According to the authors, Mr Cimrman was commissioned by a Prague restaurant to create a tableau vivant representing the conquest of the North Pole. According to the customary opening lecture, the Czech genius undertook the task with his usual responsibility and travelled to the North Pole himself. There he found the Arctic Yeti and was the first to find out it is an autogamous being. He also allegedly wrote another play, A Torn Child, that gets its own lecture. There is a third lecture before the play itself starts, dedicated to the genre of living tableaux and allegorical pageants, as - the authors say - Mr Cimrman was a brilliant artist in this discipline, having created a famous trilogy of Czech history battle scenes called Our famous defeats.

The play itself begins when Prague North Pole expedition leaves civilisation in 1909 and gets on its way to the Pole, led by the Sokol chief Karel Němec. They travel on skis with no dogs (the sledge is being drawn by the famous strongman Frištenský. The story is told as seen by Assistant Instructor Foustka. The next tableau finds the expedition on an ice floe drifting towards the North. They fight melancholy caused by the slow progress by learning a patriotic song praising Czech ability to adapt. Nevertheless, soon they are plagued by hunger; the expedition decides it is necessary to slaughter and eat the dogs - it's just the strongman Frištenský who cannot understand he himself is considered the dog by the others. Before the slaughter, the Czechs organize a farewell to their comrade with many patriotic funeral speeches. They are then touched by their own sensibility and decide it would be more humane to let Frištenský freeze to death. It's by chance they find an alternative: they find frozen members of a previous American expedition led by professor Macdonald and take them along to make them conquer the pole posthumously. When there, the expedition members find they forgot to double the amount of necessary food while planning and there is nothing to eat for the journey back. As they re-assess the value of dead American bodies, a polar explorer of Czech origin returns unexpectedly to life while defrosting to tell them professor Macdonald was researching effects of hibernation.

In the epilogue, the audience finds out that Mr Němec expedition never claimed its success being the first to conquer the pole as it did not want the claim to go to Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Jára Cimrman - Ladislav Smoljak - Zdeněk Svěrák

STAND IN (ZÁSKOK)

6 men

Cimrman's play about the unlucky opening of Vlasta

The lecture this time concerns Cimrman's work as a dramaturge, consisting in reducing number of characters in world drama for his six strong amateur theatre company. He would cut the number of sisters in the famous Chekhov play to one and produced Hamlet without Hamlet. Having to solve a power failure during a performance led Cimrman to establish a basis for radio drama genre (the first text to be produced would be called Pitch Dark, and is performed during the show). The uniqueness of Cimrman's approach in the context of the dramatic writing of his time is then illustrated using "correspondence" between him and the famous playwright and National Theatre dramaturge Ladislav Stroupežnický.

The play Stand In itself tells a story of one performance by a strolling theatre company. One of the actors run away and is being replaced by a famous stand in actor Karel Infeld Prácheňský who offers to play for the whole of that evening box office receipt. The conflict between cynical approach of a famous lovey and the enthusiasm of the improvising troupe during both rehearsals and the performance leads to a chain of slapstick situations. This is probably the most sophisticated of all the Cimrman plays; it is a regular comedy commenting on the declining theatre profession.

 

(...) we follow the destruction of a work of genius by a real master, caused by a total incompetence of the guest actor who, although performing in Pilsen with the famous Vendelín Budil Company, is unable to keep in mind the two commands from Cimrman's Decalogue. They are number two - "Remember, onstage you are usually called a different name from your own. It's also useful to know the names of the other characters!" - and five - "Do not repeat everything after the prompter. Some of the lines go to your colleagues!" (...) Ladislav Smoljak´s directing gives a gentle and reliable impetus to the pataphysical machinery of Cimrman production - every embarrassing moment is where it should be.

(Eva Stehlíková, Svět a divadlo 2/94)

The main realm for Mr Smoljak and Mr Svěrák is the word. They absorbed creatively routine stereotypes of various language areas (teaching, sciences, politics, psychology, philosophy, radio and/or TV current affairs and education). They made their own the basic templates of literary and theatrical genres (detective story, fairy tale, opera, operetta) and they make fun of their standard logics. They don't perform as consequent a decomposition of well-known, tiring idioms as, for instance Václav Havel. Their artistic ambition is different. The rich and structured literary humour is as if permeated by the ontogenesis of a Czech sceptical intellectual. (...) The plays' content does not avoid infantile and pubescent themes (...) moving via public education and naive mock science to "pure" philosophy. Jára Cimrman, as a prototype of a distracted mad and comical (and also very improbable) polymath character, could be linked to a certain nation-wide self-flagellation. But a kind detachment makes the theme of great men in history satisfyingly wise.

Jan Kerbr, Svět a divadlo 2/1994

 

Ladislav Smoljak

A SMALL OCTOBER (MALÝ ŘÍJEN)

7 men, 1 women

In this play, the author uses method of mystification he helped to create in the Theatre Jára Cimrman to present real world-shattering historical events. In the play, set in a prison cell in Austro-Hungarian Empire during the World War I, prisoner Babinský (a historical character, a common criminal) meets rebellious Czech politicians Kramář and Švehla, the well-known spy Mata-Hari, Lenin and his wife Nadezhda Krupska and a Slovak called Juraj Slovák. Babinský is serving his long term prison sentence for several murders for many years already. Mata-Hari the spy is an impish, unceremonious dancer who discovers and reveals top secret information as if in passing. She represents the only really erotic element in the play.

The cell is being used as a transfer station by Lenin and Krupska on their way from Switzerland. Lenin is presented as a demagogue ready to sacrifice millions of people to the idea of revolution. Nadezhda Krupska is his uncritical admirer; her mask is that of a man with a big bosom.

The two Democrats, Kramář and Švehla, criticize Lenin for preparing a bloody revolution. They secretly try to convince Babinský to kill him. Nevertheless, the latter soon confesses to having been asked by Lenin to kill both Czech politicians. Lenin and Krupska then leave the prison to go to Russia to carry out their revolution. Kramář and Rašín are granted amnesty.

In the last scene, set ten years later, Babinský is alone in his prison cell. He gets a visit from Kramář who by then is a well- known politician (he was the first Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia). Kramář tells Babinský the follow-up stories about the characters from the play: some of them are already dead under different circumstances. Then Kramář comments sceptically on the creation of the nation state of Czechoslovakia. There is a sort of a happy ending to the play: Babinský becomes a gardener in the women's prison where he is helped by Nadezhda Krupska, in hiding there from Soviet persecution.

 

Smoljak mixes history and documents with free fantasy into a bravura cocktail of paradoxical situations. But it's not a drink made up just to amuse the audience. I think the most valuable thing about his play (and its production) is precisely ambiguity of meaning of the text. Under the surface mask of witty lines, a more perceptive audience will find not only a bitter truth about the unchanging opportunism of Czech politics but also millions of bodies both of those who died unnecessarily in the battles of the World War I and of the future victims of the "permanent revolution" as promoted by Lenin and Krupska.

Radmila Hrdinová: Smutně veselá vězeňská féerie, Právo, 23.4.1999