Having discovered Czech musicians, Polish people discover Czech theatre.
Petr Zelenka is most performed Czech dramatist in Poland at the moment.
Two weeks ago, three posters were hanging side by side in the lobby of the Theatre Ludowy in Cracow. One poster was advertising an older production of Petr Zelenka's
Tales of Common Insanity , just next to a poster for a new production of
The Merchant of Venice directed by Tomáš Svoboda, and to a third one inviting to a concert of
Yozhin from the Bog (
Jožin z bažin ) as performed by Ivan Mládek's Banjo Band. Czech people are in demand in Poland.
"When interviewed for a daily in Cracow, I was asked, do I feel a certain Czech mania doing rounds in Poland. It's not just Mládek. Polish people got rid of some political attitudes they were fed by the Kaczynski brothers and now they are looking around Europe," claims Tomáš Svoboda who just finished directing his second production in Cracow.
Petr Zelenka is a well known trademark, and currently the most performed Czech playwright in Poland. His
Tales of Common Insanity opened here in 2003; since then the play was produced in Warsaw, Gdansk, Poznan, Lodz, Lublin, Jelenia Gora and Cracow - a total of 16 premieres. Last year the prestigious Wspólczesny Theatre staged
Theremin , Zelenka adapted his take on Michal Frayn play, the Czech version being called
The Actors (or earlier
Departures of Trains), for the Wroclaw Theatre under the title Train Timetables.
Zelenka's playwriting career in Poland culminated in collaboration with the famous stage in Cracow, National Old Theatre, who commissioned him to write and direct a play for the ensemble. The result was
Coming Clean , a play about crime and punishment set in a TV reality show environment. As the reviewer from Gazeta Wyborcza Roman Pawlowsky puts it, Poles are mostly amused by Zelenka's humour based on the tradition of Hašek, Hrabal and Menzel: "Both his films and plays describe loneliness and crisis, expressed mostly through the language of tragicomedy softening human drama. Zelenka's Czech nature transcends into universal experience - for many twenty or thirty years olds his work became a generation manifesto. It is because Zelenka touches mostly on the young people's need to live inside a relationship. His heroes don't stop looking for partners, and their despair borders on madness."