MEDIATHEK

"Můj boj - Following "The Cannibals", which featured at the festival two years ago in a co-production by the "Prague Chamber Theatre" and "Ústí nad Labem Theatre Studio", we present another of Georg Tabori's plays reflecting on the Holocuast and the events running up to it. The young Hitler's life with his Jewish roommate in a Vienna hostel is depicted as a grotesquely chilling parable. In an essay on Tabori's "The Black Mass", the play's translator Josef Balvín says:

(...) Another of Tabori's unique qualities is his ability to view even the most horrific things in a grotesque light and to overcome even the greatest pain with humour. "No one except Tabori could get away with portraying the mass murder committed by the Fascists as an evil grotesque," says Wend Kässens in his aptly entitled essay "To see what we do not want to see." Tabori's humour, which is probably without parallel in the world of theatre, combines humour, pain, absurdity and disaster in unprecedented fashion. About his father, who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1994 [sic!], Tabori managed to write: "As he entered the gas chamber they didn't quite catch him saying: 'After you, Mr Mandelbaum...'".

In an ironic disputation permeated with Jewish wisdom, which is simultaneously confronted with the seeds of facism growing out of prejudices and complexes, the lean and lanky Jan Jájek performs the dialectical Šlom with great empathy, as is this young protagonist contained the entire sorrowful history of the Jewish nation and the tragicomic pilosophising stemming from it. He clearly accentuated all Tabori's witticisms. Gentle yet unyielding, he looks after Adolf like an older brother, even though he senses what kind of monster might grow from this accidental "friend"."
(by Jan Kerbr, World and Theatre)

"Polák's Hitler is an uncouth clown, a bizarre creature lacking scruples and irony. His plays on words ("I cannot bear having my ear lodes nibbled") are not playful, but inadvertent. His earnest desire to be serious makes him ridiculous. Vladimír Polák has the Führer's gestures down to a tee, but he is not in the business of surface imitation. His is a traicomic study of the birth of a leader from a neurotic outsider who simplified the world once and for all into a few primitive, universally comprehensible formulae. By way of an aside, Polák in one of his virtuoso tirades theatrically quotes Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" (playing with a globe as if it were a balloon) - and he has every right to do so: it is no exaggeration to say that his performance matches up to Chaplin's."
(by Vladimír Just, Theatre News)

Powered by Froala Editor

13th International Festival Theatre Pilsen Booklet (Printed Edition)