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T h e...C I R C L E S...S E L E C T I O N |
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Sterijino Pozorje Festival |
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Novi Sad |
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May 26th - June 5th 2008 |
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TUESDAY - JUNE 3rd 2008 |
Small Stage, Serbian National Theatre |
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21:30 |
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Viliam Klimáček
DR. GUSTÁV HUSÁK
Divadlo Aréna, Bratislava (Slovakia) |
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Director
MARTIN ČIČVÁK
Dramaturge MARTIN KUBRAN
Scenographer TOM CILLER
Costumes
MARIJA HAVRAN
Video PETER KEREKES, MAREK ŠULÍK
Photographs
OLEG VOJTIŠEK
Premiere:
October 16th 2006 |
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C a s t |
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EMIL HORVÁTH |
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JÁN GALLOVIČ |
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MARIÁN PREVENDARČIK |
Slovakian Radio Children's Choir led by |
ADRIÁN KOKOŠ |
Accordeon |
VILIAM MAJER |
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P E R F O R M A N C E...... |
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The play embodies a fascinating confrontation of statements, documents, and first of all, Husák’s dialogues from different historical periods. Based on these documents, the unknown or forgotten facts which had long-lasting effects on life in Slovakia become obvious. The stage magic brings elements of an authentic experience into this dialogue, but also a distance necessary for re-evaluation. Does it seem that the chapter is over? Really? Humanly, politically, historically. No historical chapter is really closed. All events still influence our lives today. It is important to know the motives that drove the people who made decisions about our lives.
On a 1989 December evening, Czechoslovakian national television ran the abdicating speech of President Gustáv Husák. ‘I have believed in the glorious ideals of socialism from an early age. If there were mistakes, they were human mistakes, not the mistakes in the main ideas. I still see no better set of principles, no better orientation in the world. Therefore I am still loyal to them.’
That evening Husák left the scene – as the last of them. Like in that innocent joke from the times of normalization which speaks of how the CSSR solves a possible energy crisis. Well, one by one they all leave (meaning, escape to the West) and the last one will turn off the light.Perhaps he thought something along those lines – I am leaving, the light goes out with me, and you are staying here in the dark and chaos… I am sure that, after all he had done and undertaken on the road to socialism, he finally started despising me and all of us.
Martin KUBRAN |
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S E L E C T O R ' S...R E P O R T...... |
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Concurrently with the 53rd Sterijino Pozorje Festival, in the early days of summer, it will be exactly forty years since the student protests and other turbulent political events that marked the already historical year of 1968. Besides the social turmoil caused by this movement all around the world, as well as in former Yugoslavia, it also had a significant impact on the art of that time, theatre in particular. Some of the most important local Yugoslav reflections of 1968 were recorded, among other places, in Sterijino Pozorje, causing an adequate aesthetical and ideological turbulence. Today, forty years later, the Berlin Wall has fallen, Europe has united, Yugoslavia has disintegrated; in our country the burdensome decade of the civil war is now behind us, and the decade of slow and unfinished democratisation of the society and economic transition is near its end. Our theatre after October 5 is only just timidly starting to grapple with the social and political problems of the post-Milosevic Serbia, and the socialist past of this country is a special kind of taboo: it is being treated superficially only as a dark dictatorship, without a need for critical and dialectical insight and possible recognition of elements of its positive heritage. In such a context, the treatment of the 1968 revisionist or leftist movement is equally inadequate.
The situation is such in our theatre, but not in the European as well: the programme of the Circles is, therefore, dedicated to problematising the leftist legacy of 1986, both on the level of topics and theatrical language. The questions raised by this year’s Circles are: how do we see 1968 today and all that has emerged from it in the political sense? Is a radical political change based on progressive ideas possible today? Is there any aesthetic heritage of that period present in contemporary theatre?
Ivan MEDENICA |
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VILIAM KLIMÁČEK
Born in 1958 in Trenčine, he graduated in general medicine from the Medical School of the University of ‘Komnesky’, working as a surgeon and anesthesiologist for seven years in the Cardiovascular Surgical Clinic in Bratislava. He is one of the founders of the eminent experimental theatres in Slovakia GUnaGu (1985), an independent theatre which stages only new dramas by Slovakian authors and which is accepted by mainly young audiences. Since 1993 Klimaček has been an independent artist, engaged with literature and managing the GUnaGu Theatre. He is the Artistic Director of this theatre, one of its directors and occasionally an actor.
He has authored stage, television, and radio dramas, collections of poems, experimental fairytales, opera librettos and novels. Viliam Klimaček has won seven Alfred Radok Awards (Prague, Best Slovakian and Czech Drama of the year); received a Slovakian Drama Award for Best Dramatic Text in Slovakia twice; his winning pieces have been staged in The Chamber Theatre in Martin and the National Theatre in Prague… His dramas have been translated into English, German, Croatian, Czech, Italian, Turkish and Arabic. |
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A President’s Prisoner – A President of Prisoners
The play under the working title Gustáv Husák is a continuation of the Theatre Aréna’s concept of presenting figures from our history. The first figure, still surrounded with controversy, was Jozef Tiso. The positive reviews and the success of this play confirmed that we were on the right track and that spectators were interested in such a dialogue with history. Gustáv Husák was the last president of Czechoslovakia. His life was full of events which had a significant impact on the development of Czechoslovakia in the past. What made this elegant, intelligent lawyer become the head of the state? Why did such an important figure of the post-war period end up in prison? First of all – who was he? What was hidden behind the unpretentious mask of his face? These are the questions asked by the team behind this play.
Viliam KLIMÁČEK |
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MARTIN ČIČVÁK
After finishing comprehensive high school in Kosice, he went to study Theatre Direction at the Janáček Academy of Fine Arts in Brno. During his studies he was a guest in theatres throughout Slovakia and the Czech Republic (The National Theatre in Kosice, The Theatre of Slovak National Uprising in Martin, The National Theatre in Brno, The Half Past Seven Theatre in Brno).
After he had graduated in 1999, Martin Čičvák became the leading director of the National Theatre on the Brno Mahen Stage (receiving Radak’s Award for the discovery of the year for Berhnard’s Immanuel Kant).
He is the leading director of the Prague Drama Club. He is a regular guest at the Opera of the J.K.Tyl Theatre in Plzen and the Polarka Children and Youth Theatre in Brno. He has directed Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan for the National Theatre in Prague. He has written several plays. His drama The Home Where Everything Is Done Well has been very well-received not only in Brno and Kosice but in Budapest, Novi Sad and the English town of Norwich (he has directed it himself in the London Grace Theatre / Critic’s Choice Award.) He has received the award of critic’s at the Festival in Edinburgh for The Maids by Genet at Dartington College. He works as a lecturer at the Brno based Janáček Academy of Fine Arts. |
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.The
management preserves the right to change
the schedule
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Copyright
: Sterijino pozorje 1998-2008.
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