2024-06-27 23:11:52
Poet Ivan Wernisch obtained a powerful current for his 82nd birthday from his buddy, director Jan Nebeský. Final week, the drama of the Prague Nationwide Theater staged a manufacturing aptly named Wernisch, directed by Nebeský, on the New Stage. It’s a tribute, a novel reflection of the writer’s work and a celebration of creativeness and humor.
How to decide on the “proper” texts from greater than three dozen collections of Wernisch’s poetry, written from the start of the Sixties to the current day? How one can get the essence of what characterizes the poet’s elusive, unmistakable persona and wit in an hour and three quarters? Verses that mystify their readers, flying playfully throughout genres and cultures? Phrases that tackle surprising shapes in poems and simply mix Dadaist banter and existential unhappiness?
Dramaturgist Jana Slouková and director Jan Nebeský took on the troublesome job. The place a play is printed in this system, we discover beneath the caption Textual materials for the primary studying take a look at some fifty poems and a fraction of the play that Wernisch initially supposed to write down for this event.
The stage of Wernisch’s world
Every of these texts turns right into a small story on stage – a portray, a sketch, an aphorism, a chanson, a story, a wistful track. Along with the actors, the associatively playful spirit of this manufacturing was imprinted by the unmistakable costumes in coloration and form – objects by Petra Vlachynská and the music by Aleš Březina, brilliantly meandering between genres identical to the poet himself. Typically we hesitate just a little, whether or not some costume creations draw an excessive amount of consideration to themselves, different instances, quite the opposite, it is as if the verses themselves are asking to develop into a track. So naturally they rework into it.
In a collage that discovers the theatricality of poetry and carried by creativeness of all types, Nebeský regularly composes a Wernischian world. Together with his eye-popping, pleasant ironic commentary.
The scene, which the director designed with Vlachynska, is dominated by a white wall with a blue door. They’re too small to stroll upright, and the steps to them appear to “run” just a little too far, however everybody pretends that is the way it’s imagined to be. A freshly dug grave lies within the periwinkle-green garden, and a string of color-changing circus lights line your complete stage. They’re complemented by 4 self-propelled luminous balls that typically go “to test” across the scene.
A large airship hangs over all of this the entire present. It’s the scene of Wernisch’s dramatic fragment A Journey to the Mountains, which on the very starting takes place within the clouds from the smokestack. The item, whose majesty conjures up respect, appears to materialize the human need for flight: “For a second, we in all probability straddled the again of an enormous physique floating within the air,” reads the purpose of one of many poems offered.
However the ladders and the appears of the actors, who every now and then deliver them onto the stage, additionally level upwards. The ladders finally develop into – with an unstated reference to Jacob’s resulting in the Lord – the mediators of 1 ascension.
For now, video games are being performed on the bottom as if from a pimp comedy, accompanied by the obscure, ghostly Kašpárek. Robert Mikluš embodied himself in outsized costumes that grotesquely distort the silhouette of the traditional puppet. The actor was not even within the unique solid, but he’s the clear hero of the manufacturing. Even if the writer says in an interview in this system: “I do not like puppets, I am afraid of them, I do not belief them. And I particularly hate the nasty, sneaky, noisy, malicious bastard Kaspárek.”
Mikluš is strictly like that, as well as, he delightfully enjoys his character in Huron declamation and jazz strumming – and the viewers with him. He’s to be caressed in addition to to be killed, and he can do it too. Overwhelmed with baseball bats, he finally ends up symbolically buried, however instantly returns to the scene in an much more refined kind. An immortal animal, because the embodiment of all types of human mischief.
Robert Mikluš performs Kašpárka in an outsized costume. | Photograph: Martin Špelda
Together with his colleague Filip Kaňkovský, Mikluš additionally has an incredible cabaret – and fairly incorrect – “gypsy” quantity, throughout which his colleagues assist them with refrain and dance and the viewers laughs on the high of their lungs. The dance of the pink inflatable sharks and the whimsical dialog video games of the corporate wearing badminton hats are irresistible.
After which there are locations the place this dreamy, colourful spectacle goes apart and we discover ourselves with an overgrown previous tramp on the outskirts of town, in a backyard, in recollections of previous instances. Love takes on a darkish, melancholic kind, ladies emerge from the work as exemplary prostitutes or fragile saints. Lucie Trmíková and Pavla Beretová alternate each positions in a type of sisterly relationship. The primary attracts consideration with an aesthetic and sharply pointed expressive expression, the second represents a extra emotional, softer and extra lyrical type of femininity.
The reflective verses filled with deep nostalgia, on a regular basis magnificence and tales from the previous days sound like an afterthought. David Prachař and Saša Rašilov shine in these fragile introspections, when the poet lets us contact his physique probably the most.
Regularly, nevertheless, all of the “characters” tackle the type of the writer. The stage world is populated by Wernisch, and they’re all clawing their approach up the ladders. Throughout the theatrical canonization of his buddy, the Celestial One makes his Ten Commandments sound and gently lets him ascend to the best targets with the halo above his head.
Everybody shall be clawing their approach up the ladders. The image reveals David Prachař, Filip Kaňkovský, Pavla Beretová and Lucie Trmíková. | Photograph: Martin Špelda
Like catching fish
Already years in the past, Jan Nebeský mentioned that doing theater is like going fishing. Typically they work, different instances one sits for hours on the shore in useless. The way in which he does theater is a far cry from calculated preparations. He takes uncertainty into play. He doesn’t invent, he lets the manufacturing happen with the boldness that if the proper folks come collectively, open to the textual content and the current second, and everybody does what they’ve, the miracle of the delivery of theater will merely occur. He is doing fairly effectively.
On the premiere of Wernische, the Nové scény auditorium skilled a fascinating competition of creativeness and pure theatrical pleasure, the ovations didn’t finish. The day earlier than on the pre-premiere, few folks within the detached viewers would have wager on the success of this manufacturing.
Theatre
Ivan Wernisch, Jan Nebeský, Jana Slouková: Wernisch
Director: Jan Nebeský
New Stage of the Nationwide Theatre, Prague, premieres on June 13 and 14, subsequent reruns on June 21, 25, 26 and 27.