2024-05-20 18:41:37
Within the fall of 2022 on the newest, when author Kateřina Tučková’s bestselling novel Bílá Voda unexpectedly received the State Prize for Literature, it was solely a matter of time earlier than this story of hers additionally reached the stage. In the long run, it occurred twice. After the Municipal Theater in Brno, Bíla Voda is offered by the Nationwide Theater in Prague.
A powerful theme that has thus far been uncared for by home literature, a rigorous search of archival supplies and heroines, whose frequent genetic kinship predetermines the intertwining temporal layers of the narrative, are the cornerstones of all three of Tučková’s novels up to now. By way of its feminine protagonists, it reveals the Czech historical past of the twentieth century, particularly the state of affairs instantly after the Second World Struggle.
In Gerta Schnirch’s debut Expulsion from 2009, she centered on the displacement of Brno’s Germans, the following Žítkov Goddesses approached the fates of girls from Moravian Kopanice endowed with distinctive skills who handed their artwork from technology to technology.
Bílá Voda relies on the so-called Motion Ř, when the communists liquidated girls’s spiritual orders within the early Fifties and dragged their members off to accumulating monasteries. As in earlier books, the creator additionally opens up the query of the unequal standing of girls, right here particularly within the Catholic Church. The practically 700-page textual content, divided into small sections, weaves collectively the story of a number of members of the fictional order of the Virgins of St. Anne, interned within the Bélovodsk monastery within the northernmost tip of Czech Silesia, surrounded by the Czech-Polish border. On the identical time, Tučková’s authorial technique just isn’t fascinating language, however thriller, which she achieves by way of a mix of storylines and alternative ways of telling tales.
In Bílá Voda, a diary seems that one of many nuns, Tobie, had stored since getting into the order in 1950. Greater than half a century later, former journalist Lena Lagnerová finds it when she is on the lookout for momentary asylum in a half-demolished monastery. These two traces permeate different paperwork found by Lena, resembling correspondence between clergymen or the jail file of the central character, the nun Evarista.
Nevertheless, Bílá Voda accommodates the least direct speech of all three Tučk novels. When the Slovak playwright Daniel Majling tailored it for the Nationwide Theater in Prague, he was conscious of this restrict. He resigned himself to a literal translation and utterly omitted the narrator Lena. As a substitute, it chronologically follows the compelled eviction of the nuns from the motherhouse to Bílá Vody and their life there, or the plot twists associated to the 2 foremost characters: nuns Evarista, performed by Jana Pidrmanová, and Tobia, performed by Veronika Lazorčáková. One involuntarily broke her vow of chastity and was uncovered to a communist camp, the opposite misplaced her left arm throughout compelled labor in a manufacturing unit.
Within the foreground is Veronika Lazorčáková as Tobie. | Picture: Petr Neubert
By this purposeful simplification, the creator of the dramatization prevented the confusion that might have been brought on by fixed leaping in time on stage, however on the identical time disadvantaged himself of the fundamental precept of the work – the gradual revelation of the story, to not point out the multi-layeredness of the developed motives.
For instance, motherhood was linked within the novel not solely with Evarista, but in addition with different girls: the narrator Lena and the younger Polish lady Agnieszka, who’s hiding from her household within the convent. And every time the motif took on a unique kind.
Majling’s adaptation preserves a roughly trivial, schematic story of struggling girls. In comparison with the novel, he doesn’t help their woes with explicitly depicted brutality, however with respectable hints aspiring to low-cost emotion. Tobie actually loses her hand, however the reason being obscured by the assertion that Jesus Christ symbolically requested her for it, to whom she promised herself. Within the novel, the damage had a concrete consequence: with one hand, the nurse within the labor camp couldn’t discover correct employment, so she started to maintain information of the monastery and create its written reminiscence.
The 2 nuns who come out the worst from the dramatization are exactly those that endure from a thesis, even a sort of literary deadness. Quite the opposite, Majling may afford extra freedom with the characters which might be extra loosely associated to the story, and so he created full-fledged dramatic figures out of them. One such individual is the clerk Burdová, a Slovakian lady who’s talked about solely obliquely within the novel and checks the work morale of the nurses in Bílá Voda. Within the dramatization, a residing determine with an arc and psychological nuances, which the good actress Magdaléna Borová endowed with humor and excellent Slovak.
It’s troublesome to maneuver with the fabric specified by this manner, and on the large stage of the Stavovský Theater, the place Bíla Voda is performed. Director Michal Vajdička and dramaturg Ilona Smejkalova do not even strive. They observe the sample picture by picture. They take care of some in a significant means, for instance after they play an absurd dialog in regards to the cremation of the just lately discovered stays of St. Agnes within the crematorium or the disguise scene with the bishop of the key underground church, Daniel Felix, performed by the nonetheless important František Němec.
Different scenes reverently illustrate the template – the preliminary hasty acceptance of the novices into the order and their subsequent eviction, or Evarista’s mystical rescue, when the sister in corrections hovers over a fellow inmate who needs to take her life.
Literalism additionally prevails in inventive illustration. Along with costumes and black spiritual robes, the post-war period is represented by a pair of overused automobiles – a Tatra automotive transporting staff or nuns and a consultant Volga pushed by the get together institution.
The fixed motion of automobiles across the scene appears to dynamize the in any other case drawn-out plot. The leaves that fall from the ropes on a regular basis have an analogous perform. Not solely does it make it troublesome for viewers unfamiliar with the paintings to orientate themselves in time, because it creates the impression of a sort of timelessness, however as an efficient picture along with the music of the parameters of a Hollywood blockbuster and the smoke, it solely assaults the feelings.
Bílá Voda within the Nationwide Theater gives nothing however painless emotion. It won’t result in a deeper understanding, not to mention experiencing a critical matter.
Theatre
Kateřina Tučková: White Water
Dramatization: Daniel Majling
Director: Michal Vajdička
Stavovské divadlo, Prague, premiere on Could 9, subsequent reruns on Could 22, 23 and 24.