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After an interminable intermission came Dvorak's Quintet for Piano and Strings in A Major, opus 81. Czechoslovakia may be under someone's thumb but Czech music is very much alive. This gorgeous piece was very well played. The cellist distinguished himself with a beautiful, full, resonant opening and the ensemble played with much more rhythmic unity and dynamic cohesion. Walter Trampler was superb throughout the Dvorak. There was an evident feeling for the ebb and flow of the beautiful melodies, lines which sing and soar over the often complex texture of this magnificent quintet. The new quality in their...
...rrenmatt, three Shakespeares, two Sartres, Sophocles' Oedipus, Brecht's Threepenny Opera, Shaw's Pygmalion, a Renaissance knockabout by Niccolò Machiavelli, a late 19th century melodrama by French Primitive Painter Henri Rousseau, works by Wilde, Sheridan and Molière-besides three plays by Czech author Karel Čapek and two carminative political satires by young Czech playwrights...
Even the slightest of the plays were produced with engaging theatricality, as in the swaggering bawdiness of the Drama Club's Mandragora, the Machiavelli farce. Czech acting at its frequent best combines an animal energy with the timing of aerial acrobats. Czechs make superb comedians, and have that highest comic skill-to slip with a flash of the eye into the tragic mask. Czech direction is passionately intelligent. In Architect Josef Svoboda, they have the most imaginative stage designer working anywhere today...
Perhaps the freshest play is Ptakovina, by Milan Kundera, who is one of those fighting to keep the writers' union committed to the liberalization program of 1968. Kundera's novel of Czech Stalinism, The Joke, has the directness of a fist in the face; it has been made into a film shown at Cannes this year. Ptakovina is a made-up word, literally "Birdtrick," meaning stupidity...
Plays like these are indirect in their message because they must be; yet at the same time they make far more vital theater than any straight anti-Communist polemic. In other responses to the Russians and to their native hardliners, Czech directors have repeatedly put on Western plays with themes of conscience and freedom. They have reached back for historical plays that echo themes of patriotism, power and treachery. The most arresting of these is King John, in the recent adaptation by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, which turns Shakespeare's melodrama into a brutal and very moving confrontation...