| The Playboy of the Western World |
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John Millington Synge Činoherní klub, Praha
Alfréd Radok award 2007
translation: Martin Hilský cast:
Christy Mahon / Jaroslav Plesl
Premiere 10 September 2007 The Playboy of the Western World - With his wild comedy The Playboy of the Western World, J. M. Synge provoked the most notorious riots in the history of Irish theatre. The story of a young man who becomes the hero of a whole village when he boasts that he killed his father, it was considered a slur on the Irish national character. Playboy of the Western World is characterised by contrasts, extremes and reversals. The central conflict of the whole play is the clash between illusions and reality. The title of the play requires a small explanation: the 'western world' is the backward Irish countryside, detached from the more civilisationally-developed parts of Ireland, and the play's hero, Christy Mahon, is a 'playboy' in his imagination at best. Probably the most effective element of the play is its language, a stylised English tinged with Celtic elements which in the mouths of Synge's characters gains an almost poetic quality. Ondřej Sokol (*1971) - Studied acting and direction at DAMU in Prague. From 1996 was a member of the Town Theatre in Mladá Boleslav, after three years moving to the Drama Club theatre, where he createad a number of roles (the Vicomte de Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons, Moulineaux in A Gown For His Mistress, Bece in Portugal etc.) and in 2002 he made his debut there as the director of the The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh. He subsequently directed Sexual Perversity in Chicago, The Pillowman, American Bison and Playboy of the Western World. From time to time he also translates from English. Jitka Sloupová writes of Sokol's directing style: "masterful use of rhythm and space, clear management of the unusually multi-dimensional and temperamental performances, which he gets going and then manages to subdue in time to allow the metaphysical dimension of the play to stand out." Ondřej Sokol has been declared Talent of the Year, and won the Thálie award for artists aged 33 and under. The Drama Club - One of the theatres that created the 'golden era' of Czech theatre in the 1960s. Director and playwright Ladislav Smoček and dramaturg Jaroslav Vostrý were the key figures behind its creation; Smoček's play Picnic was the theatre's first production. They were soon joined by director Jan Kačer, with whom set designer Luboš Hrůza and several excellent actors came from the Petr Bezruč Theatre in Ostrava. The Drama Club became a genuine actors' theatre, or rather a theatre of directed actors, and in its best productions it has stayed that way. The theatre's directors have never sought effects outside the material provided by the actors; their aim was to let the direction melt in the actors' performances. The film directors Jiří Menzel, Evald Schorm and Jiří Krejčík also worked with the Drama Club. Ladislav Smoček still works at the theatre, while Ondřej Sokol and Martin Čičvák are the main representatives of the younger generation. Vladimír Procházka has managed the theatre since 1999. The Drama Club was declared Theatre of the Year in the 2002 Alfréd Radok Awards.
Despite a skin of harsh humour, the Drama Club's latest production goes to the core of existential issues, and takes a disturbing look at subjects such as truth and lies, the bizarre circumstances of sexual attraction and the search for identity.
Good theatre has at least two qualities which can immediately be perceived even by infrequent theatregoers: it is provocatively lively and smells of the present. Sokol's production has both these qualities in spades, so much so that the sceptic begins to ask: How on earth do they do it? Or: Hasn't success come rather easily to them? Could it really just be talent?
Sokol brings poetry and irony to this harsh, tragicomic drama; he gives it an almost mad playfulness with dimensions of ridicule, mystification and farce. He shows it almost as an action comedy, which can be played with in many ways.
The Playboy of the Western World is a production entirely typical of Ondřej Sokol's style - the direction never goes 'against the text,' but it takes the author more literally than is usual. The result is a sharpening of the play into a tragicomedy in which a grotesque fairground jollity goes hand in hand with darker subtones and an unusually strong poetic charge; excellent performances from the whole ensemble are the rule in Sokol's productions. I haven't felt this good in the theatre for a long time.
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