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August 29th, 2008
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Lost in translation

Another uneven year for the Bard at the castle
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
July 23rd, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Soňa Norisová, left, and an alternate Celia, Danica Jurčová, in a middling production of As You Like It.
As You Like It


(Jak se vám líbí)
When: July 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29 and 30 at 8:30
Where: Burgrave's Courtyard, Prague Castle
Tickets: 280-790 Kč, available through Ticketportal and at the venue
Performed in Czech
For complete schedule information, check www.shakespeare.cz
The annual Summer Shakespeare Festival, which takes place at Prague Castle and other selected spots around the city and country, is an uneven celebration at best. Among some Czech theatergoers it’s considered a bit of a joke, apparently, though the productions are nonetheless well-attended. Still, there is most certainly a lack of quality control. How else to explain the exuberantly bad Comedy of Errors now disgracing the stage at the Luxembourg Palace (the subject of a future review in these pages)?
The festival is made up of both new and older productions, some of the latter resurrected undoubtedly for financial reasons rather than by popular or critical demand. This year features the 3-year-old corked-up Othello by director Petr Kracik, although without the excellent Oldřich Navrátil, whose Iago was not only formidable but the sole reason for seeking out this production. Director Jakub Korčák’s fine production of The Tempest has also returned, complete with Jan Tříska’s impressive and memorable Caliban.
As You Like It is also a return engagement, and includes much of the original cast (for both good and ill) from last year’s premiere. Also, Emil Horváth’s production manages to encapsulate both the strengths and weaknesses endemic to the Shakespeare Festival. There are some strong interpretations of the Bard’s pastoral characters to be found within a conceptionally weak staging. Half the actors are committed to delving deep within their roles, while the other half dully strut and fret their hour upon the summer stock stage.
As You Like It contains many of Shakespeare’s favorite tropes and devices, including gender reversal. Two banished court women, Rosalind and Celia, head off into the Forest of Arden with an accompanying clown, Touchstone (or “Brousek” in the Czech translation, meaning “whetstone,” which isn’t a perfect translation). Rosalind, disguised as a man, collides with the man she loves, Orlando, who has also run from the court, and who does not recognize his love as a man (bear in mind the meta-theatrical layers in Elizabethan productions, where young men played the female parts, making Rosalind a man playing a woman impersonating a man).
The very palace intrigue that has forced them into the forest will follow them, but the world will be made right eventually, and amity (if not amorousness) will reign.
In an attempt to set a festal tone, Horváth opens his production with some effortful clogging from the secondary players, Morris exertions that one can usually find for free at a village fete. But the early work of the leads gives promise. Ladislav Hampl’s Orlando is, perhaps, a bit too blustering at the top, but he quickly settles into a fine romantic lead. The cousins Rosalind and Celia are taken on by the Norisová sisters, Soňa and Zuzana, and both women turn in good work. Soňa’s Rosalind manages to strike the proper balance between a gentle, witty woman and the brash man she must become to survive in the woods. Zuzana’s Celia is a perfect comic foil for her sister, finding her character’s impetuosity and also the wilder humor of the two women.
Veteran actor Marián Labuda takes double duty as the two feuding royal brothers, Duke Senior and Duke Frederick, and does a masterful job of moving between the two. There is less success with Miroslav Noga’s Touchstone, however, and the actor has not been helped by being made up like an escapee from a children’s deck of cards. Noga’s performance can only be described as antic-ridden, reminding one of how much Tolstoy hated the character’s incessant comedy and jokes, much of which even fails when being translated from Elizabethan to Modern English.
With all of the customary requirements for an amateur performance met, Martin Dejdar’s Jacques is this production’s greatest flaw. Dejdar wanders the stage continually draining a prop liquor bottle that’s obviously dry (nor does he know how to mime swallowing). But crucially, neither he nor his director seems to understand the character’s philosophical melancholia (however feigned it is), mistaking it for a self-regarding nonchalance, which goes far in wrecking the entire “Seven Ages of Man” monologue.
Soňa Norisová’s re-entrance into Arden as a woman, however, makes up for deficiencies elsewhere, and she handles Martin Hilský’s translation of Shakespeare’s epilogue not “unhandsomely.” Such odd moments such as this make the festival worth a go.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (23/07/2008):

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