High Points of Theatre in the First Czechoslovak Republic

Abstract

In the 1960s Czech theatre achieved international recognition through the work of such major artists as directors Otomar Krejca and Alfred Radok, scenographer Josef Svoboda, and playwright Vaclav Havel, to name only those in the vanguard of an extensive artistic movement. Often ignored, however, was the antecedent of that creative surge in the 1960s, the rich period of Czech theatre that dated back to the nineteenth century and reached a first major crest in the 1920S and 1930S as if in response to the creation of the First Republic of Czechoslovakia after World War I. Theatre in the First Republic had great vitality and great variety: the vitality due in large part to the enormous release of spirit accompanying the creation of an independent republic after several centuries of alien citizenship within the Hapsburg Empire; and the variety to Czechoslovakia's central location between east and west, which facilitated its access to the theatrical avant-garde of France, Germany, and the Soviet Union, and to such vital stimuli as American jazz and film.