Leading Creators of Twentieth-Century Czech Theatre. By Jarka M. Burian. London and New York: Routledge, 2002; pp. 225. $95 cloth.

Abstract

When surveying books on Czech theatre on a library shelf, one is likely to be surprised to see how many there are. After all, the Czechs form a small nation—ten million all in all—whose independence, before the vast tides of twentieth-century history swept over it in 1939, lasted no more than two decades. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that for this nation the strong bond between theatre and politics has lasted since the dawn of its literature in the eighteenth century. It seems something of a miracle that by 1920, two years after the creation of an independent Czechoslovakia, its theatre found itself in the mainstream of modern European drama and that it moved, within the next twenty years, into the avant-garde of its contemporaries. Against this briefly sketched background in his introduction, Jarka M. Burian pitches his discussions of the creative artists whose work raised international awareness of their nation's theatre and, above all, that “other,” nonverbal language of the stage: scenography.