The word “expat” cannot be translated into Czech. An exile and an expat are two very different things. To be an exile means having your life tied up into a difficult little bundle. An expat, on the other hand, can do fun stuff – like theatre, for instance.
“I originally wanted to go to Russia,” says Brian Caspe, founder and artistic director of the The Prague Playhouse, at the moment the most active group of English-speaking theatre actors in Prague. “But then it began to seem to far and I was afraid of the cold.” That was an important deciding factor for someone used to the climate of Los Angeles. Part of the reason why Brian in the end chose Prague was that an agent offered him work here. Brian is an actor and he was able to make a living through acting in Prague for six years. But now he has had to find another day job.
“In L.A. there is incredible competition, but here there weren’t that many English-speaking actors. A lot of films and commercials were being shot here, but that has changed now. Filmmakers have left for places where they have better conditions.” Besides acting and directing, Brian also teaches acting classes. And in the last three years, he has been involved in another activity, which could have an interesting future: The Prague Playwriting Contest.
A businessman at the cottage
Besides the Prague Playhouse, the Prague Post is also behind the birth of this competition. The Prague Post became in 1991 when it was established the most important communication platform for English speakers in Prague. It remains that to this day although the number of expats living in Prague is now smaller. Prague is certainly no longer “the Paris of the 90s”.
What are the rules of the competition? The contest calls for a 30-minute play in English written by someone who doesn’t need to live in the Czech Republic but has to have lived there at some point in his life. The contest is unique mainly because the winner is not selected based just on the script. Three plays that make it to the final round are rehearsed over the course of four evenings and performed for an audience at Prague’s Divadlo Minor. The audience then has an opportunity to vote for their favourite play. It is the panel of judges, however, that decides who gets the CZK 20,000 prize. But the decision is only made after the judges evaluate how well the play works on the stage.
A week remains before the 21 February premiere. Gordon Truefitt has just arrived to the rehearsal straight from the hospital where his son was born several hours earlier. But it changes nothing about his passion for the play being rehearsed. In the space of the headquarters of the Society of Friends of the USA at Na Poříčí he is directing one of the tree nominated plays. They are running through the entire play for the first time, and when they finish Gordon is pleased. The play has energy.
The stage set is improvised from several chairs and a table. A suspenseful drama involving a businessman and his Czech wife is unrolling, revealing a clash between a “western” and an “eastern” way of life.
Theatre calls for exaggeration, so in the play Early Retirement, egotism and greed are punished in a rather romantic way. The author of the play is David Fisher who moved here shortly after the Velvet Revolution and founded The Bear Educational Theatre here. The idea to teach English through theatre has since spread to Hungary, Austria, Slovakia and France.
If this scene is to last it must become part of regular theatre offerings. Every actor has come to today’s rehearsal from somewhere else. Gerald Turner, a Brit, is a translator who in the 1980s worked with the documentation centre for Czechoslovak literature in Germany and has translated the works of Ivan Klíma and Ludvík Vaculík. “When you are translating literature, you are basically also acting,” he explains. Gordon, the director, came here from London at the end of the 1990s, but he was not involved in threatre at the time. He had abandoned his (mostly television) acting career and turned to theology. He visited Prague as an exchange student and ended up staying. He got married and returned to acting, although he is not able to make a living out of it.
Stories involving Czech wives are common among males in the local expat community. The character of a Czech (or Slovak) wife or girlfriend appears in many of the competing plays. In Fisher’s play, she takes on the form of Zuzka, a delicate, devoted “care-giver”, played by Veronika Bellová, a Czech who has lived in the United States and now in Prague feels to be part of the English-language community: “I am extending my ties to the English-language culture.” She is about as serious about theatre as her stage husband, Kevin Clarke. He makes a living as a programmer but on set, between the table and chairs, he has just demonstrated a truly unnerving scale of all sorts of bad habits of a London businessman.
Violence and unexpected plot twists
Dale Bruton, the author of the second play in the trio of finalists, says he is an anglophobe who likes punk and horror films. His Forced Entry is a dark play about two house thieves and one beautiful woman. There are many twists and turns in the plot of the play before the denouement: The aggressor becomes the victim and vice versa. The space where director Todd Kramer and the actors are rehearsing this one-act play also has a touch of punk and horror about it. A vegetable vendor has rented the passageway of a building and you must pass between boxes to the back of building’s small courtyard, then go up one flight of stairs and walk along a terrace and then down a flight of steps to another courtyard where, surrounded by a labyrinth of old apartment buildings stands a former transformer station. This has been turned into a rehearsal space. The transformation was carried out by the theatre group Misery Loves Company, but apparently it is used by all sorts of people.
The space cannot be heated, so actors rehearse in coats and hats. The beautiful – and as it eventually turns out also dangerous landlady – has just surprised a thief with a revolver. Vendula Manfredi is Czech, but she has lived abroad for a long time and worked as a model. She studied acting with Brian Caspe. So has Jim High, who plays one of the thieves. “I got to know the Prague acting community through the acting classes,” says the actor from London. “It was so inspiring for me that I decided to stay.”
The other thief is played by Logan Hillier. Besides acting in all sorts of productions, he teaches drama, music and dance at a high school in Vysočany. Todd Kramer, an actor and director, came to Prague from Los Angeles like Brian. He has been here for eight years and in the beginning had more work than he did in the United States. “Big fish in a small pond. You know how it is.”
A suicide from New York
The group of actors being directed by Melanie Rada are rehearsing at the Prague Film School. In the attic of a building on Pštrossova street, the actors are doing the first run-through of the third of the finalist plays. Things are complicated by the fact that all those present find themselves in various stages of the flu. The King Size is the most chilling of the three plays. The protagonist is a young New Yorker who has come to Prague to hide from his family in order to – again and again – attempt to commit suicide.
The play stars David Fellowes, a Brit, and Mick Swiney and Jeff Fritz, both Americans. All three are professional actors and have been living in Prague for quite a while. They say that the longer they live here, the more interesting the city seems. Another member of the cast is Melanie, who is half French-Canadian and half Czech, and who moved to Prague four years ago. She teaches at the English International School Prague and creates lighting arrangements for various Prague theatres. Besides that, she also directs and together with Jeff she has founded the theatre group Akanda.
It is basically the same story over and over: 100% commitment, enthusiasm and often acting at a professional level. Besides that most of the actors have day jobs. Theatre for these expats is a calling, as part of their social life. But the future might lie in the opposite direction, that is to say, breaking the boundaries and working with the locals. In order for English-language theatre to remain vital and to evolve, it must become part of the regular theatre programmes and also try to attract Czech audiences. Hamburg, Frankfurt, and, of course, Berlin and Amsterdam have permanent English-language theatre. Why couldn’t it exist in Prague? Why can’t the Prague Playhouse move from the internet to an actual permanent setting?
“I am an optimist,” says Melanie. “The quality of English-language threatre is increasing and I think it’s really starting to interest Czech audiences. It is moving in the right direction.” The Prague Playwriting Contest serves as proof for that. The final stage of the competition will take place in several days and the third rehearsal of the play is just starting. Anna Lit, a 17-year-old Czech-American, who plays the Slovak girlfriend of the protagonist enters the scene – wearing pink boxer shorts.
The three nominated plays will be played 25 February and 1 and 4 March at Divadlo Minor.
