Topic Archive Culture
Prague Fringe Festival gets underway on Sunday
Prague’s seventh annual Fringe Festival, a marathon of theatre, dance,
comedy, music and film from around the world, gets underway in the Czech
capital on Sunday. Running for eight days, it will offer 227 English, Czech
or non-verbal shows performed by 39 companies. Steven Gove, the man behind
the Prague Fringe Festival, told me what is on offer this year:
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Václav Havel - "Leaving", but also returning
In this week's Arts, a look at the first new play by former Czech president
Václav Havel in twenty years. "Leaving" - about a politician's
painful adjustment to a new life after leaving politics - opened at
Prague's Archa Theatre on May 22nd, marking a return to the stage for Mr
Havel, a world-renowned playwright when he entered politics in 1989.
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Havel’s new play premieres in Prague
Last-minute rehearsals before the long-awaited world premiere of Václav
Havel’s latest play at Prague’s Archa Theatre on Thursday night.
Leaving or Odcházení, is the first play the former Czech president has
written in more than two decades. It tells the story of a high-ranking
politician who leaves his post and sees his world fall apart. The play is
inspired by Shakespeare’s King Lear and Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard and is
about the passage of power from one generation to the next. The former
dissident insists that it is not based on his own experiences, as he
started writing it way back in the 1980s, not knowing at that time that he
would one day become the president of Czechoslovakia, and later the Czech
Republic.
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Jaroslav Marvan: 50 years on stage and screen
Jaroslav Marvan was one of the most prolific Czech actors of all times with
more than 150 film roles and many more theatre acts. He appeared in his
first – silent – movie in 1926, and he made his last film in 1973, a
year before he died. In this edition of Czechs in History we look at the
extraordinary career of Jaroslav Marvan, a theatre and film star before the
war as well as in communist Czechoslovakia.
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Prague’s American Center exhibition shows “Life with the Radar”
The Czech and American governments have reached a deal under which a US
radar base would be based in central Bohemia. With most Czechs opposed to
the project, Prague’s American Center, part of the U.S. Embassy, has
launched a photo exhibition entitled “Life with the Radar”. It
documents life on the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, which hosts
the radar facility that could one day be moved to the Czech Republic. Radio
Prague talked to Miroslav Konvalina, the head of the American Center and a
former Czech Radio correspondent in the United States, who is one of the
authors of the exhibition.
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Hollywood to Czech Republic: “Give us a break!”
In 1996, Mission: Impossible put the Czech Republic on the international
map of film-making locations. It wasn’t just that the city provided a
backdrop to much of the action in the film; it was also the fact that a
major Hollywood production made use of the crew and facilities of the
city’s Barrandov film studios –something that had been done with great
effect in 1984 with Miloš Forman’s Amadeus. In the years that followed,
Prague became an “A-list” location with everything from James Bond to
Oliver Twist coming to the city. But today, a weak dollar and increasing
competition from other European countries is putting Prague’s premium
status at risk and that is what I’ll be exploring in this programme. More
Meda Mládková and her priceless art collection
Meda Mládková is a Czech art collector who spent more than half of her
life in exile, mostly in the United States. In 1968 she established a
collection of Czech art which she brought to the US from behind the Iron
Curtain. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Meda Mládková returned to
Czechoslovakia and donated her entire collection to the country. I met Mrs
Mládková in her museum on Prague’s Kampa Island and started by asking
how she became involved in art collecting in the first place:
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Celebrating the Czech Republic’s vibrant animation tradition at Anifest
Anifest, a weeklong festival dedicated to animated film has fast become a
firm fixture on the Czech cultural calendar since it was established seven
years ago. This year’s event, which was held in the picturesque South
Bohemian town of Třeboň, screened 320 films in various competitive
categories as well as several animated works out of competition from all
over the world.
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Exhibition revives Czechoslovak triumph at Expo 1958
It is exactly 50 years since Czechoslovakia’s great triumph at the world
Expo exhibition in Brussels, at which the country won the best pavilion
award and many Czech and Slovak artists received special prizes. To recall
the Czechoslovak success at Expo 1958, the City Gallery of Prague this week
opened an exhibition entitled “Brussels Dream”. It aims to recreate the
famous Czechoslovak exhibition with authentic objects from Expo 58. It also
reflects the lifestyle of the early 1960s, marked by the rise of popular
culture and affected by the so-called “Brussels style”.
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Prague Spring international music festival gets underway
As every year, on May 12th the sound of Má vlast or My Country by Bedřich
Smetana will launch the Prague Spring international music festival - a
renowned festival of classical music and one of the biggest events of its
kind in Europe, bringing together top orchestras, ensembles and soloists
from around the world. I caught up with the festival’s director Roman
Bělor to ask what is on the menu of Prague Spring’s 63rd year:
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