part. All these questions, and many more, are lying ready to hand for the Czech dramatist as subjects for large treatment and courageous handling, and we may therefore expect to find a special form of the Expressionist drama growing and flourishing side by side with the advance of the new republic.
In our producers and theatrical designers we are fairly fortunate in Prague. At the National Theatre there is Dr K. H. Hilar, Jaroslav Kvapil and Karel Capek at the Vinohrady Theatre, and Jan Bor at the Svandova Intime Theatre.
Dr Hilar is an ambitious producer with one eye on Reinhardt and the other on the limited possibilities of the National Theatre stage. He produced The World We Live In; and I hear he is to produce either Emperor Jones or The Hairy Ape by Eugene O’Neill very soon.
Jaroslav Kvapil, on the other hand, is a Shakespeare specialist. He has been producing Shakespeare for almost a quarter of a century. This season he has given three beautiful productions: Twelfth Night, Cymbeline, and A Midsummer-Night’s Dream.
Jan Bor has the credit of introducing Franz Werfel’s mysterious play, Bocksgesang, to the Czech stage. This play will be seen in New York next season.
We have half-a-dozen competent scenic designers who are kept well occupied owing to the extremely large number of plays which are produced every year, Joseph Capek, Vlastislav Hofman, Bedrich Feurstein, Joseph Wenig, J. M. Gottlieb, and C. O. Jandl. The first three design for all the modern plays, and the latter three for the ordinary type of stage play.
Joseph Capek’s finest achievement this season was his setting for Shelley’s tragedy, The Cenci, which was produced by his brother, Karel Capek. Dark sombre curtains and three blood-red cubed pillars which were used in all the scenes, the Cenci Palace, the Vatican, and the Castle of Petrella, becoming the symbols of the bloody tragedy. The setting for Calderon’s romantic tragedy, Life Is a Dream, designed by Joseph Wenig, was a series of painted arches stretching back into the distance like a tunnel in an underground railway. If I had space I would describe some of the beautiful designs which Hofman is exhibiting at the moment at one of the exhibitions. Hofman is perhaps the most interesting and live artist in this sphere.
