complicated adjustment of our theatre. A survey of our actors (in whose ranks a painful gap has been made by the death of the great mime, Eduard Vojan); a review of our leading stage directors; an examination of the prospective foreign plays in the newly announced repertoires—all this should provide further testimony for our basic assertion that there is a brisk interaction between the domestic and the foreign.
In our foreign repertoire during the last season (to speak at present only of Anglo-Saxon literature) we have gone back to Marlowe’s Edward II, and attempted to recover Shelly’s Cenci; now Beaumont and Fletcher (Wit Without Money) and Byron (on the occasion of his centennial) are to be produced—not to mention the achievements of contemporary England and America, among which we expect much of O’Neill’s first appearance here (Emperor Jones or The Hairy Ape). Incidentally, Mr C. E. Bechhofer, who introduced the American dramatist in England, is also well acquainted with the Czech theatre. But the extent and the height of the aspirations of the local stage are best indicated by the manner in which the Czech theatres cling to Shakespeare, who always remains with us the most popular dramatist, and is part of the steady repertoire not only of the leading stages, but also of the smaller ones. Jaroslav Kvapil still is the most convincing interpreter of Shakespeare. In the year 1916 he undertook a vast Shakespeare cycle, which he is now supplementing by the production of several rarely-played pieces. In addition to Cymbeline, he has had an especially remarkable success with Troilus and Cressida. Also, he is preparing for a kind of revival of his former Shakespeare productions. A pupil and successor of the Munich Künstlertheater, allied with the dramaturgy of Eugen Kilian and the stage-directing of Reinhardt, Kvapil has his artistic counterpart in Karel H. Hilar who, previously connected with Jessner in Berlin, has also attempted in staging Shakespeare to apply the principles of expressionistic stagecraft, and in this way has presented Coriolanus and The Tempest, and recently also As You Like It, although without taking the position of his “senior’’ rival. The rivalry of these two stage-directors displays a good part of Prague’s theatrical life: Kvapil’s tasteful harmony in lights, lines, and tones—Hilar’s self-willed storming and stressing; Kvapil’s finely shaded lyricism—Hilar’s dynamic theatrics which calls for works by Grabbe or Hebbel, but also knows
