Žebrácká opera - 2 CD

A play about morality and manipulation. Václav Havel wrote his variation on the theme of John Gay's satirical opera at the invitation of the Činoherní klub. However, when he completed it in 1972, it was clear that the hope of staging The Beggar's Opera in a Prague theater was too illusory. After a gust of freedom in the sixties, the country was entering a period of strict normalization, and presenting the audience with a picture of a society operating on the principle of utter unscrupulousness, where the symbiosis of the police and the underworld creates an opaque system of half-truths, informers, and corruption, was unthinkable not only in Prague but in any Czechoslovak theater. The panicked reaction of the communist regime to the premiere, which was organized for the banned author by director Andrej Krob with his amateur Theater on the Move in a pub in Horní Počernice in 1975, testifies to how eloquently Havel's comedy mirrored the emerging conditions. "It felt a bit ghostly to witness such a brilliant analysis of police informants in the midst of a thoroughly surveilled regime," recalled theater critic and theorist Jindřich Černý, who was in the audience at the time. The StB, which had already missed the performance on the outskirts of Prague, then at least retroactively (and all the more maliciously) punished both the performers and the audience for their participation. To...