Charles Explorer logo
🇬🇧

Aristophanes Avant-garde and Manifesto of Peace (Czechoslovakia 1923-1934)

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2021

Abstract

During the interwar period the name of Aristophanes was associated with important personalities of Prague contemporary art and literature: the world-renowned writer and for a short period theatre director Karel Čapek and his elder brother - great painter, writer, and scenographer Josef Čapek; Jiří Frejka who applied modern theatrical techniques to the experimental scene of the Dada Theater; new stage designers, representatives of new artistic movements such as Constructivism (the architect and scenographer Antonín Heythum) or Cubism (the architect and scenographer Vlastislav Hofman). In Prague, the comedies of Aristophanes were staged not only in new directional approaches but also in modern translations.

These new translations worked as an unusual artistic asset, while at the same time they offered a rich source of expression for the emerging generation of avant-garde theater. However, later in the difficult years of rising fascism, Aristophanes' theatrical performances became also a form of spiritual and cultural resistance, when they served as an alarming manifestation against fascism and Nazism.

Soon, however, censorship intervened, forbidding many works, including Aristophanes. Last, after these important and innovative performances, Aristophanes has been included in the classical repertoire of many theaters all over the Czech lands so the old attic comedy appears on Czech stages almost every two years.