The Contemporary Play

Gustave Akakpo: Habbat Alep

Translated by Matylda and Michal Lázňovský
The seventh volume of French-language African drama published in The Contemporary Play series. This play by a Togolese playwright tells the story of a writer returning home to his native country in search of an ancient language, his own roots, and for the best place to build an entertainment park. His relatives try to get him to marry his cousin, who is expecting a child but has no father for it. As the writer travels through his country, which is less a home and more a foreign place to him, we are confronted with the comical and absurd and even the tragic aspects of the contemporary world.
Price 80 Czk / 38 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-192-9

Léandr-Alain Baker: Les jours se trainent, les nuits aussi...

Translated by Matylda and Michal Lázňovský
This is the fifth volume of French-language African drama published in The Contemporary Play series. The play by the Congolese writer Léandr-Alain Baker Les jours se trainent, les nuits aussi... is one of the ‘classic’ titles in the new wave of African-French writers. An intimate drama for three people, the play is about the intrusion of a black-skinned man into the ‘orderly’ life of a middle-aged married couple. The intruder, whose identity is never precisely made clear to us, behaves like an external, unpredictable force whose freedom, or rather whose lack of respect for the rules and laws of bourgeois life, is almost frightening in its effect. He gives rise to unrest and doubt. He is an alien, someone who disrupts routine. He shows that the ‘contented life’ that the married couple had been leading was really just an illusion. 
Price 80 Czk / 39 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-192-9

Jeroen van den Berg: De Vrouw van Schopenhauer

Translated by Monika Loderová
The play is a humorous, ironic dialogue between twenty-one-year-old Arthur Schopenhauer and his mother Johanna. The young Schopenhauer has just submitted his first manuscript to his publisher and is tensely awaiting the response to his revolutionary work of philosophy. His mother is a successful novelist, who hosts salons attended by Goethe, Hegel, and others, where Arthur can ventilate his antagonism towards everything and everyone.
Price 70 Czk / 38 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-108-2

Joseph Brodsky: Marbles

Translated by Marina Castiellová.
An intimate drama by the Russian poet. Two prisoners, Publius and Tulius, converse together on the themes of freedom and oppression and the relationship between the past and the present, passion and abnegation, and art and reality.
Price 60 Czk / 65 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-063-9

Gianina Carbunariu: Stop the tempo! Kebab

Translated by Jitka Lukešová 
These are two plays by the contemporary Romanian playwright that deal with young people: in the first case, about people who espouse living life to the full and who first find themselves caught up in the whirlwind of a precipitous pace of work, music, and sex, and then they try the opposite extreme – a life without lights, sounds, or being ‘hooked-up’ to the contemporary world. The second play is the story of three Romanians who are working in the West, their dreams and views, and the harsh reality of living in a foreign country.
Price 80 Czk / 90 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-227-0

Kossi Efoui: Le Petit frère du rameur. La ballade des voisins anonymes

Translated by Michal Lázňovský
The fourth volume of French-language African drama published in the Contemporary Play series. This is one of the authors who in the 1990s changed the geography of francophone drama. Here in Le Petit frère du rameur, in a short, almost ritualistic elegy over a dead girl he examines a key issue in the contemporary world: the integration of African immigrants into European civilisation. The second play, La ballade des voisins anonymes, is a monologue by an eccentric character, who is going through a pile of crumpled questionnaires sent to him by various organisations and institutions, behind which the hero sees one single organisation, the Organisation of Anonymous Neighbours, trying to get him under their control.
Price 80 Czk / 39 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-177-5

Per Olov Enquist: The Hour of the Lynx

Translated by Zbyněk Černík
In this play the author touches on religious themes, but viewed with Bergman-like detachment. A boy who kills two people for no apparent reason finds himself here as the one closest to God. And another character in the play, a clergywoman, begins to sense that God is a ginger tomcat. The Hour of the Lynx (I lodjurets timma) is one of the most frequently translated and performed of Enquist’s plays.
Price 70 Czk / 42 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-119-8

Jon Fosse: The Name. Night Sings Its Songs.

Translated by Karolína Stehlíková
Two plays by a contemporary Norwegian playwright. In the first, The Name (Namnet), a pregnant girl returns home to her parents in the company of a young man, the father of her child. Their relationship is as stiff and lifeless as the relationships in the girl’s family. The characters are incapable of communicating with each other normally or articulating their feelings. This situation is disrupted when the girl’s former boyfriend comes to visit.
In Night Sings Its Songs (Natta syng sine songar), a young, unemployed man spends whole days idle at home and dreams of a career as a writer. His wife suffers next to his passivity, suffocating in the small flat they live in. One evening she goes out with her friend for a drink and when she comes home she puts an end to the silence and apathy and a tragedy occurs.
Price 70 Czk / 123 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-124-4

Evgeniy Grishkovec: How I Ate a Dog. Simultaneously.

Translated by Vlasta Smoláková
In the first monologue, the narrator draws the listener/viewer into a stream of observations, feelings, and doubts connected with his three years of military service on a Russian naval flotilla in the Pacific Ocean. In the second, he meditates on the problem of the subjective reflection of the present, on the relativity of our ideas, and on the strange concurrence of matters, feelings, attitudes, and opinions.
Price 70 Czk / 35 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-127-9

Jean-Claude Grumberg: Rêver peut-être

Translated by Michal Lázňovský
A famous theatre actor receives a summons to appear in court. He is about to go on trial for crimes that he commits in his dreams. The actor is rehearsing Hamlet and he is having dreams about murdering Polonius – which he also has to answer for before the court – and it looks like the judge is planning to monitor even his ‘on-stage’ crimes. This Kafkaesque grotesque with Shakespearean and Freudian motifs gradually and surprisingly turns into a parable of the consequences of violence and totalitarian power.
Price 70 Czk / 62 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-120-1

David Hare: Amy’s View

Translated by Jitka Sloupová
A play set in the midst of a group of London intellectuals. Through the story of an ageing famous actress, her daughter, and her son-in-law – a successful film director – it portrays the current state of society and the differences in how men and women approach life.
Price 60 Czk / 106 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-083-3

David Harrower: Presence

Translated by Jan Hančil
The year is 1960 and three young musicians from Liverpool set off for Hamburg to win their spurs by playing in a club that only recently changed its format and, instead of strippers, stages British pop. They argue about their bed, and dream about girls from Hamburg and success. But the band is plagued by failure, up until the band’s front man, Paul, inspired by what he has learned about the history and the present of the city, is struck by a moment of provocation and pulls on Nazi jackboots. However, the price of this success is high and is reflected most strongly in the relationships between the three protagonists.
Price 80 Czk / 63 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-156-2

Drago Jančar: Hallstadt

Translated by František Benhart
In Hallstadt (Halštat) Professor Habilis and his colleagues make a revolutionary archaeological find, but the real mission of the team (the bones clearly date from a much more recent period, the professor deliberately deceives his colleagues) and then the identity of its members are called into question. It turns out that all of the characters have recently been contacted by Drago Jančar, who was looking for five characters for his play. In the final act the characters return to their original lives and it is clear that even though they obtained other roles in life in their ‘Hallstadt period’, they have still held on to their good and bad qualities, and their woes and frustrations.
Price 70 Czk / 57 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-100-7

Koffi Kwahulé: Petite souillure

Translated by Michal Lázňovský
This play by an African writer is a parable on sin, which always requires redemption. This jazzy theatre fable is composed as a montage that works with masks and emerges from ritual.
Price 70 Czk / 55 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-125-2

Koulsy Lamko: Celle des iles

Translated by Matylda and Michal Lázňovský
The ninth volume of contemporary African drama published in the Contemporary Play series. The central character is a young black woman who appears one day in the French port city Nantes. Her life story relates to the history of the slave trade, which at one time France was engaged in. Slavery only ended in the mid-19th century, so it is no surprise that a tradition of resistance and hate and even a longing for revenge still exist. The manuscript is passionate and exudes a strong sense of traditional African magic and music.
The theme might seem somewhat remote to us given that we have no colonial past, but in a way it is still a strong presence in today’s world, where racism still exists and where echoes from the colonial past can still be heard and boomerang into the present.
In cooperation with the Creative Africa festival and the French Institute in Prague.
Price 80 Czk / 37 pp. / ISBN 978-80-7008-244-7

Daniel MacIvor: In On It

Translated by Pavla Niklová
In this play by a Canadian playwright, the two characters move on several different levels of action and time – they are the protagonists in a story about the declining relationship between two gay men and the tragic end of one of them, but with the passage of time they also reconstruct their story and play themselves and the other participants in the action.
Price 70 Czk / 59 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-132-5

Caya Makhele: La Fable du cloître des cimitières

Translated by Matylda and Michal Lázňovský 
In this play, the Congolese writer tells a variation on the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. The play’s hero is Makiadi, a former low-level employee at the Ministry of Health in an unnamed country and now a homeless man, who has begun to abandon the idea that there is any meaning in life. We come across him as his fate is unexpectedly changing: he has received a letter from a woman who, apparently owing to her unrequited love for him, has thrown herself under a train. In the letter she calls on Makiadi to set out after her into the underworld. Makiadi unexpectedly feels some kind of responsibility for the woman, whom he doesn’t even know. But he doesn’t know how to get to the underworld – the quickest route is no doubt through the cemetery and a coffin appears as the right means of transportation. So he heads over to the morgue. The cyclical structure of the play seems inspired by the heritage of African ritual dance.
Price 80 Czk / 40 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-140-6

Patrick Marber: Closer

Translated by Jitka Sloupová
The heroes are contemporary, emotionless Londoners caught up in a lover’s quadrangle. Dan a journalist, Anna a photographer, Larry a doctor, and Alice a stripper solve their problems by manipulating each other’s feelings.
Price 60 Czk / 107 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-084-1

Marius von Mayenburg: Feuergesicht

Translated by Josef Balvín
A ‘clinical diagnosis’ of a contemporary middle-class family.
Price 60 Czk / 57 pp. / ISBN 0-7008-098-1

Felix Mitterer: Abraham

Translated by Magdalena Šulcová
This is the tragic tale of a man condemned to being misunderstood and cursed by those close to him because he is gay. In the apocalyptic conclusion, the hero of the play, sick with AIDS, is killed in a dump by his father’s hand.
Price 60 Czk / 59 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-080-9

Felix Mitterer: Krach im Hause Gott

Translated by Magdalena Šulcová
A play by this Austrian playwright in which two thousand years after Christ, God the Father summons his family to a ‘meeting’ to discuss the future fate of humankind. In a dispute over whether the last judgement should be visited on humanity right away or whether people should be given another chance, the wrongs and twisted relationships of God’s own family rise to the surface.
Price 60 Czk / 39 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-070-1

Olja Muchinová: You

Translated by Vlasta Smoláková
A play by a Russian author on the co-existence of two generations made light with the use of irony, vodka, and gunfire.
Price 70 Czk / 65 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-105-8

Rodrigue Yao Norman: Hello Africa!

Translated by Matylda and Michal Lázňovský 
In this play the Togolese author addresses a basic dilemma of Africans living in Europe. Two brothers who came to Belgium from Africa years ago are trying to decide whether to stay or go back to Africa. The tense night time conversation reveals the difficulties and the demeaning position of being a black immigrant in Europe, constantly hovering between legality and criminality. The question that comes up is how much more a person can take and when have the limits of human dignity been exceeded. The play provides insight into not just the life of Africans in the position of immigrants but also presents European civilisation in a somewhat different light than how we are capable of seeing it ourselves.
Price 80 Czk / 38 pp. / ISBN 978-80-7008-230-0

Valere Novarina: L’Opérette imaginaire

Translated by Michal Lázňovský
A parodic, Jarry-Michaux type of work that plays on words, images, and  their meanings. The play is a kind of deconstruction of operatic mannerisms in a joyful and almost surrealistic form that is entirely open to possible stage interpretations. 
Price 80 Czk / 73 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-179-1

Paloma Pedrero: Noches de amor efímero

Translated by Šárka Valverde
Four acts on a fleeting amorous encounter between two people, on the bewildering beginnings and tragic ends of love.
Price 70 Czk / 66 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-123-6

Five Mexican Plays

Translated by Martina Černá, Jiří Holub, Stanislav Škoda
This book was published as part of the Season of Czech Theatre in Latin America project. The volume aims to introduce Czech readers above all to the poetic line in Mexican drama, whose central feature is a specific type of imagination. The writers in this collection often draw on the ancient roots and rich history of their country. The volume contains the following plays: Mauricio Jiménez: Only a Sword Can Knock Us Down; Jaime Chabaud: Monodrama of God’s Shepherd Gongora; Angel Norzagaray: Letters on the Base of a Tree; David Olguin: Belize and Hugo Hiriart: Amber.
Price 220 Czk / 208 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-187 2

José Pliya: Le Masque de Sika

Translated by Michal Lázňovský
This bitter comedy by an author from Benin can be read as a burlesque, an absurd drama, an existential detective story, a magic ritual, or all of the above at once. A Yoruba mask of a weeping girl dramatically alters a meeting of three old friends and like in Pliya’s other plays the past is then confronted with the present, reality with dreams, and memory with reality. Le Masque de Sika is the third African drama published in the Contemporary Play series – again on the occasion of the Creative Africa festival.
Price 80 Czk / 38 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-162-7

Let’s Talk about Life and Death (New Polish Drama)

Translated by Jiří Vondráček
Let’s Talk about Life and Death is the title of a volume containing plays by four contemporary Polish authors: Lidia Amejko (1955): Double-Doors, translated by Irena Lexová; Krzysztor Bizio (1970): Let’s Talk about Life and Death, translated by Jolanta Kamiňska; Tomasz Man (1969): Katarantka translated by Luboš Veselý; and Ingmar Villquist (1960): The Piece of Lard with Fruit.
Price 70 Czk / 98 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-137-6

Yasmina Reza: Art. L’Homme du hasard.

Translated by Michal Lázňovský
Art is a lightly and humorously told tale of three friends whose relationship is inauspiciously affected by the purchase of an abstract painting. L’Homme du hasard is about a famous writer’s encounter with his readers, whom chance brings together in the same car on an international express train.
Price 60 Czk / 73 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-067-1

Sam Shepard: Simpatico

Translated by Dana Hábová
The latest play by Sam Shepard explores his favourite themes of brotherhood, betrayal, guilt, identity crisis, and decline.
Price 70 Czk / 113 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-108-2

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: Le Libertin

Translated by Matylda and Michal Lázňovský
The philosopher Diderot is writing a treatise on morality for his Encyclopédie, but the concept of morality changes depending on whom he is talking to and about what. Before his wife he defends the ‘morality’ of an unfaithful man, before his daughter, who wants to have the child of a married noble and raise the child herself he emphasises the institution of marriage. In the end he is unable to write this entry and makes do with a reference. The lively dialogues and humorous reversals of fortune culminate in a very ‘immoral’ conclusion to the play.
Price 70 Czk / 68 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-115-5

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: Le Visiteur

Translated by Michal Lázňovský
This play by a French author takes place one evening in 1938 in Vienna. After Austria is occupied by Germany, the old, ill, and mentally unbreakable Sigmund Freud definitively puts off his decision to emigrate. His daughter Anna is arrested when the Gestapo search the home and a Gestapo officer begins to blackmail Freud. A strange visitor helps Freud solve this hopeless situation.
Price 60 Czk / 51 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-071-X

Sony Labou Tansi: Antoine m’a vendu son destin

Translated by Michal Lázňovský
Sony Labou Tansi is one of the most noteworthy figures in Congolese drama. This 1997 play by him deals with illusions and the danger of power. 
Price 80 Czk / 49 pp. / ISBN 978-80-7008-208-9

Tři katalánské hry

Translated by Eva Kadlečková, Romana Redlová and Vít Klouček

Carles Batlle: Temptació

The play tells the stories of three people whose lives accidentally intersect: Aisha is a young illegal immigrant from Morocco, Guillem is a Catalan owner of an antique shop, who is engaged in the illegal activity of human trafficking, and Hassan is an old man that enters Guillem’s home to meet with an old friend from his youth. An encounter between these three characters results in a string of fateful errors that lead to the play’s final tragedy. The play is about the conflict of cultures, mutual miscommunication, various national traditions, and above all about contemporary Spain in the throes of radical social changes.

Josep M. Benet i Jornet: Soterrani

The play is a dialogue between two men, which begins as a banal conversation and gradually transforms more and more into a disturbing and mysterious discussion. One of the men is looking for a lost woman, the second evidently knew her. Dark moments in the past of both characters come out. Their conversation is full of evasive responses, hidden meanings, and aggressive verbal attacks. The author provocatively juxtaposes the violence that stems from boredom or personal obsessions and the violence that accompanies war conflicts.

Gemma Rodríguezová: 35.4 Estem Quedant Fatal

This play is an intelligent, mordant tragicomedy about the world of business in the globalised economy, where the abuse of power is the rule and interpersonal and professional relations are distorted. The action takes place in the office of the Barcelona branch of a major German business. The number 35.4 represents the average age of the employees as recommended by the central office in Germany, and it is a fundamental piece of information for the Germans’ planned reorganisation of the business in Spain. With liberating humour, the play voices the theory that the entire world economy is in the hands of sick madmen and demimondaines, constantly clambering up the professional ladder, and owing to its rotten leadership the world is falling head over heels into an economic crisis.

Price 150 Czk / 137 pp. / ISBN 978-80-7008-224-9

Peter Turrini: Alpenglühen

Translated by Ondřej Černý
A blind old man isolated in a mountain cabin. Here his only contact is with a young man who brings him the things he needs and news about the world. At the old man’s request an unknown woman enters his cabin. These three characters play with their identities, try out various versions of their own life stories, and no one knows what is true, and what is a game.
Price 60 Czk / 39 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-079-5

Nikoline Werdelin: Liebhaverne

Translated by František Frölich
Copenhagen’s upper middle class of thirty- and forty-somethings: self-confident, content, focused on material wealth, they feel like the world is their oyster. But on closer inspection things are different – these professionally successful and self-confident people are in reality miserable and trying to find something that will make their lives happy.
Price 60 Czk / 50 pp. / ISBN 80-7008-085-X

George R. Whyte: Dreyfus Intime

Translated by Michaela Škultéty
This dramatic work is based on the historical events surrounding the Dreyfus affair. The play’s author has focused for many years on this piece of history and had an opportunity to study it in the Vatican’s archives and in the libraries and archives of Jerusalem. 
Published in cooperation with the Goethe-Institute Prague and the Dreyfus Foundation.
Price 80 Czk / 40 pp. / ISBN 978-80-7008-243-0

Karst Woudstra: Een zwarte Pool

Translated by Monika Lodenová
Two married couples are dining together and a Polish student who helps out in the hosts’ household is invited to join them. Instead of the friendly gathering that was planned, a series of dialogues unfolds that gives vent to marital frustrations, concealed hurts, anger and passion rooted in prejudices against central and eastern Europe, but also reveals affluent Netherlands in a critical light.
Price 60 Czk / 87 pp. / ISBN 0-7008-094-9