Last Saturday night, K and I went to a play at Prague’s grand National Theater, and then had dinner at the classic old cafe across the street. It felt like and was a real night out. Finally.
Because of Covid restrictions, the endless colds we have suffered from, and the challenges of finding babysitters, K and I have actually not been out very much in Prague. Certainly not as much as I would have liked.
I had bought tickets to the play more than a month prior. I had been wanting to go to the National Theater, (in Czech the Národní divadlo), since I had first seen it. Its enormous French- style, slate, mansard roof is visible from all over. The theater opened in 1881, and was meant as an expression of the flourishing of the Czech people, albeit under the embrace of the Austrian-Hungarian empire. It had taken three decades to build and had been financed in part through small donations.
It was easy to see its exterior, but getting tickets to a play inside was challenging. First of all, I didn’t even know it was the National Theater yet. I just knew the building had caught my eye. When I did find out its significance, its website was challenging. There were actually four theaters under the rubric of “National Theater,” all special. There was the National Theater, The Estates Theater, the State Opera and the New Theater. With the exception of the New Theater, all were over a century old.
I finally went to the box office, struggling with the attendant who spoke almost no English. This is surprisingly common here, even in jobs where doubtless the person deals a lot with tourists. I found a play with English subtitles. There were not many. I bought two tickets, two good seats down in the main auditorium, at the end of January. The tickets were not expensive, about $20 apiece.
A week before, I realized I hadn’t lined up a babysitter yet. As the person who most likes to go out, I had worked hard to find sitters. I had lined up three or four in succession, using a babysitting website I found here. The sitters, who we would interview in person beforehand, would be okay one or two times, but then be unable to come due to being in quarantine, scheduling, or something else. Because of this, (and the colds, and the covid restrictions), we hadn’t been out much. We had been to a movie, twice, and to dinner, twice. These outings all had a cramped, trial feel to them.
For the play, I called all our usual suspects. No luck. Figures. Scrambling, a day before the date of the play, I found a French medical student that one of our other sitters had recommended. She came over that day, met EC and K, and seemed good. You make a big deal about babysitters even though their main task is just sitting on your sofa while your child sleeps upstairs.
So we were set.
Then two hours before the show, K told me, while lying on her back on our bed, that she was feeling “absolutely horrible.” She had been for weeks suffering from yet another bad cold, but I thought she was on the upswing. Apparently not. What to do?
“I don’t want you to go if you won’t enjoy it,” I said.
“I’m not saying I can’t go,” she said. “I’m just saying I’m not going to be up for much”.
Ok. I took that in. Lucille, the babysitter, arrived. I put dinner on the table for both her and EC. We left.
At the Theater: Scandalous Love
Plays here start early, usually at 7 pm. This one started at 6 pm. We got on the number 22 tram and were there in 15 minutes. We entered. Our masks were on and our COVID cards were checked.
As I had half expected and fully hoped, most people were dressed up. Many women wore long gowns and jewelry; the men were in coats and ties. We were underdressed but I didn’t worry about it. It felt good to be part of such a crowd. We were going out.
The big reveal was walking into the auditorium. I had been waiting for this. It was surprisingly small for such a huge building. The interior was tall rather than long, and was intimate. We sat in the 14th row, which was almost the last. There were four or five levels of private box seats in a horseshoe around the stage, a classic old-world configuration. Each had its own entrance. Maybe we could get one of those next time, K said to me. Fine with me.
The play itself, Marysha, was an old Czech classic, first staged in 1894. This was the eleventh time it had been staged at the National Theater. Going in, we didn’t know all of this.
Marysha is a typical story about a young woman whose father pledges her to marry an older, more prosperous widower, but the woman wants a poorer, handsome, unreliable soldier. It was scandalous when it came out because it ends — spoiler alert — with Marysha poisoning her unloved husband, who didn’t seem like such a bad fellow, with a treated cup of coffee.
The staging and performances were avant-garde and non- traditional. There was no conventional scenery, just chairs strewn around the stage. At one point a character used a squeaky toy for her dialogue. The actors playing the father and the older groom rolled around on the stage at one point, for little reason I could see. The actress who played Marysha was sexy and funny, especially in the scenes before she got married and was consigned to domestic drudgery. She would roam around the stage.
In the physicality of the actors and unconventionality of the staging, I was reminded of the performances and scenery I had seen at a play about a month earlier, by myself, at a smaller, less fancy theater in Smichov, a district across the river. So perhaps this was Czech theater style: dramatic, alive, seemingly spontaneous.
The costumes, when they existed, were great and bizarre. In the wedding scene, actors with constructions completely covering their heads and faces slowly walked on stage and took seats, and said nothing. Perhaps they symobolized the tyranny of expectations? No idea. The coverings were shaped like animal heads or boxes. K and I were both reminded of the crazy costumes our friend Rachel Cohen would sometimes use in the dance performances of her company, Rococo.
K and I had a hard time following the play, even with the subtitles above the stage. The avant-garde approach didn’t make it easy. But we were not the intended audience. Most of the audience probably knew the story already. It would be as if an American company was putting on Hamlet or Death of a Salesman. It made sense the company would take an off-angle approach.
I found I had a better time if I mostly ignored the translation beamed on top of the stage. It was hard shifting my eyes back and forth. Even I had the basic story, an unhappy love triangle. Better just to enjoy the sound of the dialogue and watching the actor’s movements.
At The Restaurant: Leisurely Elegance
It was only about 8 pm when the play ended. K was feeling better. We decided to simply walk across the street to Slavia, an old and famous cafe and restaurant housed in one floor of a former palace. It had huge windows that fronted on the street, and I could see when I went by in the number 22 tram. It had opened shortly after the theater in 1883. The Communists had nationalized it, but now it was back. In its history, it was part of the real cafe culture that had once flourished here. Some, like the Slavia, still existed. K and I had had a meal at the Cafe Louvre on the same street, where Albert Einstein and Franz Kafka hung out in the early 1900s.
The Slavia had an atmosphere that was partly fancy and partly down home. The waiters, many of whom were men, wore black and white uniforms. The ceilings were high and big paintings were on the wall. Yet the floors looked like linoleum and the tables were placed matter of factly across the large room. The menu, besides the desserts and coffee, contained classic Czech dishes like sirloin in a cream sauce with dumplings. K ordered that. I had a fancy ham sandwich with hollandaise sauce, and beef consomme soup.
As we ate, others from the theater wandered in, many in fancy dress. They look relaxed. They sat at the tables, loosened their ties, and chatted and laughed. It had a nice vibe. The Slavia I’m sure at times has a lot of tourists, but that night , like the theater audience, it was mostly Czech.
We had delicious desserts and coffee (Alex), and then caught the tram home. Lucille and EC were fine.
So it was a successful night out. We had gotten some culture, some food, and some time to ourselves. Let’s do it again!
Yesterday I checked with Lucille, who somehow has become our only babysitter. She’s busy this weekend. And no other babysitter in sight.
Oh well.
What I’m Reading and Watching
Varina: A Novel, by Charles Frazier
I was at first disappointed that Charles Frazier, after the success of Cold Mountain, had written another Civil War novel. But it’s grabbed me, and I’m a fan, so far. I downloaded it onto my e-reader ages ago and started it recently without knowing what it was about. The Varina in the title is a real historical figure, the younger widow of the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis. She lived into the 20th century and had a varied and interesting life. So this is a historical novel. Many unusual circumstances of her life have been presented, and I am of course curious as to what is fact and fiction.
K has the blame for getting me to watch Hannah, a violent and tawdry show about a genetically engineered assassin and her fellow assassin sisters. But I’m hooked, in part because it’s nice to have a show to watch together. We have binged on it repeatedly, watching three or four 50-minute shows in succession, staying up past our advisable bedtimes. An Amazon Prime original.
I continue to work at getting hooked on the old Star Trek: Next Generation, but I confess I have only watched two and a half episodes. Got to get back to it!
Meal of the Week
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