The dramatization of former dissident Dani Horáková’s book about her cohabitation with director and screenwriter Pavel Juráček, a prominent figure of the Czechoslovak new wave of the 1960s, will be presented this Friday, April 28, by Prague’s Na zábradlí Theater. Anna Klimešová directs the production, named the same as the original O Pavlovi. It deals with loneliness and isolation in a relationship.
The Friday and Saturday premieres are followed by the nearest reruns on May 12 and 22. The project loosely follows on from the production Golden sixtieth directed by Jan Mikulášek, who just edited Juráček’s diaries at Zábradlí.
Today, seventy-six-year-old Daňa Horáková, who together with Václav Havel ran the samizdat edition of Expedice and after going into exile established herself in West Germany as a journalist and minister of culture in the federal state of Hamburg, won the Lidové noviny prize for her book About Pavlov.
Although the creators of the current adaptation are several generations younger and have not experienced normalization, they consider the themes contained in this story to be timeless. “For the beginning of the relationship between Juráček and Horáková, the StB played a big role. In order for Juráček to go to Germany, the police asked him to marry Daňa and go to Munich with her. Their entire stay in exile was covered by the Asanaca event, when the StB decided to move out number of Charter 77 signatories abroad. However, we perceive their personal story as universal regardless of time,” says playwright Petr Erbes.
The team started thinking about the topic during the pandemic, when many couples found themselves in isolation. “We were interested in the topic of coexistence – how to endure together, live and communicate in such conditions. It’s a play about many levels of loneliness and all the absent people we live with every day,” adds director Klimešová.
Pavel Juráček is played by Michal Bednář, and Anežka Kubátová will play the role of the author of Horáková’s book model.
Anežka Kubátová as Daňa Horáková and Michal Bednář in the role of Pavel Juráček. | Photo: KIVA
Viewers will have the opportunity to look into the claustrophobic Munich studio where the newlyweds went in 1977. Despite the fact that Horáková describes a very specific life situation in her work in a clear historical context, she views her relationship with Juráček from a broader perspective. Already in the book, he offers many parallels, from Franz Kafka’s relationship with Dora Diamantová to Viktorka and the black hunter from Babička by Božena Němcová. Similar parallel life stories and imaginary visitors to the cramped apartment will also be seen by the audience of the Na zábradlí Theater, performed by Kateřina Císařová, Johana Matoušková and Vojtěch Vondráček.
Readers became familiar with the exile period of Juráček’s life in 2021, when under the title Diary IV. 1974-1989 both the last part of his diaries and the book About Pavlovi were published. In it, Horáková systematically comments on Juráček’s diaries from the same period, but at the same time draws on her own notes and archive.
“I have the impression that after the publication of his diary, and undoubtedly also thanks to his premature death, Pavel becomes a kind of role model, a kind of morbid idol,” Horáková states in the introduction to the book, according to which the image of a Sisyphean nonconformist was created, which Juráček himself, according to her, greatly stylized, or straight up lied to. “Pavel was interested in nothing but himself, and therefore belonged nowhere,” he writes later.
Despite all the correctness, however, the text “does not show a thorn of late reproach towards Juráček or towards those who idealize him”, Aktuálně.cz wrote.
The book examines the nature of the marriage, which meant self-destruction for the author, and definitely presents an unflattering portrait of Juráček. At the same time, however, it captures a broader picture of Czechoslovak dissent in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as life in German exile.
“A FAMU graduate wrote to me and scolded me for the book. That it’s not proper to talk about a genius like that. And that she likes him very much, even though she didn’t know him. It’s morbid for me, falling in love with the image that Pavel left behind. Falling in love with monument,” Daňa Horáková later told in the podcast.
Director and screenwriter Juráček already demonstrated his talent as a dramaturgy student at FAMU. Although he did not finish the Prague school, he got a hold of himself in the film studio in Barrandov. He gained recognition for his medium-length directorial debut, Postava k podríčně from 1963, which he made with Jan Schmidt. His masterpiece, The Case for the Novice Executioner, ended up in the vault for a long time.
At the beginning of 1977, Juráček was one of the first to sign Charter 77, after which the ruling regime forced him to emigrate. The film did not catch on in Germany. After six years, he returned home mentally and physically broken. He died in May 1989.
