Innkeeper, Count Zeppelin, the prisoner Kulhánek and the fictitious girl Růženka. The characters, who met for the first time exactly 55 years ago in the deep forest, where not even a footpath leads. At that time, the play Divadla Jára Cimrman’s Hospoda Na mýtince premiered in Malostranská beseda. It was the first that Ladislav Smoljak and Zdeněk Svěrák wrote together.
Meanwhile, Zdeněk Svěrák sings the wanderer’s aria alone on stage, and Miloň Čepelka, hidden behind the scenes, tells him the first word of the next verse just to be sure.
“Against the previous three, like The Act, Investigating the Loss of the Classbook, and The Home Killer, it was a quest. And the Inn was a find. We were looking for the style that Cimrman actually wrote for the theater, how it should look compared to other theaters,” recalls Zdeněk Svěrák.
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Hospoda Na mýtince was the first play they wrote together with Ladislav Smoljak. “On the way from Vienna, Láďa came up with the idea of presenting Cimrman as an author of operettas. And that was the right decision, because the operetta belonged to Cimrman’s time,” he adds.
But the date of the premiere, April 17, 1969, went down in Czech history as a different, more significant and less cheerful event. “Dubček finished and Husák joined. That was the turning point,” explains Zdeněk Svěrák.
The change to the position of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party marked the beginning of the period of so-called normalization. “I can’t forget how armored personnel carriers drove under the windows of the Malostranská beseda. We were very scared,” admits Miloň Čepelka.
“What I enjoy about it is realizing how carefree we were when we were young and how playful the game is. Everything just went so freely and naively,” says Svěrák.
Hospoda Na mýtince was the first Cimrman play that crossed the threshold of a thousand reruns. Today it has 1181 and is thus the second most listed piece.
What can you find behind the scenes in the closet labeled Inn? And who wanted to play the role of Count Zeppelin? Listen to the full report.
