the age of William Shakespeare. It is refreshing, however, that Kohout himself lacks any embarrassment on this score, regarding his dramatic adaptations as a challenge, whether he is adapting Jules Verne’sLe Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1873; Around the World in Eighty Days, 1873), Karel apek’s Válka s mloky (1936; War with the Newts, 1939), or Jaroslav Haek’s Osudy dobrého vojáka vejka ve svtove války (1921-1923; The Good Soldier vejk, 1930). Each of these projects posed a truly formidable challenge, and in each case, Kohout surmounted the difficulties imaginatively. Verne’s novel, with its huge cast of characters and locations, is staged with half a dozen characters playing ten roles each, with a twentieth century commentator/raisonneur supplying an additional dimension as well as a bridging device. Válka s mloky was staged as a television broadcast featuring the apocalyptic destruction of the world. Yet it was Haek’s The Good Soldier vejk that presented Kohout with the biggest challenge. No fewer than thirty dramatists had tried to stage the novel, from Erwin Piscator to Bertolt Brecht. Brecht’s adaptation was particularly unsuccessful, but it taught Kohout a lesson. Where Brecht put vejk in a German uniform and sent him to fight in World War II, Kohout decided to let vejk be vejk. He did it by concentrating on the first of four books of the novel and on a single theme: little Josef vejk against the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire. Kohout further preserved the original flavor of Haek’s work by incorporating quotations with minimal changes and transforming the play into a multimedia extravaganza with the use of music and projection techniques.

Each of the three plays is much more than an adaptation of an entertaining novel with comical and satirical possibilities. Cesta kolem svta za 80 dni contrasts the travel and technology of the nineteenth century with the technology of the twentieth century, with its space travel. Yet the audience in Prague could not even travel to Vienna, because it was “in the West,” though only in the political sense (geographically, Vienna is east of Prague). The freedom to move freely where one wants was among the most desired in the liberal 1960’s and remains the dream of intellectuals and ordinary people alike. Technological advances did nothing to enable one to travel to neighboring Vienna, hence the disappointment. Furthermore, the rational application of technology, which harnessed the labor of the newts, results in an apocalyptic war instead of a millennium. vejk is an example of a man who turns the very thought of rational organization of society (best exemplified in the military) into a joke.

vejk is a clown who knows that he is clowning in order to survive. His wits are all that keep him from ending up as common cannon fodder, as did his comrades. What makes him special is his analysis of reality and his strategy to deal with it, both of which escape a common soldier. vejk is not only amusing but also cynical and cruel. He is the opposite of the dreamer. In fact, he is the bane of all dreamers, as becomes abundantly clear in vejk’s clashes with many-hued dreamers in Haek’s novel. It is perhaps because of Kohout’s deep involvement with the character of vejk that he turned, in his next play, to an original creation of an anti-vejk: the clown-dreamer hero of his August, August, August (August, August, the clown).

August, August, August

August is a clown-dreamer, as opposed to the clown-cynic of the vejk type. Instead of cynicism, one finds lyricism; instead of the war, there is circus; instead of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, a circus manager. The play deals very artfully with the timeless problems through allegories that are purposefully transparent but nevertheless effective. It was also the last major play that Kohout saw staged in his own country.

ivot v tichém dom

Three one-act plays—Pech pod stechou (bad luck under the roof), Fire in the Basement, and War on the Third Floor—were staged in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, in 1974 as a trilogy under the common title ivot v tichém dom (life in a quiet house). These are plays that could not be shown in Czechoslovakia and that one could define as dissident plays, if only because their common theme is the powerlessness of ordinary people confronting an all-pervasive totalitarian machinery that invades the “quiet” private space of an individual like a Kafkaesque nightmare.

Poor Murderer

Without any doubt, the most powerful of Kohout’s plays is his creative adaptation of a short story by Leonid Andreyev, “Mysl” (“Thought”), entitled Poor Murderer. This work, more than other Kohout adaptation, provides an ample justification for adaptations in general. It is also a borderline case in the sense that Kohout has taken liberties with the story, making some important changes that invest the original with possibilities that it did not have as a short story. In the original story, a physician, Kerzhentsev, is interrogated by a board of psychiatrists to determine whether he is sane as he is to be tried for murder. As Kerzhentsev reconstructs the murder, it becomes clear that some time before he attempted the murder, he had decided to pretend to be insane to evade legal responsibility for the crime. Kerzhentsev’s tragedy follows his realization that his pretense was so thorough that even he no longer knows for sure whether he is normal.

In Kohout’s play, Kerzhentsev is turned into an actor and allowed to reenact his crime with the help of his fellow inmates in a mental hospital, under the watchful eye of the chief psychiatrist, who attempts to understand Kerzhentsev’s problem through the reenactment of a “play” written by Kerzhentsev. The wealth of meanings and different levels of interpretation enter through the device of the play-within-a-play.

Kerzhentsev was in love with a woman (who did not reciprocate his love) married to an unworthy has-been of an actor, a philanderer, a drinker, and a man of very little talent. Kerzhentsev believed that he was a much better man and feigned madness to kill his actor/rival. When he reenacts the murder in the play-within-a-play, he is stopped, and it is revealed to him that he never murdered his rival. Crushed, Kerzhentsev is seen smiling dementedly as his beloved actress finally realizes the depth of Kerzhentsev’s passion and, blaming herself for his insanity, decides to dedicate her life to nursing Kerzhentsev. At this point, the rival admits defeat and congratulates Kerzhentsev for his successful “killing.” The ambiguity inherent in this ending is not resolved. It is impossible to know what Kerzhentsev is truly thinking or whether he is in fact insane. One thing is clear: Kerzhentsev planned to get rid of his rival and planned a revenge and a “killing.” Although not a drop of blood was spilled, Kerzhentsev carried out his threat of revenge and even succeeded in getting the attention of his beloved.

The play is a masterpiece of tense, concentrated, highly choreographed danse macabre, in which meaning suddenly shifts and the focus moves among several levels of reality. One message is relentlessly driven home: Rationality has its limits. If Kerzhentsev’s plan truly did work, did it not work perhaps too well? There are serious doubts about Kerzhentsev’s sanity no matter what the outcome. Perhaps even more relevant, bearing in mind the general direction of Kohout’s long-standing preoccupation with rationalism, the play provides yet another example of rationality in the service of evil.

As an outstanding example of Kohout’s disillusionment with rationalism, the play has no rivals in his dramatic repertoire. The theme has ample support, however, in Kohout’s novels. In White Book, a high school teacher challenges the traditional understanding of physics symbolized by the law of gravity when he levitates at will (to the distress of the local scientific and political authorities). In The Hangwoman, modern education produces an executrix versed in the art of execution and torture after being systematically trained by several knowledgeable, even scholarly, executioners. In Nápady svaté Kláry, a high school girl causes consternation by her accurate fortune-telling.

The irrationality of the three novels clashes with an only apparent rationality of the authorities, be they political or scientific. The outcome of such clashes is the underlying doubt about the rationality of a wide variety of beliefs. In this, Kohout joins the chorus of other Eastern European dramatists and novelists, whose experience motivates them to regard the nature of belief in all of its guises with suspicion. It is a suspicion well-founded, as Kohout convincingly demonstrated in his first truly internationally successful play, Taková láska. It was perhaps his desire to convey this conclusion clearly that motivated him to turn to adaptations and rely on transparent allegories. The effect of such cautionary tales as he provides in his plays and novels is often liberating. Far from encouraging a pessimism, disdain, or contempt, they promote understanding, sympathy, and compassion, even toward those authorities who so richly deserve his censure.