Štěpán Pácl, director at the Brno National Theatre, Czech Republic
European directors interview series
Dana Rufolo interviews Štěpán Pácl, director at the Brno National Theatre, Czech Republic.
9 September, 2024
Štěpán Pácl is a rising young Czech theatre director whose original approach to directing reveals great respect for the art form and a commitment to upholding the integrity of the dramatic work that he is staging. Presently he is directing two plays by Karel Čapek for the National Theater of Brno: Mother and The Life of the Insects.
Stěpán Pácl. Photo credit: Marek Olbrzymek.
It is Pácl’s conviction that the audience is the final judge of his productions’ success, and his aim is to create stage plays that combine humour with thoughtfulness. In the case of the twentieth-century Czech author Čapek, this has meant modernizing the language of the plays and creating a contemporary set design that permits the dramas to be more accessible to today’s audiences, including students who have only read and never seen a Čapek play. Pácl restrains himself from further manipulation of the scripts, for he is a playwrights’ director and not a Regietheater director. His approach is popular, and he has been asked to stage an opera in 2025.
In this interview, Dana Rufolo (DR) asked questions of Štěpán Pácl (SP) in English.
DR: I became familiar with your work because you produced a Karel Čapek play which I saw in 2024, Mother, and was very impressed by how you staged it. What is your personal history? How did you become a director?
SP: My parents worked in a famous theatre in Prague, the Činoherní klub (The Drama Club). It was a small theatre established in the 1960s in the centre of Prague where many great actors played. I was often there as a child in the Eighties and early Nineties. I remember thinking that I was looking at another world on stage, and my wish was to be a part of this other world. Not to act in it, but to create it.
This was what motivated me to study directing at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. Luckily, I started working right away in some regional theatres. I was very lucky at that time to meet some very good actors, from whom I learned very much. I met the famous Czech director David Radok, and I was an assistant to his productions twice. I learned a lot watching him work.
DR: What precisely did you learn from David Radok?
SP: How to tell a story in space, not as a dance but as a civic or dramatic movement, and how to build the dramatic space so as to tell the story. The second thing I learned is how to organize rehearsals. These two things can’t be separated; I realized you can’t create anything without having completely prepared and organized even before the rehearsals start.
DR: Was that the end of your training?
SP: No, I continued and did a doctorate in Prague at my alma mater. I finished my studies in 2014. The subject of my dissertation is how language and space on stage are connected. I used my own productions for the research. Most of them were Czech plays and so very close to me. Because for me translation is a barrier. Instead of one author you have two. The original author and the translator. It is better to have a conversation only with one author.
DR: Do you also work in film and television?
SP: I am just focused on theatre. I made a radio show twice. It was a great experience and I found the medium of radio exciting, but it is really different for me. I hold a profound respect for film. I admire what film as a medium can do, but only as a spectator. And TV, that’s just what we call in Czech “an on-demand water heater”. TV is empty of value, usually.
DR: So you were really immersed in your childhood dream of creating another world before our eyes? Are you one of the few directors who specializes exclusively in theatre?
SP: In the Czech Republic, specialization is normal. There is a division; generally, you are either a TV director or you are a director of theatre plays.
DR: Are you only working in the Czech Republic?
SP: Yes. In terms of directing a play outside of the Czech Republic, I think it is very difficult when an ensemble has to work with a foreign director. It is because there are important differences in language, culture and the tradition of acting.
DR: What are you rehearsing now?
SP: Karel Čapek ‘s Ze života hmyzu (The Life of the Insects). The premiere is October 11 at the National Theatre Brno. The play is based somehow on the tradition of the variety show, which characteristically is made up of a variety of scenes. In this play, the scenes involve the character of a tramp who closely examines the grass growing in public areas and sees all the insects there – the beetles and butterflies and so forth – and he sees the cruelty of the insects – how they are egotistic, how they fight against each other. He says, “They are behaving like me, so what’s the difference between me and insects?” We added some songs, and we have a dance company. It’s a huge production. So that’s why we have spent all day and until late at night rehearsing since August 19.
DR: That’s a very ambitious project. What is the most difficult part of putting together acting and music and coordinating the different performance modalities?
SP: To keep the thought integrated and to not lose sight of the underlying idea. Not to fall into the trap of only creating a show but to be sure that the play’s production concept is evident even in the dancing and musical parts.
DR: Why are you interested in Čapek dramas particularly? Or am I wrong to think this?
SP: Čapek is part of the school curriculum. Everybody reads him – or his brother Josef – even already in elementary school, because they wrote popular fairy tales for children. After, Karel Čapek’s more complicated novels are part of the school curriculum. And everything that is part of the curriculum seems very boring to students. That was how it was for me, anyhow. You have to find your own way to Čapek; you have to find why his writing is great on your own. The school tells us he is great, but what does that mean? In spite of this, our production of Čapek’s Mother in the National Theatre Brno has been able to turn around this common picture of Čapek as a boring author. Many high school classes come. For most of the students it is their first visit to the theatre and the first time they see a Čapek play staged. Most of them are very touched; it is exciting for them to watch the play and they realise that, after all, Čapek is not boring, and what`s more, funny and exciting. Also, they can see that other audience members, the older ones, are laughing during scenes where they didn’t get the point. It makes them think. That was my objective. It is a miracle that it worked out that way.
Of course, you have to understand that Čapek wrote a 100 years ago. The language has changed. Our sensibility to language has changed as well. That is a barrier between today and Čapek. So, I adapted the language of Mother. Čapek was listening to the people around him at that time, but the language of the street and the students has changed.
DR: So, the philosophical aspect of your work comes from your background as someone with a doctorate in theatre theory and practice. In Zuzana Brandová’s 2022 interview with you for iDNES.cz, you stated that you listen to your audience and where they laugh is an indication of the future directions in society. That’s remarkably insightful. Can you please tell me what this listening to the audience means?
SP: The first thing is that I really want to reach the audience with my work. I create performances for the audience, not just for entertainment or for money but in order to develop some kind of a dialogue. Listening to the audience means: what is the topic we are ready to talk about? I think the topic is already in the air; it’s not that I develop something new; it’s not surprising. But there are many topics, and some are more important than others at different times, and so it is important to discover exactly the current topic that is in the minds of audience members but maybe they haven’t yet had a chance to become aware of it. But sometimes it is very difficult. I think I manage to pinpoint the relevant topic once in every five productions.
DR: Really? Why?
SP: The laughter of the audience is not always identical. I think there are two types of laughter. One is laughing because something unexpected and funny happened. The other is to laugh at something happening on stage and to know, as an audience member, why I am laughing. There are the emotional and the intellectual forms of laughter. It’s not just a passive reflex, laughter. It contains a common thought which is unspoken but has been shared by all. And everybody on stage can feel that something has happened when the audience laughs like that. I experienced this type of atmosphere in the theatre where my parents worked – moments of silence or laughter which represent unspoken shared thoughts. I remember feeling that something important and meaningful was being displayed.
DR: That’s subtle. Theatre in the Sixties was culturally important. It was a time when the general public felt that theatre was a way of looking at the world, a model for reality. The contemporary theatre world is lucky to have you as a director – someone who experienced engaged theatre that was a paradigm for what reality is and how it should be interpreted – in today’s era when there isn’t even a remnant of the Sixties worldview.
Returning to “Mother”, and re-thinking it in terms of theatre in the Sixties, to me your production was an anti-war play that avoided the directness of street theatre. Čapek wrote literature that has all the elements of drama in it, and in your production it had, in my opinion at least, an even stronger anti-war message than the original play has.
SP: Strangely enough it might be just because it was my intention not to stage Mother primarily as an anti-war play. The anti-war message in the play is obvious, but it is not oversimplified. In the first place, it is a drama, a play, a theatre piece with acting characters. That was important for me – to see it not as a manifesto but as an excellent and sophisticated play.
DR: It’s a play about a mother who loses her sons and husband to the war? I recall you’ve even stated that it could be called absurd, because it is exaggerated. Everyone in her family dies. Except the last son, and we see him too departing to fight in the war at the end of the play.
SP: For me there are two important levels, the tragic and the comic, and both are derived from a fundamental inability to comprehend why what is going on is going on. In the structure of the play, this principle is more important than the anti-war aspect. Miscommunication is the basis of comedy, and I was trying to find the comic moments hidden in the misunderstanding between the living mother and the dead. For example, the mother is talking to her dead husband and the dead oldest son, and she says, “You my son were a doctor and you were saving people’s lives, while you my husband were a soldier and you were killing these people – the same people that our son the doctor was saving.” She says, in effect, “It doesn’t make sense. You men claim it is heroic, but I see it as incomprehensible.” The men have their truth, and she has her truth. However, at the same time this inability to understand each other is tragic.
The play could have been very sentimental because of the mother’s unending losses, and I wanted to avoid that at all costs. It begins with the cast. In this production, the mother isn’t grey-haired. She is still young and engaged and passionate, and her aim is to face the loss of life. How to live and how to continue living without going mad or committing suicide. How to save the living parts of the family. When this production played at the Habima Theatre in Tel Aviv in 2022, the artistic director told me he was surprised to see how logically Tereza Groszmannová acted the role of the mother, with understated emotion. She was very unemotional. She was trying to understand something which is not understandable. She is asking, “Why are you dead? Just explain it to me!” She insists, because it just doesn’t make sense.
DR: I found her search to understand is full of life force.
SP: The truth is I wanted Tereza not to be sentimental, to avoid that danger.
DR: I believe that Čapek plans to have the mother transform when she gives her youngest son a gun to fight against the enemy. Scholars also claim that the play suggests that there is a point at which one accepts that fighting might sometimes be necessary and good. But in your production, I didn’t really see the character transform. At first, I wondered if Tereza Groszmannová was tired on the day I saw the play. But then I realized the fatigue was part of her subtle interpretation of the emotional ambiguity that her character feels when she lets her son go fight after hearing that innocent children and civilians are being shot by the enemy. I saw her handing over the gun to her last son, and I saw her resigned to the fact that it was necessary, but I also saw that she didn’t accept that necessity. Was my interpretation correct?
SP: It’s difficult not be falsely pathetic at that moment, but I think there is no change during the play in the mother’s character. The mother’s aim is to protect her children. But in the end, the mother suddenly realizes that it is not possible for her to protect her son while other children are dying. It doesn’t make sense either. There’s a paradox in it: since her life’s aim is to protect life then she must send her son to war. She didn’t change her mind. She has to do that, but it is not her wish.
DR: So, Tereza played that scene by dropping her energy level?
SP: Tereza thought that to whisper the lines would be the solution. She is afraid of her emotion. It is difficult to be exact, not to lie.
DR: These are the problems of theatre; to have your actor portray the ambiguity is very difficult. But Tereza brilliantly shows us that it is a very complex moment.
SP: I like to do performances relying on brilliant acting. We did Yasmina Reza’s Art with three actors, no music, and basic stage lights – just acting left. Mother also has very little music in it, and it works; the audience is excited. This type of actors’ theatre can survive, but there aren’t many plays like that.
DR: I know you have stated already that you chose to produce “Mother” before Russia invaded Ukraine, but can you elaborate a bit?
SP: Like I said, I wanted to rehabilitate Čapek. And then we had the perfect actors for the mother and the youngest son Toni (Pavel Čeněk Vaculík) in the ensemble. If you have the right cast, it’s a sign to do the play. A good cast is seventy percent of success. But all the same, everyone said, “Why Mother now? It is so schematic! All the way through, Čapek is preparing the last scene!” But we saw the drama and the misunderstanding and the comic moments, and we made these moments clearer, and people were surprised that it works as a drama and is not only schematic.
At the time when Čapek wrote Mother, the play was a clear message against the Nazis. Thirty years later, in the Sixties, Čapek’s wife, Olga Scheinpflugová at the age of 66, played the lead role in Mother. Her last performance was a matinee. There were students in the audience. They were really rough; they were talking during the performance and they were rude to her. She was extremely upset. Three days later, she died. The students were young, the war had happened 20 years ago, they’d come with their teachers from school, there were 500 of them, and the teachers couldn’t manage to discipline such a large group. But for Olga, it reminded her of the hatred that Čapek and she had experienced in the Thirties during the Nazi era. People tend to see this play as more a piece of national or theatre history than something meant to be performed on stage.
DR: But you made it contemporary. Your production is timely in terms of international conflicts going on right now.
SP: During the preparation period, the lines of the war reporters on the radio or on television in Mother had seemed very unreal to me. Their talk of bombing for instance. There was nothing like that going on then. There had been the Syrian conflict, but it wasn’t in the daily news. Then, one week after we had begun rehearsals, the invasion of Ukraine started. Suddenly the reports from the news and the lines from Čapek’s play were identical. I realised how ignorant I`d been before. At the time I was scared; we were rehearsing, and I was looking at the dialogue, and I saw that there was no artistic distance any longer.
DR: After you saw the danger of the world of the drama corresponding too closely to geopolitical reality, how did you change your directing in order to make sure it remained foremost a drama and not an anti-war play?
SP: I came back to the beginning – to the reason I decided to do it. To that initial moment when I found the scenes of comical and tragical misunderstanding in the play. And how it talks about how to face loss. I reminded myself not to be sentimental during the rehearsals. I made the important decision to not think or talk about Ukraine during the rehearsal. As soon as we started to talk about Ukraine, the actors stopped acting.
DR: You mean they forgot about the integrity of the play itself? They thought they were referencing what was going on outside the play?
SP: Yes, they said a line, and the line was true, a fact, because of the real war in Ukraine and not because the actors found the proper way of acting. If we had relied only on the fact of the war, it would have meant the war had invaded the theatre.
DR: Your next play is going to be Čapek’s “The Life of the Insects”. Is it going to be in any way relevant to contemporary politics?
SP: It asks if there is any difference between human beings and animals. That’s the question that has relevance. Why are we so cruel? And I feel it is very strong in the play, and I hope it will be visible to the audience, that there is the valid fear that maybe there is no difference between humans and animals. Maybe in the end we are equally cruel, egoistic and only instinctive? We only think that we are superior to animals.
I am sure that there is a difference, but it is very interesting to ask: “Where is the border? I think I am behaving like a human being but am I behaving like an animal or an insect? What does it mean to be free? Does it mean to have everything I want or does it require some kind of dialogue?” It’s in the play.
DR: Why did Čapek choose cold-blooded animals? Also, in his novel “The War with the Newts”, the newts are salamanders. Cold-blooded animals.
SP: Mammals are too close to us, maybe? Also, The Life of the Insects is a collaboration between Karel and his brother Josef. If I had to really simplify it, Karel viewed humanity as essentially good and championed that goodness, while Josef, in contrast, believed people are inherently corrupt. Josef wrote his own surrealistic novel where people were the result of a deformation. So, when the Čapek brothers worked together, they combined their respective thoughts about people as good and evil. They found a nineteenth-century book by the French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre that talks about the life of insects in the form of stories. It’s not descriptive. He sees insects as strugglers and invaders and martyrs, so this entomologist saw the drama taking place in the grass, and that was the inspiration for the play. In it, there is the question of who we are. Why are we capable of both good and evil?
DR: Would you ever consider adapting “The War with the Newts”, putting salamanders on stage? There is a precedent. Edward Albee wrote a play with reptiles in it, “Seascape”.
SP: I saw a production of Seascape in Prague. People as reptiles. It was somehow silly. There’s a difference between reading the play and imagining these reptiles and then putting them on stage. You’d have to have a very good idea of who they are.
DR: What will you do after “The Life of the Insects?”
SP: I will be doing something completely new for me: an opera. The artistic director of the Janáček Theatre in Brno asked me to direct Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, with Ondrej Olos conducting.
