Interview with Jiří Suchý

Agáta Pilátová: Now he is in the encyclopaedias and in general he is remembered a lot, not just this year and not just at Semafor. What do you have to say?

Jiří Suchý: I think that he rightfully belongs there. I've talked about him and his significance many times, but I will just add briefly: He knew how to write great songs and he hit the folk taste with them. That "folk" might sound kind of pejorative, but folkiness is not something damnable, it can be a highly inspirational impetus.

AP: If it were possible, what would you and Jiří Šlitr revive at the theatre?

JS: We'd probably turn Jonáš and Doktor Matrace into a similar perennial like we have with Jonáš and Melicharová – it would be a pair that would show up on the stage from time to time in new situations. For example with Jitka Molavcová as Melicharová we revived the show "Life is a Coincidence in a Worn-out Vest" ("Život je náhoda v obnošený vestě"). I think that Šlitr and I could do that too.

AP: Your theatre actually exists in two forms: the historical one, which lives on and is constantly referred to in radio and television. And the second is the current one, your contemporary theatrical output. Doesn't the past follow you around a little bit?

JS: Definitely. But for me the current one is far more important, because this is our arena, where we fight. I've ended up in quite a paradoxical situation: I battle with the enormous competition that is my own past.

AP: But you could be glad that the history of Semafor is so vigorous, couldn't you?

JS: It depends how you look at it. Sometimes people stop me on the street and say: We love Semafor so much, we stood in line for six hours for tickets to Jonáš! And when I ask them if they've seen any of our new plays, they reply: And you're still acting? I'm always rather lost for words and sometimes even angry. One woman even told me: I don't go to your theatre, I don't want to spoil my memories, but otherwise I'm a huge fan of yours. But what do you do with a fan like that, who doesn't even come to your theatre? For me the fans are those that stuck it out with us. I think in general that what people love in Semafor is often their own past. Their youth when they sat in the audience and caressed the hand of some loved one with Matuška singing on top of it. The ones who are interested in what we're doing today and want to know Semafor's contemporary output, there's unfortunately less of them. I would be happier if more people said to themselves that since they used to love Semafor so much then it would be good to know about them today too.

AP: So Semafor's past has more public acceptance than what you're doing now?

JS: Disproportionally so. Say our current songs have a hard time getting into the media; the radio has written them off too. Only our first ten years are recognised and it's as if the rest didn't exist. Sometimes I smuggle one or two songs into one of my radio shows and then it dies out. With this stance the public has actually degraded Semafor – along with its past – to the status of a kind of museum.

AP: Aside from doing theatre you also write stories and essays; you draw; you film videos. But most people know you primarily as a theatre man and a writer of song lyrics. Does that bother you?

JS: I don't think about it much. I just write, draw, compose, act. It's all fun for me and I don't even really pay attention to what impact it has. Of course I give precedence to the theatre; that's something I don't do by myself, there are dozens of other people dependent on me there, who Semafor sustains.

AP: In my opinion your stories are somewhat underappreciated. They have a particular kind of sadness in them; the heroes are often lonesome losers. It's like these stories reveal your other, turned away side.

JS: I guess so. But I think that even the saddest texts have their kernel of humour in them. I learned that from Chaplin: sentimentality mixed with humour is far more compelling; at least for me it always had more of an effect than pure humour, because the contrast of sadness and laughter has its own particular charge.

AP: You've written over a thousand song lyrics; if you had to put together a truly slender anthology, how many would you choose?

JS: Tough choice, there were over thirteen hundred of them. Of course not all of them turned out perfectly but I could probably pick out thirty of the best. I wouldn't leave out the text for "Yes, then I was still alive" ("Jo, to jsem ještě žil") and "I bought a wick" ("Koupil jsem si knot") – as a cabaret ditty; you see, that one's about a loser again, who ends up in a box. But I would also probably include the song from my current repertoire "I knew it would happen" ("Já věděl jsem, že se to stane").

AP: Midway through the nineties you started up a project of collected works. How far along is it?

JS: Altogether it's supposed to have twenty volumes; so far fifteen have come out and the sixteenth is all set. But now we can see that we won't manage to put it all in. Even just for the reason that while the individual volumes are coming out, new texts are constantly being created. But I have to mention my publisher, Doctor Kadlec. He's an amazing person, eminently erudite and devoted. He often knows more about our theatre than me. He pulls the whole load himself – like always. He was the one who carefully prepared and published the complete Hrabal.

AP: What kind of response have the collected works had?

JS: It could be bigger. A certain circle of people, a few hundred, collect all the volumes. They want to have it complete. But the majority of readers only buy what interests them. We had an interesting experience: the introductory collection of stories came out in the biggest run, as we thought it would be attractive for people. And the next book, the collection of poetry, came out with fewer copies. We thought that we wouldn't sell as much poetry. And you know, that was actually the only volume that we had to do a second run on.

AP: In the texts of your stories and songs, and sometimes in your interviews too, you reveal that you like the poetry of Christian Morgenstern. How did you discover it?

JS: Through Doctor Vyskočil. When I was pestering him in the middle of the fifties to start working in the wine bar Reduta with me, he first came to take a look there. And when he heard my songs he lit up and said – that reminds of Morgenstern, he must've been your model. It was the first time I'd heard the name, I was a highly uneducated boy back then. Not that I'm by any means super-educated today, but at least I know who Morgenstern was. Vyskočil recited his poems to me that time, in the translation of Emanuel Frynta, and I said to myself, it's true, these texts resonate with what I love: that it's funny but at the same time that it's poetry. After that I fell in love with Morgenstern.

AP: In recent years you were unpleasantly hit by a double loss for your theatre: first you lost the stage in Passage Alfa, then the year before last you lost Karlínek in the floods. You said then that catastrophic situations are actually inspirational for you. Really?

JS: Yes. At the moment when I get into a pickle I start to think about how to get out of it and all of the sudden new ideas and concepts spring up. It's actually a step into something new and unknown, and I enjoy that and it excites me. I don't exactly want to invite catastrophes by saying that, but basically I just like starting out, I'm a kind of pioneer; not the kind with the red scarf, but the kind who goes somewhere first. I really love getting something underway; keeping it going I take as a responsibility. When someone is starting something new it brings excitement.

AP: How is it going with the construction of your new stage in the Dejvice hall Globus?

JS: They're just starting to build; it should be ready by fall. I expect that by 30 October, when Semafor will be 45 years old to the day, we will be able to open the theatre.

AP: How do you take the staging of your plays in other theatres?

JS: I'm generally get pleasure out of it. For instance quite a number of theatres have played "Bouquet" ("Kytice") now, and now I have more requests to lend out the lyrics. It's nice – when I can make it I go watch the performances. "A Well-Paid Walk" ("Dobře placená procházka") I even saw in Belgium, and members of the royal family were at the premiere. I can't imagine it any other way than that it was because it was presented as an opera, and so they came with all the pomp and circumstance.

AP: When another theatre stages your scripts, don't you sometimes feel like jumping on the stage and doing it in your own way?

JS: I don't. It's obvious that every theatre is going to approach it differently, with its own particularities. Some of them don't entirely thrill me, but I accept it. Everyone has the right to interpret an author according to their own ideas. When I'm not satisfied I don't show it. Only once I protested a tiny bit: they were showing our "Weekend with Krausová" ("Víkend s Krausovou") in one theatre and they "enriched" it with lots of dirty jokes. And I didn't put any in it! When they were thanking me they pulled me up on stage and I was embarrassed – the audience might have thought, "Oh so this is that pig." And so I distanced myself from it a little. I tried to do it so as not to offend the group, but I had to display my disapproval.

AP: Vulgarity is one of the fashions in theatre today.

JS: It's not really my thing. I'm no prude, the odd swear word pops up in my plays too, but it's always thought through and has a point. It's like Švěrák says – it's like shrapnel that is timed for a certain moment. But to throw it around and put in vulgarisms just for their own sake, that really doesn't fly with me.

AP: From the very start you've had a remarkably creative, playful, and at the same time respectful relationship to the Czech language. What do you think about how it's being butchered in the media today and sometimes on the stage as well?

JS: From the very start my relationship wasn't respectful, not until I started to do theatre. I never had much of an inclination for visual clowning, and so I started to focus on the verbal, and there I had some success. I discovered that Czech is tremendous material and I started to like it. I often suffer from uninventive or unrespectful treatment of Czech. In scripts and on the stage. Stage talk is in decline. I always think about Jiří Voskovec, about his brilliant articulation. And about how even after years living as an émigré he maintained a vigorous relationship with the language. He kept interested in it. Šlitr once told me that during his visits to the USA Voskovec used to inquire in great detail how people talk here, how this or that concept is changing, and then he would integrate some of the phrases into his lexicon. And then I got letters from Voskovec where he would ordinarily use phrases like "to have your mind blown" or call girls "chicks" and so on.

AP: You're often a guest on radio and television as the author of series and programmes. Which ones do you remember particularly fondly?

JS: The television series Grandsupertingltangl – it sometimes shows up on Czech Television, mostly at night. In it we met with noted personalities from various phases of popular music – from street songs that we extracted from old women in retirement homes to R.A. Dvorský and Karel Vlach right up to the newest things of the time. On radio I remember a number of shows; one of the radio editors, Jiří Bauer, was once responsible for the fact that I started to appear on the radio more often and got into to radio for good. Just now on Czech Radio we started a new sketch series called "Through the Looking Glass" ("Za Zrcadlem"), which is broadcast every month.

AP: You have lots of work behind you; did any unfulfilled ambitions remain? Maybe  film?

JS: I could write a book about it. In fact I did even write a thin little book about it, it was called "Perplex, or The Path from Nothing to Nothing" ("Perplex aneb Cesta od ničeho k ničemu"). There I dissect my film ambitions and I also slightly disparage them. I was practically never successful in film; "If a Thousand Clarinets" ("Kdyby tisíc klarientů") could be mentioned – that has public acceptance even today. My last film was "The Bride" ("Nevěsta"), and then I didn't do anything in film for almost twenty years. Only when the censor started to loosen up at the end of the 80s, two films with Melicharová were shot. The director Vladimír Sís arranged for them.

AP: But you still shoot videos don't you?

JS: Yes, for example we're preparing private recordings of our theatre performances and we also shot two feature-length movies on video. Now there is also a series in film form of my once quite successful book "Lexicon for the Smitten" ("Lexikon pro zamilované"). But that's all a hobby; I really pay for my film projects.

AP: Once you even performed in an advertisement for laundry detergent for that, which some attacked you for. And you tried to explain that the money you made for the ad was to pay the costs for your films. It seems to me that today people don't take it like that when a "serious" artist does an ad.

JS: Perhaps, but at the time I was just quietly amazed at how many people wrote off my forty years of work for one one-minute ad. I got letters from some of them that for them I had ceased to exist as a theatre man. And yet even Fellini did ads so that he could shoot a good film. I attribute the negative responses to the Czech national character.

AP: To envy?

JS: I didn't want to say it like that.

AP: Not long ago representatives of private cultural institutions expressed rightful indignation at the proposal that such institutions pay higher VAT. Would that affect your theatre too?

JS: Of course, it would be truly highly unpleasant, especially when at the same time prices are going up and lots of other things. People would of course start to think where they could save money. In the end they'd find that the most disposal thing is theatre or the cinema. I was thinking that we should do a production without sets and costumes and write in the programme that the sets and costumes had to go because of the VAT. Maybe it would get a response...

Týdeník Rozhlas, 8 March 2004