Revisiting the House 1

 

I apologise for the gap in posts. You must have thought I had given up on this blog, and maybe I had. Maybe having sold the house and been confined to the UK by Covid, bad knees and back it hurt too much to look at what I had lost/been forced to give up. It did and does hurt. 

In November 2022 I did return to my little Czech village, staying in the house of my puppetmaker friend directly opposite my old home. It felt very strange to cross the bridge across her drainage moat and look at the bright lights shining out from my old home. In the November gloom the house was a beacon on the lower slopes of the Lisci Dira hill. I saw it as I crowned the hill on the track I took on my walk home from the bus, calling me down to the village and yet not calling me, because it was nolonger mine. 

In the house someone else was stoking the stove, someone else was chopping onions and making goulash, someone else was talking to her friends. Someone else but not me.     

Czech Prints - Puppets

I was talking to my son this afternoon via Zoom and we came to the topic of Czech prints of puppets. As those of you who are regular followers of this blog will know, the Czechs are experts in the making of puppets. We had a wonderful puppet maker as a neighbour and I first met my friend, Hannah, when I went to her flat in London to borrow some puppets she had made. Anyway I promised my son I would share with him some of the puppet prints from my collection of Czech graphics.

The print above is by Vojtech Cinybulk (as are the three immediately below). Cinybulk wasn't just an artist of puppets, he was active in puppet theatre, which no doubt accounts for how many puppet prints he produced. 

It is not generally known in the UK that Dr Faustus was widely performed as a puppet show in Europe.

This print is by Lander.

The next two prints are by Mahulka. A regular character in children's theatre is Kaspar, a marionette boy. 

Here he is again, this print is by Grmela

and again by Borek

But this delightful little fellow has evolved from a more raucous immoral character that stems from the same roots as the British Punch. The change was driven by a change in target audience, with many middle class families having their own set of puppets.  

But puppetry in the Czech Republic has never just been for children. From the cautionary tale of Faust, through the devil-beating Kaspar, to the surreal puppets of Svankmajer, Czech puppets have always also appealed to adults. They have always had a subversive element. The Nazis suppressed puppet performances, although brave puppeteers continued to perform in secret. Over 100 puppeteers and puppet writers died under torture or in concentration camps. The Czechs rightly take puppetry very seriously.