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I love working in theatre and intercultural encounters

Professor Pavel Drábek teaches drama and theatre practice, history and theory at the University of Hull in the United Kingdom. He translates older English drama, and writes opera librettos and plays for the radio and the theatre. He spends his holidays in the Czech Republic.

Pavel Drábek is a graduate of Masaryk University and now a professor at the University of Hull.

One day he is giving papers in Toronto, Montpellier or Cologne, the next he is in a theatre in Uherské Hradiště watching a production he has written. The interests of English and theatre scholar Pavel Drábek are as diverse as the places where he has studied and worked. He graduated from the Faculty of Science at Masaryk University with a double major in English and Mathematics, completed a doctorate in English Literature at Charles University in Prague, habilitated in Theatre Studies at the Faculty of Arts at Masaryk University in Brno, and has been a professor at the University of Hull since 2013.

You are the author of a remarkable book, České pokusy o Shakespeara (Czech Attempts at Shakespeare), which traces the history of Czech translations of “the Greatest Englishman”. In addition to important translators, it deals with the difficult social and political situation from the late 18th to the 21st century. What is the state of play in 2024? 
I finished the book in 2010 and it is with some regret that I have to say that it is pretty much the same as it was then. Not much has changed in the intervening decade and a half. Olga Walló has published her beautiful translation of King Lear, which has unfortunately gone largely unnoticed. Filip Krajník translated and published a very good translation of Hamlet, which was performed on the small stage of the South Bohemian Theatre. My own translation of Romeo and Juliet is included in the repertoire of the Slovácké Theatre. But if I’m not mistaken, that’s about it when it comes to translations of Shakespeare.

Pavel Drábek at the Author's Reading Month 2024 in Brno.

Together with the composer and musician Ondřej Kyas, you founded the Ensemble Opera Diversa, whose members are professional musicians and singers. The ensemble performs at festivals and prepares its own productions. What led you to it? 
When we were students, the musician and writer Ondřej Kyas and I wrote our first minioperas, partly for fun and partly because we were fascinated by what seemed to us to be out of reach. In 1999, we were not an official ensemble, just a loose group of friends. Then, in 2003, Don Sparling, my former teacher, colleague and a friend with a supreme sense of humour, asked if we might write a miniopera for a meeting of the Utrecht Network universities. What the Ensemble Opera Diversa has become since is the result of the quixotic efforts of outstanding artists, friends and visionaries, and it is a great honour for me to have been part of this miracle. 

Besides librettos, you also write spoken drama. You started with Czech Radio, and now you write for theatre as well. Some of your texts are inspired by old English plays, others are set in the early 20th century. You don’t find contemporary themes interesting?
I do, but I like theatre that looks at our world from a different vantage point. Although my first radio play, Everyman čili Kdokoli, is based on the late medieval morality play, the personas and their experiences are contemporary. What was spiritual soul searching in the original has become intimate, contemplative songs in our version. Košice 1923 has no direct source but deals with great inner turmoil in the lives of four female characters who experience a seemingly dull day. My latest play, Zapeklitě! (Hell of a Fix), which I wrote for the Slovácké Theatre in Uherské Hradiště, could very well be set in this day and age.

After almost 100 years, Aesthetics of the Dramatic Art, which you co-edited and co-translated, has been published in English. Why did it take so long?
The semiotician Ivo Osolsobě has devoted almost his entire professional life to Zich’s work. For him, it was the greatest book ever written about theatre. Together with his colleague, the English scholar Samuel Kostomlatský, Osolsobě prepared an English translation of the work at the behest of the famous linguist Roman Jakobson, but he never got around to publishing it. Encouraged by the classical philologist and theatre scholar Eva Stehlíková and the CzechCanadian Slavic scholar Veronika Ambros, David Drozd from the Department of Theatre Studies became the main editor, and Tomáš Kačer from the Department of English and American Studies and I translated the book anew. Josh Overton, my former student and co-author at Hull, joined us as language editor.

What makes Otakar Zich’s work so important that the whole world deserves to know about it?
Zich has written a meticulous and systematic study of the creative work in the theatre, covering everyone from actors, playwrights, directors, dramaturgs and scenographers to opera composers. And although it is now almost a century old, not much has changed about this anthropological dive into the theatre organism. We sent the manuscript to colleagues abroad and to leading world figures in theatre theory, and they agree with us. The book is a real gem of Czech scholarship.

You worked at Masaryk University, now you live in East Yorkshire. What surprised you when you started working at a foreign university 12 years ago?
What surprised me most was the extent to which corporate capitalism has infiltrated the British academic environment and how tuition fees have devalued it. I still haven’t got over it, to be honest. Perhaps that is why I’m so passionate about building connections with the international community of scholars and artists – be it the Authors’ Reading Month or the Prague Quadrennial, with whom I’ve been working as a curator since 2017. This truly global community makes art and creates a more just, open and educated society. Given the upsurge in nationalism, whether it’s xenophobic hysteria and crazy responses to refugee crises, or the disaster of Brexit, I believe such cross-cultural learning and meeting is the most important thing for the humanities, social studies and the arts.

Discussion at the 2024 Authors’ Reading Month.