The play Maryša follows a young woman who finds herself in a society that doesn’t value strong women. Her family pushes her into a marriage she doesn’t want with an older widower instead of the young man she is in love with. This decision has tragic consequences, and not only for her.
The story of Maryša is familiar to most Czechs. The play is seen as one of the foundational works of Czech realism and is included among the works to study for the maturita at the end of secondary school. Even for those who didn’t actually read the play at school, parts of it have seeped into the everyday cultural lexicon and get passed around until some don’t even know where they came from.
Until now, this work was not accessible to people who don’t speak Czech, but it is now being brought to the stage in English by Czech Theater at Vesna on Údolní 10 on 30 November and 1, 7, & 8 December. This gives more people the opportunity to understand the relevance of phrases like “coffee from the Jew”, “a life to drown for”, and “that’s a horse and that’s a person”.
Czech Theater is an amateur, multicultural, community theatre founded in Brno in 2018 with the goal of making Czech theatre accessible to the non-Czech speaking community and also giving Czechs the opportunity to see their own culture through a different lens. They have been putting on plays in Brno since 2018 with people who’ve come to Brno from across the world, or just around the corner. This performance was made possible by people with at least 18 different nationalities.
The authors of the play, Alois and Vilém Mrštík, drew inspiration from their own lives in villages around Brno. When it was first being produced, its use of direct language and realistic depictions of villagers made the National Theatre fear it wouldn’t be successful and so the premiere was in the afternoon, rather than the evening. It went on to become one of the most, if not the most, frequently produced Czech plays ever. And its authors have been immortalized with a statue in front of Janáček Theatre.
The play was inspired by real events, but reality wasn’t quite as tragic. The woman who inspired the character of Maryša ended up living together with her husband for almost 40 years and had seven children with him. If you pay a visit to Těšany just outside Brno, you may be able to find a grave with the epitaph “Napsáno drama, prožito větší” (loosely translated as “Had a drama written about them, experienced a greater one”).
Tickets are available for the second weekend of shows: 7 December and 8 December.
