Miloš Dvořák

"I was sitting on the pavement outside the house and suddenly opposite me - some lady lived there, Nepokojová was her name - leaned out of the window, towards the people on the street, and she started shouting: 'Peace is here!' - I didn't know what that was, so I ran home to ask, and because of that I remember it so well, how I asked mum, she was home, dad was probably at work: 'What is peace?' Kind of like, I don't know if the word was banned during the war or whether I just hadn't heard it yet, right."

"That was a kind of, I wouldn't like to say, excuse. He could say that too, right, but basically he had a couple of drinks more, and he had this idea that he has to get from the theatre to the big theatre, because that's where he lived, on Lidice Square. And they were building something there, I don't know if it was Labe (a shopping centre - ed.) or what. There at the bus station or somewhere was this fence, like you have around construction sites, and he crashed into it and caused some seven hundred crowns in damages. No one was hurt, not him, not anyone else. They didn't catch him there, but by the time he got to the theatre in his car - which was also still mobile - then they were waiting for him and they snatched him up, right. Well obviously, that's the correct thing, there were some laws about that, there always are, but it's true that - Tomáš Töpfer told me the story at the time, he was in Ostrava beforehand, right, and there was this actor there, or he was the boss even and he was in television all the time, Vochoč his name was, who was driving drunk in Ostrava just a short time before this incident, and he crashed five cars, parked cars that is, and of course they didn't even prosecute him, because he was their man."

"That was kind of, how he brought in his young friends - this is Vašek Beránek - he came on, he did the playwriting, so he had the idea, because he knew what the situation was like during Pecháček (art director of TTS 1986-87 - ed.), right. And he realised after some - I don't know, well it wasn't hard to tell I guess, right, he met people, talked with me - so everyone was glad he was there, so he had the idea that he simply has to change everything, including the operations side of things, and start something completely new with his group of youngsters. But I think that was just for a short time, that, I don't know, during half a month, a month, then actually, what he did with the notice he gave me, then he took it back, he only gave it to me verbally and I can't remember now, I was rather surprised and I don't think I was servile or anything, I just said: 'If you think so.' But maybe even he, after some talking, maybe he talked with some people, right, or maybe he came to understand things. So we got on, I think, very well after that."

"We were here (in Prague - ed.) with Snítilý (manager of the State Theatre of Zdeněk Nejedlý in Ústí-upon-Labe - ed.) and with Chundela (art director of The Theatrical Studio - ed.) to see the final year students of DAMU (Theatrical Academy of Arts - transl.). That was the class with Tomáš Töpfer, Lábus and Petr Vaněk, so when we were speaking with them after a graduation performance in The Disc (Disk), then I know they didn't make a very good impression on us, because someone had promised them that the whole class would go to Jablonec. And we asked: 'Who could have promised you that?' Because we were in the same region, and we know how it was with finances at the time, right. Someone had promised it to them, and we said: 'How much money do they have for you?' And someone, I don't know if it was Töpfer or someone, said: 'Well, they have some twenty or forty thousand to start with, and something we have to earn.' Just simply naïve ideas. Of course it was ridiculous, and obviously that's not what happened in the end. The only outcome was that Petr Vaněk ended up with us, the only one of that class."

"He was an exceptional person. That was one advantage of Ústí, that when Evald came there, he obviously stayed there, and so he spent all the time between rehearsals with us, right, so you have this person by your side who is - well, who is special, but it's hard to explain, you'd have to know him. He was - it didn't really look like he was directing, he always came there - but everyone says that about him, right, everyone who worked with him, even afterwards at Na zábradlí ('On the railing', a Prague theatre - transl.), he would say: 'Well then, children, what will we do with it, well?' One time I saw him get slightly angry, he raised his voice - and that was during a, as they call it, a technical rehearsal, right, that's when they bring in the props - the ones that are actually supposed to be in the play. And there wasn't much of it that time, that was to do with Diogenes (the play 'Diogenes the Cynic'), some sort of fences that were a bit different in the end from what they brought there. He sort of flew into a rage and started stomping on them, saying this wouldn't do, this wasn't what he had in mind. But that was maybe the only time I saw him angry. Something like Krejčík (the director Jiří Krejčík - ed.) I guess."