Rudolf Felzmann

“(What was the cause of your father’s death?) Skin cancer. Perhaps it would have been possible to treat it, but it was after the war and he was German. Our dad had spent several months in the camp, where there were Germans awaiting their deportation. I remember that we brought him a paper Christmas tree there. It was shortly before his death: Dad then died in the middle of January.”

“When I was a student at the pedagogical school, from time to time there was an opportunity to act in a play or a scene or something like that. That’s where my attempts at directing began, because if I wanted to act, I had to put the whole play together, direct it, and sometimes I had to write the script as well. The performance of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt was done at the pedagogical faculty as a kind of protest, in a way. Grieg’s music played an important part in it, and I loved his music. Perhaps it was thanks to Grieg that my affinity to music grew. I directed the Peer Gynt play, although I acted the main role in it as well. I was then doing it like this for many years to come, and only later I began to focus purely on directing. It became a principle for me in the amateur as well as in the professional theatre for me.”

“I kept reading books all the time, I was going to theatre and I was thinking about how the directors and scene artists and others were doing it. I tried to get as much as possible from their work, and for me, it was a certain substitution for the fact that I have not studied directing nor dramaturgy at school. Many interesting books started to be published in the 1970s, informing about dramaturgy in the world and about the famous directors – now there was no longer just Stanislavsky! It was interesting when Radovan Lukavský transcribed Stanislavsky’s method of actors’ work and thus he brought it closer to a contemporary Czech actor. I was absorbing all these things and sharing them with my colleagues from the amateur theatre.”