Jiří Suchý

* 1931

  • "Well, suddenly the revolution came and that was pretty ugly in Spořilov. Because they were doing the dragnet on Germans there. Simply, when he was German - it was not about what he did during the war or anything, but he was German, so they locked him up. They forced to place them under the church in the hall where Ivan Vyskočil played the theater. They put everyone there. Then, after a month, they were taken somewhere - suddenly buses came there and loaded them and took them somewhere. I came to the hall and it was splashed with blood. They were going there to beat them at night. Mr. Sieber, he was a businessman, I went for milk to him every day. They put him there. Viola from Prácheň, she was such a crazy writer, small, so weird, and she was an antisemitismus follower. Once, I was walking down the street and I met two revolutionary guardsmen - they were like those in the uniforms of the German freikorps who were in Africa at the time. So, they had those African uniforms and here they had the RG brand. The uniforms were in storage here, so they issued the uniforms. And they were leading the poor girl, she was beaten, bruises everywhere, just like that. And then they brought her and thrown her under the church, and in two days she was lying there covered with a paper pack, dead. Well, it was terrible. Of course. Then they brought out all the women and shaved their heads in the square. Everything was very rough. Then, the buses arrived for them, the revolutionary guards stood there, and as the frightened people came out, they beat them with their butts."

  • "And Jiří Šlitr played the Devil from Vinohrady in the evening. It was a performance where only he played, where I did not play with him. It was his recital. I then had a beneficial theatre performance, and at time he wasn't there. On that day a newspaper was published and there was a list of people who were abroad. Karel Gott was in Munich, I think. And my name was written there, that I was in London. So, it was generally known that I was abroad. And when the show ended, there was a curtain call, so I came on stage there - and I have never experienced such applause as that day. They were just so happy that someone was also coming back, it was an incredibly long applause. I performed there then, we were singing songs, we did such a thing… and it was extremely emotionally tense, the situation. Well, and so I stayed here."

  • "They probably put a more elite unit here, because they apparently had something here - they probably had some training, because, for example, they handed out cigarettes, box by box to men. They said: ‚Do you smoke? Do you smoke?‘ It was very friendly and cheerful. I was very enthusiastic about the Red Army, because unlike those Germans who were so reserved, these were… I was impressed, for example… I was walking around Spořilov and suddenly, there was a Russian with an accordion sitting on the sidewalk and singing a Chastushka. He played the accordion, and as I walked around, he laughed looking guilty. It was all very nice.”

  • "I also thank to the Communist Party for its popularity - not of that party, but of Reduta - because we sang songs there that were completely different from the official ones. At that time… because jazz was banned, rock'n'roll - it was not allowed to be here at all. And we played both. Down in the basement. And not only that. The songs that were played upstairs - I always say upstairs - I mean in Prague and in the whole republic - were not bad. They were beautiful songs, but they were very docile. Vladimír Dvořák, for example, he was one of our best lyricists, the songs were like, ‚Good night, the breeze whispers softly to you‘. Those simply very beautiful songs. Or About Kristýna, it was a huge hit. And instead of these docile songs, we sang songs that I mostly made lyrics to and I also sang them. One was called 'I broke my aunt's hand' - blues, or 'A calf shot a cow' it was called, 'Dumb dog,' but that's just the way it was. And those people were wild and free. It got around, and in two months it was packed with people there.”

  • "Always, when I went there… and I didn't even meet this person in the 'tile room' anymore, but he always invited me to the hotel Intercontinental, for example. We sat there and talked. And I always said to my wife, 'I'm going to play chess.' Because I knew – it will take some time - what I can say, what I can't say, how to slip out of something, how to get around this, how to divert attention elsewhere. And imagine, I enjoyed it. I don't know, on the one hand, I was always a little scared of it, but when I was there, I prevaricated… I even deliberately named two people who reported on me. About whom I was sure of, but who treated me very much - like they were on my side. I knew exactly... because it was even a matter of having a connection to Biľak and so on. That's how I always said, 'But you know, look out, look out, this man treated me like that,' and so on. And they were surprised. They couldn't say anything, could they. So, I named two people twice who reported on me. Also, they asked me about the sculptor Preclík. I said, 'He is a great man. What do you have against him?' He said, 'Well, we have certain reservations about him regarding the socialism.' I said, 'I would never say that about him! Because whenever we met, he was always normal and his relationship with the present was never hostile in any way. Or at least I never felt it.'

  • “The students were on strike, and this was already in December, I remember precisely that it was on December 24th, and we set out to visit various faculties. And the students were there and we supported them in various ways, talking with them, singing for them, and so on. And it was very nice, they always had freshly baked cakes and such, because people kept bringing it there for them. When we stopped at the sixth faculty in row, we even had to refuse, we could not eat anymore. And this was something very memorable: by midnight we have visited all the faculties and after we left the last one, I was driving Jitka Molavcová home, and when I was then coming back to my home, it was midnight, and on our radio – still a socialist radio – they were broadcasting the midnight mass. And this was something very emotional. At that moment I realized that the regime had come to an end.”

  • “The situation in the radio was somewhat special, because I was forbidden to work in the radio, the director Riško issued a prohibition, but since there were many departments and the staff were continually changing, and they were not passing these instructions to the others... After some two years they suddenly began calling me, asking if I could make some program for them, and so I did. And they were then broadcasting it for a long time, until somebody noticed, then they would ban it again, but meanwhile another department asked me for cooperation, and I was not telling them that I was not allowed to, and nobody even informed me of that officially, and thus I have broadcast a great number of programs on the radio, and till they realized that they actually had me in their territory, I had always managed to prepare some programs.”

  • “Basically, I had to face the consequences of some of my signatures, like my signing the Two Thousand Words manifesto, or the Several Sentences, or there was a petition for Václav Havel’s release from prison. And I have signed all of them, and naturally it had its consequences. It was the worst in the early 1970s, and it dragged on till about 1985, then certain thawing set in. After that, they even let me travel to Finland as a director, and I was even allowed to make two films after 1985. Because the regime did not feel so confident anymore. But till that time, I was almost not allowed to do anything. I was allowed to be active in theatre, they did not dare to ban me from that, because Semafor was still immensely popular. To that extent that comrade Balážová made that memorable statement on TV, saying that they would not allow me to work in television, but that they would let me rot in that parish house of mine. By parish house she meant the theatre. And I still haven’t become rotten, as you can see.”

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Praha, 07.10.2009

    (audio)
    duration: 13:23
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Praha, 04.07.2018

    (audio)
    duration: 01:50:51
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 3

    Praha, 21.09.2018

    (audio)
    duration: 01:47:02
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 4

    Praha, 26.06.2019

    (audio)
    duration: 01:23:17
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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Humor is my nature

Jiří Suchý
Jiří Suchý
photo: foto: Petr Neubert

Jiří Suchý was born on October 1, 1931 in Pilsen. In 1955, he was at the birth of the Reduta Theater. Its jazz and rock’n’roll disrupted the authorities’ ideas about socialist art from the very beginning. In 1958 he co-founded the Na Zábradlí Theater, and a year later he created the Semafor Theater with Jiří Šlitr, which has made a significant contribution to the history of Czech theater and popular music. While the relaxed 1960s were among the most successful in his career, the 1970s became a period of difficult zigzagging. Due to the signing of the manifesto Two Thousand Words in 1968, he was restricted in his artistic activities in the 1970s. He was not allowed to appear on television, on the radio, he could not make films, he was not allowed to publish books, he was deprived of his leading position at the Semafor theater. The activities of Semafor were influenced by the interest of the State Security, which monitored Jiří Suchý and many other employees and invited them to regular interrogations. In 1977, Jiří Suchý refused to sign the so-called Anti-charter. In 1989, on the other hand, he signed a petition for the release of Václav Havel from prison and the manifesto Several Sentences. In November 1989, the Semafor Theater, like other Czech theaters, went on strike and held discussions with the audience instead of performing. In November and December 1989, at the same time, Jiří Suchý and Jitka Molavcová toured the striking universities to support them. After the regime change in 1989, he returned to the leadership of the Semafor theatre. As early as in 1988, Jiří Suchý was convinced that the communist regime would collapse soon. In spite of that, he was indeed surprised by the course of the events. Together with other Czech theatres, his theatre Semafor joined the strike following the brutal police intervention against the student demonstration on 17th November, and instead of the performance, they held a discussion with the audience on that evening. In December his ensemble was then supporting the students´ strikes by visiting the individual faculties and talking with the students. The end of the totalitarian regime made it possible for Jiří Suchý to devote himself to independent pursuit of his artistic activities. He became the manager of the Semafor theatre again, and he introduced the play “Heigh-ho, or There will be no Hell, and the Paradise is Coming Back,” which was a reaction to the social changes of the time. In order to summarize the twenty-year era of freedom, Jiří Suchý borrowed the words from one of his plays. “Now we have arrived to an early stage of capitalism, and capitalism is much better than socialism, but it is worse than I had expected.”