Academic literature on the topic 'Czech Television plays'

The Communist past is perceived negatively by modern Czechs and since Russia is the successor of the Soviet Union, a negative image can effect the coverage of Russian-Czech relations and the image of modern Russia in the Czech media. The study applied qualitative and quantitative content analysis to study the coverage of Russian-Czech relations by the leading television channels of the Czech Republic Česká televize 1 and Prima. The findings of the analysis of 1,195 video news illustrate that Russia plays a significant role on the international agenda of Česká televize 1 and Prima. The main feature of the coverage is a focus on the political and historical element of the Russian-Czech relations. 49 % of video news about Russian-Czech relations by Česká televize 1 were dedicated to politics, 28 % were about history, 8 % to sports and culture. A recurring theme in analyzed news about Russian-Czech relations is freedom’s theme. Česká televize 1 and Prima primarily focus on coverage of events inside the Czech Republic (at least 60 % of the analyzed news stories). Czech TV channels have a tendency to create heroic images of people criticizing authorities of the Russian Federation (B. Nemtsov, A. Politkovskaya after whom the Czechs named two city facilities in Prague). Another feature is the indirect creation of Russia’s image as a large militarized country, which played the role of an oppressor for the Czechs in the recent past.

Public television is present in every European country, and it position on the market has been changing during the process of transition from monopoly to oligopoly and further towards monopolistic competition market. In most transition countries of the European Union, this process started in early 1990s and today public television represents only one player on the market. This paper analyzes the position of public television in 8 countries: Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia for the period from 1995 till 2019. The goal of this research is to analyze the changes in the market share of public television, as well as to compare public television position in these 8 countries. This will be done by applying descriptive statistic methods on the data about audience. The audience represents the market share, and it is analyzed on the level of each public TV channel. Countries are further divided into three groups, those with strong, middle and weak position of public television. Additionally, concentration analysis based on HHI will show how similar or different these markets are. The results show that the market power of public television has fallen in the analyzed period. Despite of that, in the majority of the 8 analyzed countries, public television still plays an important role on the market.

Václav Havel's plays of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were evaluated primarily for their dissident content. Leaving, which he wrote in 2007, followed his thirteen-year premiership and presidency of the Czech Republic. In this article, Michelle Woods asks whether perception of Havel's plays in England was confined to their alleged politics, how this view affected their translation, adaptation, and reception, and whether they can now be read beyond the ideological positions of the Cold War. She focuses on Protest at the Royal National Theatre in London in 1980 and Sorry on BBC Television in 1977, as well as on two commissions which failed to be produced: The Garden Party for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1964 and The Conspirators for the National in 1970. She argues that the plays were fundamentally misread through the prism of a Western conception of East European dissidence, which determined whether they were produced or not, and led to the dismissal of Havel's translator, Vera Blackwell. Material from Blackwell's recently opened archive is here used to reassess her role in the dissemination of Havel's plays in the English-speaking world. Michelle Woods is Assistant Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz and is the author of Translating Milan Kundera (2006) and several articles on the translation of literature and film.

František Listopad was a Czech poet, novelist, essayist, theatre and television director. In 2021, the Czech Republic together with the entire Portuguese-speaking world commemorated the centenary of his birth. In addition to his extensive work in several languages, he also played a crucial role in a historic revival of Czech-Portuguese cultural relations, for which we are indebted to him. Listopad was a man of three names and several homes. He was born in 1921 in Prague as Jiří Synek. He published his first short stories under this name. During World War II, he was persecuted for his Jewish origins. However, he avoided deportation to a Nazi camp, hid with friends and was active in the resistance as a member of the illegal organization “For Freedom” (Za svobodu). For reasons of secrecy, he changed his name to František Listopad. At the same time he also began to write poetry and literary reviews. After the war, he became a co-founder of the daily Mladá fronta. After initial enthusiasm, he began to criticize the communist regime, mainly for restricting human freedoms. In 1947, he was sent to Paris as an editor of the weekly Parallele 50. After February 1948, he was ordered to come back to Czechoslovakia, but he did not return. In France, he focused mainly on writing essays and working for the emerging local television. In 1958, he moved to Portugal, where he lived until his death in 2017. Here he chose a different name – Jorge Listopad. Listopad considered Salazar’s authoritarian right-wing regime to be very restrictive, but much freer in many ways than Czechoslovakia of the time; for example, it did not prohibit citizens from travelling abroad. In Portugal, in addition to significant literary work, Listopad devoted himself mainly to theatrical productions. He also became a university teacher. He never moved back to his original homeland to stay there permanently, but after the 1989 Velvet Revolution he often travelled there. He presented his plays there and published collections of poems and short stories. In his literary and theatrical works, František Listopad often existentially reflected the life in three unfree systems: the period of Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, communism and Salazar’s dictatorship in Portugal.

The concentration camp in Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic was unique, in that it was used by the Nazis as a ‘flagship’ ghetto to deceive the world about the real fate of the Jews. It contained an extraordinarily high proportion of VIPs – so-called Prominenten, well-known international personalities from the worlds of academia, medicine, politics, and the military, as well as leading composers, musicians, opera singers, actors, and cabarettists, most of whom were eventually murdered in Auschwitz. The author, Roy Kift, who first presented this paper at a conference on ‘The Shoah and Performance’ at the University of Glasgow in September 1995, is a free-lance dramatist who has been living in Germany since 1981, where he has written award-winning plays for stage and radio, and a prizewinning opera libretto, as well as directing for stage, television, and radio. His new stage play, Camp Comedy, set in Theresienstadt, was inspired by this paper, and includes original cabaret material: it centres on the nightmare dilemma encountered by Kurt Gerron in making the Nazi propaganda film, The Fuhrer Gives the Jews a Town. Roy Kift has contributed regular reports on contemporary German theatre to a number of magazines, including NTQ. His article on the GRIPS Theater in Berlin appeared in TQ39 (1981) and an article on Peter Zadek in NTQ4 (1985).