Jiří Fisher

“Well, and then there was a period when nothing much happened and then another of my idols, actor and director Jan Kačer, came to Brno, and he brought the play One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. A famous version of the even more famous Miloš Forman’s film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We started rehearsing it, it was beautiful work and it was from a completely different source than the director Krejčík, for instance. I think that Jan actually comes from the tradition of Alfréd Radok, of Mr. Schorm, which is kind in a way, when he actually indirectly offers something to the actors and then he artificially and he very cleverly manipulates with them. The actor then feels that it was his idea, but he had been actually gently, beautifully and painlessly pushed there by the director Jan Kačer. We rehearsed the play and there was a great committee, a censoring committee, that came to the first or second dress rehearsal and they looked at it and said: ‘No, that cannot be staged. The director, Mr. Kačer, has deviated from the directorial intention, and the anti-socialist note is very clearly palpable in the play.’ Well, they simply banned it. And now we are getting to another point of decision. What to do with it next? Some comrades come and they destroy two and a half months of work, they throw it away and they just say, now, you cannot stage it, because it is an anti-socialist nonsense. Well, actually most of my colleagues bent their backs and they said, all right, then, so we will not stage it. We had a little boy, our son who was not even one year old, and I thought, no, no way, this cannot be, we cannot do it like this. And so I wrote an open letter to the minister of culture Klusák. What was behind this? How come that somebody can just come and say that the play is not to be staged, although it had been approved before, and so on.” – “Did you get a reply?” – “No, no reply came, never, but the director of the drama department at that time - I forgot his name - well, he told us: ‘Look, I have a new play for you, instead of the Cuckoo - his name was Oldřich Vykypěl, I just remembered. He was an actor, too, and by the way, in the play he was to have the role of the Chief, who tears out the water fountain block and breaks the window and runs away from the institution. He came and he said: ‘I have a great play, an excellent play, for you, as a substitute for the Cuckoo, and it is called Paganini and Frištejnský,’ and then he looked at us and said: ‘But guys, don’t be crazy, it is set in a loony bin, too.’”

“And meanwhile we also played one performance in Off-Broadway, in Village in the Greenwich House Theatre and it was called Ceremony in Bohemia, and it was a very nice performance about a court trial with VONS (The Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Persecuted – transl.‘s note). It was actually almost a documentary, about the members of VONS. There were the figures of Havel, Dienstbier, Bednářová, Benda - I played him, Němcová - my wife played her, young Němcová, who was also played by my wife, and so on. And people from Voice of America arrived to see the play. They wanted to report about it in their broadcast. They came to us after the performance and they said: ‘Look, wouldn’t you like to work for Voice of America? You speak Czech, you can speak English, and if you take translation tests and voice tests, we are certain that you would pass.’ At that time I told him: ‘Well, I don’t know, but I don’t think so,’ because at that time we still believed that we could develop our career as actors quite well. But some two or three months later the phone rang: ‘Look, we are adding two hours to our broadcast. Come, it would be great.’ And after that lost film, I said: ‘Fine. All right, let’s go. We will go there, we will go to Washington, and we will see, for one year, let’s say, it may turn out well. It may be nice. If we don’t like it, we can always go back.’ I passed the tests and we went to Washington, D.C. And well, this one year turned into thirty years in Voice of America. Since it was paid quite well, and it was interesting, and it was a very creative job and we also felt that we were somehow contributing into the mess that was taking place there, in the communist Czechoslovakia.”