Ludmila Janská

"So they were throwing people out of the party. Different ones, but I don't even know who all. But they didn't throw anybody out of the theatre, and for example, a guy like Felix Le Breux was in the party, and he was sick during that '68, so he didn't get thrown out. But a lot of people were thrown out and then, like, somebody has to go back to the party and so... We were three dramaturgs and none of us in the party, and so the director said, 'Well, somebody's going to have to, or I'm going to have to engage a party member. Some of you will have to leave.' Well, it was quite exciting. Well, but then my colleague gave in and worked it out and joined the party and made it through. And I went to the director privately at this time and I said, 'Director, just so you know, if I were invited to join the party, I couldn't.' And he says, 'Be calm, nobody's going to entice you.'"

"Well, and I met him once, I think it was 1987 or something like that. There was one... Edward Albee came, the playwright. I went to see him, but I forgot my invitation, I was late, and they wouldn't let me in. Because to keep people from coming... and Havel went there and they wouldn't let him go either. So we stayed in the courtyard, there in the Theatre Institute, and I talked to him for a while, and what happened, within a week I was followed by a cop. So they took a picture of me, found me, and somebody was following me. And he said, 'We would like you to tell us...' - I was invited to these cocktails at the Americans or the English, so I used to go there sometimes when there were visitors and so on. 'We would like you, when you go on these visits, to tell us who comes there from the dissidents', because it was already the Gorbachev years and these people were already coming. Before that... not before that, before that they didn't dare. But that's why I went there, because I wasn't that interesting. I used to be... I went to London through the British Council, so they knew about me. Well, who would they invite? So they invited me. And then they went there. Jarda Kořán went there, Havel went there, and various people, and once we were at a cocktail party at the cultural attaché's flat in Náměstí Míru. It was a big flat, several rooms, and now it was full of people, and I was there with my husband, with my second husband, and I said, 'Hey, there is Havel coming, let's go somewhere else so that someone won't report me for not reporting him. And we'll go over there to Zdeněk Urbánek's.' He was also a Chartist, but he was our collaborator. 'Let's go to Zdeněk's.' So we went to him and he was standing with a man with glasses and he said, 'Let me introduce you. This is Jiří Hájek, the current spokesman for the Charter."

"Then came Charter and Anticharter. At that moment they arrested our former director Ornest and two other people, Pavlíček and Lederer. Pavlíček as director of Vinohrady [Theatre at Vinohrady] and a certain journalist, Lederer. So it was like, 'Look out, look out, something's happening!' And besides, my daughter was in the eighth grade and my son was already in a secondary school graduation or a pre-graduation year. And I thought, 'What kind of tricks am I going to do so that these kids don't have the same fate as their father, who has never been allowed to do anything?' So I ended up signing the Anticharter. And I would like it to be known that there are always such personal examples. I cried because of it. But I just told myself, 'I can't do that.' When I saw that everybody came in one by one and signed - the actors, everybody. So I'm not going to be the one who's focusing the attention on myself to get them to go after me. I don't mind, I'll go wash the underground, but I don't want these kids to experience what their father did. So those are the different reasons. Maybe those kids would be proud of me and they'd be happy to put up with it, but I know that the children of the Chartists paid a lot for it."

“Then we staged a play by some author from East Germany. It was a decent play about Joan of Arc. It was a kind of a fantasy play, and they did not burn Joan of Arc at the stake, but they burnt somebody else instead and they hid her somewhere in a convent. And then some years later she is in the convent and she talks with the nuns. I don’t remember anymore what the problem was, but they then banned the play, because there were five nuns as if five armies of the Warsaw Pact which had occupied Czechoslovakia. We thus had to take the play down. Sometimes a play was staged with the awareness that it was a bit provocative, but at other times we staged some play and we did not have a clue and the audience was picking those juicy bits for themselves and responding with joy.”

“We staged the play A Delicate Balance, which is a kind of a family drama. A couple, their daughter who is just getting a divorce and who makes a mess in the house. Their friends, a husband and wife, come and they say that they are afraid to be in their home and they ask whether they would be allowed to stay with them. The family lets them in and not only that they become a bit of a nuisance… And now imagine that this was the reason why the play was withdrawn. Because they were unwelcome visitors. And the tanks which arrived to our country in 1968 were an unwelcome visit as well.”

“At that time, people naturally hang on to whatever was slightly anticommunist, for instance, and they reacted to that. When we prepared a play, it would often happen that some committee would come to the final rehearsal and they would tell us: ‘You are allowed or you are not allowed to stage it.’ Or they had comments: ‘That word should not be there, and it should not be like this.’ For example, we staged Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, and there is doctor Astrov who says in the play: ‘Look how it looked here fifty years ago. There were forests everywhere, and it was so beautiful. And now see how it looks today.’ This happened to be on the 50th anniversary of establishment of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. I thus had to correct the fifty years to sixty years, because otherwise it would have already been wrong.”