The Liberated Theatre

1938

Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich, the comic dyad whose Osvobozené divadlo defined Prague's interwar political cabaret. Place: Umělecká beseda hall, Vodičkova street · later Adria Palace Figures: Jiří Voskovec · Jan Werich · Jaroslav Ježek, composer (from 1929) · Jindřich Honzl, director Voskovec is 21, just back from a lycée in Dijon. Werich is 21, his classmate at the Prague law faculty. They write a sketch revue called Vest Pocket Revue in 1926; they perform it themselves in the spring of 1927 in a hall borrowed from the Umělecká beseda artists' society on Vodičkova street. The hall holds three hundred. The reviews are extraordinary. By autumn they have a name (Osvobozené divadlo, the Liberated Theatre, lifted from the Soviet avant-garde directors but emptied of doctrine) and a permanent company under the directorship of Jindřich Honzl. By 1929 they have Jaroslav Ježek at the piano, a 23-year-old jazz composer trained at the conservatory, half-deaf and nearly blind, who will write more than sixty songs for them in ten years. This photograph dates from 1938.