The Bouda Theatre

JAN 01 1786 · 12:00

Václav Thám, dramatist and director of the Vlastenské divadlo. In July 1786 he opened a wooden booth (bouda) on the Horse Market, the first stage in Prague to perform in Czech for paying audiences. The structure stood five years. Place: Horse Market (now Wenceslas Square), Prague New Town Figures: Václav Thám, dramatist and director · Karel Hynek Thám, his brother, philologist · the journeyman actors of the Vlastenské divadlo company The Patriotic Theatre, Vlastenské divadlo, opens in July 1786 in a hastily timbered building on what is then the Horse Market (Koňský trh), at the foot of the long sloping square that will be renamed for Saint Wenceslas in 1848. Prague calls it Bouda, the Shed. The walls are pine, the roof is leaky, the auditorium holds about nine hundred at a press. It is the first permanent stage in Bohemia to play in Czech. Václav Thám, a twenty-one-year-old playwright who has been agitating for Czech-language theatre since his student days at the Klementinum, is the driving force. The repertoire is mixed: translations of Schiller and Shakespeare, original Czech historical plays (Thám's own Břetislav a Jitka), German comedies in alternation. On Czech evenings the audience is bricklayers, journeymen, women from the Vinohrady villages who would not be seated in the Nostitz house, and a thin layer of patriots from the university.