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My First Encounter with Karel Čapek by Voyen Koreis
Only seven full days remained to the premiere, and
while I was assured that there would be full rehearsals held every night,
the mission that stretched ahead was a fearsome one. The Robber, whom I
was to play, is on the stage for the best part of three hours, and I
realised that learning the lines properly was not going to be easy, even
for my young and flexible brain. After the two men left, leaving the
script in my hand, I walked to the nearby forest, and laying on the grass
in a nice little glade where no one could hear me, till the late afternoon
I worked seriously on memorising the role. By the evening I was already on
the first name terms with my one time foe, and we were rehearsing
enthusiastically, full of optimism. There isn’t a great deal the author of this play
provides in the way of instructions, but it is obvious that the Robber is
meant to be quite a young man, perhaps not much more than twenty, possibly
a student. When I appeared in the same play about three years later in one
of the minor roles, this time however on the professional stage, the
character was played by an actor who must have been in his mid-forties.
Some of his efforts, like the attempts at scaling and falling off the
wall, which are an important part of the production, looked laborious and
perhaps even slightly ridiculous. I could not help feeling rather jumpy
while watching him from the wings, but I knew my place in the pecking
order. Now, at eighteen I was young and supple; so climbing up a wall that
was about eight feet high presented no great problem. I had to rehearse
the scene well enough though, as when in the first act he finds himself on
the top of the wall, the Robber is shot at, and wounded, by his rival in
love, the Forester. The jealous Forester is provoked into shooting at the
Robber by his daring leap onto the top of the wall and by his sardonic
exclamation “Adieu, imperishable marksman!” The hero’s fall off the wall should be spectacular enough for the audience to gasp loudly. When during the dress rehearsal we had ran through the shooting scene it soon became obvious that the traditional method of providing sound to the riffle being shot on stage, by hitting a plank against the wooden floor, brought about a whimper that was quite useless in the open-air theatre. For the full effect we not only needed the gunshot to be loud and impressive, but also its echo to mightily reverberate in the surrounding woods. An expert from the forestry department was called in, who at speed arranged for two proper hunting guns to be lent to us, an empty one to be carried on the stage by the Forester and the other, loaded with a dummy cartridge, to be shot from behind the scene. This proved satisfactory. On the first night the house, roofed with the starry
canopy offering a perfect drop to the lyrical night love scenes that with
my limited experience I had not anticipated without trepidation, was near
full. In the early sixties, television was still in its infancy, and
inhabitants of a small town like ours usually had little else to do on a
Saturday evening but go to the cinema or, if they had the opportunity, to
the theatre. After the six days spent on diligently learning my lines, and
the six nights of intense rehearsing with the other actors, I was
reasonably confident and comfortable in the role and except for the loves
scenes, surprisingly little nervous. But fate spared me from having to be
a romantic lover, at least on this one night. No one will ever know how it
happened that in the muddle that goes together with every first night, the
two guns to be used in the shooting scene were accidentally switched, with
the loaded one finding its way into the Forester’s hands. I leaped onto
the top of the wall, waved my stage adversary good-bye while uttering the
confrontational words after which, while standing close to the wall, he
pulled the trigger. The sound was indeed thunderous, and to my surprise I
could also see a flame come out from the business end of the Forester’s
riffle. At the same time I felt something hot scorching my right thigh.
The fall off the wall onto a piece of grassy carpet laid there for the
purpose I performed well, exactly as I had rehearsed it. However, even as
the echoes of the gunshot were still heard coming back from the forest, I
already knew that something was not right. Lying with my left side towards
the audience, unobserved I could use my right hand to feel my thigh, which
had begun to hurt a great deal while swelling up alarmingly. Eventually my
probing fingers reached a hole in the charred fabric of the trouser, and
felt a large open wound underneath it. At this moment I knew that I was in
serious trouble. Meanwhile the play continued, several villagers crowded
the scene and, in accordance to the script, attended to my imaginary head
wound, finally loading me onto a barrow and wheeling me off the stage.
While all this went on I continued to act as the wounded Robber, even
though it was becoming clear to me that I would not be able to continue
acting to the end of the play. The performance had to be called off, and an
ambulance arrived. On the operating table in the hospital, the doctor on
duty extracted from my wounded leg substantial parts of the cartridge -
most of the shell together with several pieces of felt plugs, cardboard,
etc. which had no time to disperse as they would have done had the shot
been fired from a longer distance. After the treatment I was left with a
prominent scar a good ten centimetres long, which to this day reminds me
of my first major stage role. I don’t even want to think about what
could have happened if the Forester had aimed higher (according to the
script the shot is supposed to brush the side of the Robber’s head…) I
stayed in the hospital for about two weeks and some days later, still
limping slightly, I was able to play the role to the end. Also several
times after that, always in front of large audiences, as the fame of the
Robber shot on the stage grew to high proportions, almost becoming a
national legend. Even those who before this event would never come near
the theatre suddenly found it irresistible. Soon after this incident I left the town to live
elsewhere, eventually altogether leaving the country. Nevertheless, I
cannot possibly leave out of this narrative an episode that occurred more
than three decades later. I came back to visit my old hometown, after a
long journey from Australia, where I had been living for many years. With
a former schoolmate we went to a pub. One of our peers sits there; he
casually looks me over as if I had never left the town, and declares in a
dry manner: “I’m
not talking to you!” “What
have I done?”, I ask him. “You
caused me getting into a big trouble with my old man.” This called for an explanation, and subsequently it
turned out that the poor fellow was dating a girl that his parents did not
want him to go out with, mainly because she was Jewish. Parental authority
was still strong in those days and especially in these parts of the world,
as was xenophobia. On the same night I was stricken with the gunshot he
was with her, stricken by love. When his parents asked him later how he
had spent the night, he innocently declared that he was in the theatre
with friends. Understandably he knew nothing at all about the shooting
accident, which so easily could have ended my life, and of which the whole
town was talking. With the deception thus revealed, naturally, his
disbelieving parents were not impressed. I bought him a drink or two and all was well again.
On the next day in the town square, coincidentally I ran into the girl,
also my classmate, who was the other party in the clandestine rendezvous.
I questioned her about it and she
confessed that she too was severely disciplined by her parents for the
same transgression, that she broke up with the guy soon after this, and
ended up eventually marrying another man whose parents were more
broadminded, having several children, and by then even some grandchildren.
This too called for a drink. In the nearby pub where I had invited her, we
drunk to our glorious though long departed youth and, naturally, to Karel Čapek,
who had made such an unexpected and profound impression on our lives. ***
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