Authors
Arnošt GOLDFLAM
Arnošt Goldflam is a writer-director and director-dramatist who was born in 1946 in Brno. He failed to complete his studies of Medicine, was engaged as a manual worker and a clerk, and was a member of Jan Novák’s humorous “Brno Bohemia” group. He has also been active in the plastic arts. Between 1972 and 1976 he studied Theatre Direction at JAMU [Janáček Academy of Music and Drama] in Brno. In the early 1970s Goldflam was an actor at the Husa na provázku [Goose on a String] theatre, and he also worked with several other companies. In 1977 he was appointed actor and director at the Haná Theatre, which at that time was in Prostějov. Since 2003 he has been engaged by the Klicper Theatre in Hradec Králové.He also does film and television work.
The dramas of Arnošt Goldflam occupy the space where an understanding of the melancholic borders on the comic. With sensitivity and irony Goldflam records the minutiae of the ostensible everyday, with an erring and doubting individual set against a background of historical upheaval even when the scene is at its most banal. Though his characters are occasionally perplexed by their own suffering and sadness, Goldflam shows little compassion in revealing them in their selfishness, blindness and ridiculousness as he parodies literary fashions seemingly at random. The author approaches the heroes of his works with empathy, lays bare their private worlds, and then distances himself from them coolly. Arnošt Goldflam’s range of themes is clearly limited and is run through with games which mutate and vary. His works are often played out in the bosom of the family, with an emphasis on the son’s existential road to maturity. The son attempts to draw his life’s boundaries, to rebel, to escape. Cross-generational conflict and dreams of escape lead ultimately to disillusion. Causality and chronology are overpowered by association and the violation of the boundaries of linearity. The reality expels the dream or imagining; the real world is founded on endless doubt. In the play I Is Someone Else both hero and environment succumb to never-ending metamorphosis; the hero’s age and role within the family are subject to constant change and challenge. Though initially the situation is for the most part absolutely realistic, this changes gradually into something dreamlike, bizarre and absurd. Objectivity is disrupted by a subjective, inner view of the world. The similar plays Pavel Jedlička and Jenda Krahulík and The Contract begin with the monotony of getting up in the morning, while the events to come distance themselves so as to be in diametric opposition to the everyday. Arnošt Goldflam’s dramas are not monolithic, graduated stories; they are mosaics of pictures. The plot is subject to frequent interruption or else it develops in a star shape alongside related literary, musical and other motifs. The concrete space-time continuum is penetrated by memories, snatches of songs and imaginings. Goldflam favours detail over the whole, a single situation over unified action so as to capture minutiae in observation. Often he includes in his plays elements of the autobiographical, the most obvious of which are the author’s own childhood and Jewishness. But even this latter is not addressed with unambiguous seriousness; in the shadow of death the author mixes the high with the low, the comic with the tragic. In the play Sweet Theresienstadt the scene of a concentration camp is captured through anecdote as a sequence of lovers’ escapades. Consciousness of one’s Jewish origin is a major theme of another play which is heavily autobiographical – Sand (So Long Ago); this work is like an intimate diary, within which the author interweaves fiction and authentic experience. In Goldflam’s plays we find strains of absurd theatre, grotesque hyperbole, denial of the theatrical illusion and an ambivalence in interpretation. Part of his oeuvre comprises pastiches of foreign literature. There are motifs from the Bible in the plays The Return of the Prodigal Son and The Contract – a variation on the story of Abraham and Isaac, the motif of the sacrificed son. The inspiration for the play The Eyes of the Errant Stars is Ivan Olbricht’s story The Sad Eyes of Hana Karadžičová. Sweet Theresienstadt or The Fuehrer Gave the Jews a Town draws on the diaries of Theresienstadt inmate and First-Republic journalist Willy Mahler. Goldflam also uses his plays to experiment with literary genres and established modes, as is clear from the title of his monodrama The Red Library [this being the name of a series of works of popular romantic fiction]. The interplay of the most various genres is the basis of the play One Night or A Dream, while a parody of literary cliché appears in Blue Face.
(dv)
This author profile was last updated in 2007
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Arnošt GOLDFLAM, Deutsch.doc
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