1 From Radok's unpublished, tape-recorded remarks mailed to me in 1975. Unless otherwise noted, other quotations are from the same source.

2 One of his retrospective remarks is especially helpful in conveying his attitude about the roots of his culture: “It is the medieval stink of witch-burning that has made our culture so rich and strong (those rituals, along with the rituals of folk theatre and those of the Catholic Church). That's how we come close to Russia and Poland—I mean, the fact of our getting our faces slapped repeatedly through history rather than the fact of our all being Slavs. It's most apparent in music, and you can see it very clearly in Chagall. The nature of Czech theatre can best be compared to Chagall's paintings, pointing out the fact that what the west is lacking is the feeling of Chagall. And all of our dear Chagall originates from pain and tension.” Quoted by Liehm, Antonin in “Alfred Radok,” International Journal of Politics, III, 1–2 (Spring-Summer, 1973), 39Google Scholar.

3 Radok, Alfred, “Divadelní novověk [A New Age in Theatre],” Divadlo (November 1962), p. 33Google Scholar.

4 The program for The Merry Widow? referred to the young theatre's desire to create an “operetta dell'arte,” retaining the best of traditional operetta, its music and lyric esprit, but purging it of the “sweet poison” of its “false sentimentality,” its cliches and its cheap effects, all of which are associated with the unhealthy bourgeois tastes of a bygone era. The very question mark in the title of The Merry Widow? rather clearly indicates the production's satiric thrust, but some of the critics at the time attacked the young company for producing what was known to be one of Hitler's favorite works.

5 Radok often expressed his fondness for the early years of the twentieth century, viewing it as a period with an unusual tolerance for individuality, if not eccentricity; an era when nineteenth century naiveté first fully confronted the wonders of technology and was charmed by them.

6 Rumor had it that in a closed meeting of National Theatre personnel Radok was harshly condemned for decadent western formalism in choosing a work like Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes and for directing even native scripts with insufficient regard to their ideological implications. So heated was the meeting that Radok suffered the first of his several heart attacks but was accused of shamming. It was ironic that his chief accuser, the head of drama at the National Theatre at that time, Jindřich Honzl, had been a leading avant-garde pioneer in the Czech theatre of the 1920s and even early 1930s. Allegiance to the Communist line, however, made him a severe watchdog of ideological correctness in later years, especially after 1948.

7 Grossman, Jan, “Síla věcnosti [The Strength of Věcnost],” Divadlo (October 1961), p. 586Google Scholar.

8 One of his perceptive critics described the essence of Radok's method this way: “Radok is able to work with facts and concrete details like few others. He notably exploits the objective values of phenomena. But at the same time he puts them in the service of his own creative fantasy and rids the phenomena of their objectivity.…He wants to create [through the text] an entirely new, unfamiliar reality in which the objective and the subjective blend in complete unity.” Císař, Jan, “Daleká cesta fantazie [The Distant Journey of Fantasy],” Divadlo (November 1966), p. 38Google Scholar.

9 He had made one other feature length film in the meantime, Grandpa Automobile, in 1956, a wry, nostalgic comedy dealing with the early adventures of motoring at the turn of the century.

10 Radok, “Divadelní novověk,” p. 31. A fuller description of Laterna Magika may be found in my The Scenography of Josef Svoboda (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), pp. 80–89Google Scholar.

11 Radok had his own staff and a number of assistants, including, it is interesting to note, the future Academy Award winner Miloš Forman, who had also assisted Radok on Grandpa Automobile.

12 Two of Radok's other notable productions at the Municipal Theatres were London's Lady Thief (1962), by Neveux, Georges, and Gogol's, Marriage (1963)Google Scholar, brief descriptions of which may be found in my article, “The Scenography of Ladislav Vychodil,” Theatre Design and Technology, XV, 2 (Summer 1979), 14Google Scholar. Interestingly enough, Radok's young assistant dramaturg on the Neveux production was Václav Havel, who was to become Czechoslovakia's leading post-war dramatist and, later still, its most famous dissident.

13 Zdeněk Hedbávný, “A. Radok: Poznání je cesta k odstranění zla [Recognition is a way to ward off evil],” Zítřek (n.d.), p. 3. (An undated newspaper clipping.)