Karel Kříž

Stage Director

Along with Ivan Rajmont, Peter Scherhaufer and a slightly younger Miroslav Krobot, Karel Kříž is a member of the generation of stage directors who have continuously exerted a major influence on Czech theatre since the 1960s.

From 1962–1967, he studied stage direction at the Faculty of Drama of Prague's Academy of Music and Performing Arts. In 1967 he took up the bid for an engagement from the F. X. Šalda Theatre in Liberec, where he met a team of lifelong collaborators, one of whom was stage designer Jaroslav Malina. Karel Kříž has always been attracted to synthetic and metaphoric theatre forms where a significant part is assigned to music. To name but a few of his productions, one should mention those of Brecht's Mother Courage with music from Paul Dessau; Federico García Lorca's drama, The House of Bernarda Alba; Hugo von Hofmannstahl's The Incorruptible; Carlo Gozzi's The King Stag; or an adaptation of Italo Calvino's novella, The Baron in the Trees, among many others. In the early 1980s he joined the Prague Municipal Theatres company, where he created among other productions a remarkable reading of Peter Shaeffer's Amadeus (which stayed on the theatre's repertory for more than five seasons); a programme composed from texts by Angelo Beolco alias Ruzante, The Words of Ruzante; Jean Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot; García Lorca's Blood Wedding; and most notably, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. He then moved on, to what was then the Realistic Theatre of Prague, where he became, in 1991, the director of the newly established and newly named Labyrinth Theatre. During his era with that company, which lasted until its closure in 1998, his most memorable stagings included a project entitled Figaro (composed from texts by Beaumarchais and Ödön von Horváth); and the opera for drama actors, Aucassin and Nicolette, a setting of the text of the old French legend by Jan Klusák. In 1991, the critics' Stage Production of the Year award went to his account of Tom Stoppard's Travesties. A creative tour de force was represented by Kříž's grandly conceived productions in a project entitled The Conquerors of Troy, bringing together all the parts of the Euripides tetralogy. A compact line running uninterruptedly through Kříž's career has been constituted by his Shakespearean productions, of which he has to this day created around a dozen. He has to his credit guest productions for the National Theatre in Prague (Love's Labours Lost; August Strindberg's Miss Julie; Harold Pinter's The Lover / Ashes to Ashes; Tom Murphy's Bailegangaire), the National Theatre in Brno, the theatre companies of Plzeň, Pardubice, Jihlava and other venues. His current pursuit of synthetic theatre expression is centered primarily around collaboration with composer Vladimír Franz.

Karel Kříž has presented his work at a number of international festivals, including, in 1990, Moscow and Berne (with Václav Havel's Redevelopment); in 1992, Leipzig (Dadaopera, with music by Jiří Cerha); in the United Kingdom (Wimborne, Shrewsbury, Leeds, Brighton and London, also with Dadaopera), Italy (Anagna and Rome), Egypt (Cairo Festival of Experimental Theatre, with The Oar and the Rose, a musical collage dealing with the life of Saint Adalbert, again with Jiří Cerha's music), and others. At present, he combines his creative career with teaching of stage direction at Prague's Academy of Music and Performing Arts.