It's Sunday in Crouch End (and most places, truth be told...). I'm feeling slightly unwell and have spent the day curled up rather decadently in bed with good coffee, a sour cherry and dark chocolate scone from Gail's and Moisés Kaufman's Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde.

Along with the Beatles, Liam Neeson and James Joyce, Oscar Wilde was a major high school love of mine. Our relationship began when I was about fourteen and took me to a number of interesting places, including central Pennsylvania's only art cinema, where I watched Stephen Fry's portrayal in Wilde. The apotheosis of my Wilde years (combining as it did two great loves) was Liam Neeson's 1998 performance in The Judas Kiss on Broadway. My mother was my constant companion in pursuit of this obsession - as I was underage, I certainly wouldn't have gotten in to Wilde on my own - and deserves credit for her understanding and support of an artistic interest that included more exposure to adult male bodies in various states of undress than the average 15 year old girl generally encounters (particularly in central Pennsylvania).

It's been some years since I've thought about Wilde and re-reading Kaufman's play, which I saw at Open Stage of Harrisburg during the heyday of my affection, was both a reminder and affirmation. Listen to this - go on, read it out loud:

Wilde Art has a spiritual ministry. It can raise and sanctify everything it touches, and popular disapproval must not impede its progress.

Art is what makes the life of each citizen a sacrament. Art is what makes the life of the whole race immortal.

Narrator 5 From The English Renaissance of Art:

Wilde The arts are the only civilizing influences in the world, and without them people are barbarians. An aesthetic education, which humanizes people, is far more important even for politicians than an economic education, which does the opposite.

(Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. London: Methuen (1998). pp 66-67.)

In recent years, I have become somewhat cynical with regards to great claims for art - and manifestos generally. Last fall, I was teaching Artaud and had a hard time not rolling my eyes, though at the same time I was incredibly happy for my deeply entranced students. But this stirs me up and feels so incredibly right that I want to frame and hang it over my desk. It also strikes me how similar Wilde and Václav Havel are in some respects - Wilde's words could serve as an indictment of neoliberalism and Klausian politics and evokes Havel's assertion that asking why humans need culture is tantamount to asking why they are human beings.

On a micro-level, reconnecting with Wilde reaffirms my affection for the beautiful, for stylish living. Occasionally, particularly in academic circles (and even in certain artistic ones), a concern for elegance, graciousness and ceremony can seem trivial, or be readily trivialized. If I ruminate too long (and how long is too long?) on the beautiful cut of a pair of trousers, or the horror of cheap faux fur, a part of me can't help thinking I'm wasting time that would be better spent reading critical theory. Certainly some lifestyle fetishes are created by the media, whipped up to make us spend money and want things we don't need. But genuinely gracious living, true devotion to Beauty is nothing to do with this. It finds the spiritual in the quotidian. It elevates us and makes us realize we can do better. It emphasizes our humanity. And today it has made me feel that what I do is not in vain, that the English in particular need foreigners possessing eccentric yet cultivated taste, self-confidence and intolerance towards small-mindedness. And that is something lovely indeed, particularly when one feels a bit under the weather.

Fidlovačka, or No Tag and No Joy

In a week of milestones, which included my first completely successful Czech language phone call, last night was my first trip to a non-subtitled Czech play. I went to see Fidlovačka, aneb kde domov můj? at Divadlo na Vinohradech. Fidlovačka is a nineteenth-century Czech play by J. K. Tyl with music by František Škroup. It was first performed in 1834 when its nationalistic content and championing of the Czech language in a German-dominated cultural sphere caused quite a stir. The performance was banned for a time and Tyl considered it a failure. It was later resurrected and enjoyed great success, its greatest achievement being the adoption of the fourth act aria, “Where is my home?” as the Czech national anthem. The subtitle of the original production translates to “no anger and no brawl,” but the one playing at the Vinohrady Theatre invokes the national anthem and juxtaposes the original text and story with debates in EU Parliament concerning the adoption of an EU symbol, flag, and/or anthem. Impassioned debates about collective and national identity ensue. The Czech delegate is particularly outspoken – he is tremendously concerned with the preservation of Czech national identity and ends the first act with a rant concerning the importance haček, a diacritical mark that essentially ads an „h“ to Czech consonents (š is pronounced “sh”, for example). His final (hilarious) point was “Čapek neni Capek!” – a reference to the frequent mispronunciation of celebrated author Karel.

The performance was also remarkable for the appearance of the dignified and formidable Jířina Jirásková as Parliament chairwoman. Born in 1931, she’s performed at the Vinohrady theatre for an amazing sixty years. As always when I got to a “stone theatre” (read big, official) in the Czech Republic, I am struck by the sheer number of bodies on stage – there must have been thirty people on stage last night, about twenty of them playing Euro-MPs, lending credibility to the Parliament scenes and chiming on the songs as Tyl and Škroup’s text increasingly dominated proceedings in the second act. It makes me long to have been born in such a system, in which a career as a theatre actor is a reasonably attainable and financially viable goal in a way it just isn’t in countries that lack repertory systems.

The only hiccup in the evening was my interaction with the lady who ran the šatna – the coat room. When I checked my coat prior to the start of the play, she chided for me coat's lack of a tag that would facilitate hanging. Here it is, in all its barren glory:

I don't know what this is called in Czech (or even if there’s a specific English term) and I’m not up on my tailoring vocab, so I’m not sure if she was cross with me (admittedly in a pleasant, good humored way) for failing to sew one in, or with my beloved COS for failing to place one in the coat. As I waited for the play to begin, I couldn’t help wondering if there’s a correlation between a country’s degree of coat-check obsession and the occurrence of hang tags on locally available coats. My coat is manufactured by a Swedish label and I purchased it in the UK, where coat checking is nowhere near as common as it is in central eastern Europe, though I would think that there’d be a high incidence of it in Sweden, given the length and severity of the winters. Considering the Czech (and Polish) dedication to coat-checking (which I quite like, when I'm not getting in trouble), I wonder if a coat’s check-ability is considered when deciding which brands to import. Have I finally discovered why so many of my favorite labels have no foothold in the Czech market?

Unfortunately, my relationship with the keeper of the coats did not improve post-show, when my exit from the loge revealed the fact that I’d had the audacity to check my troublesome coat when there was ample space and coat-hooks in my box. I only realized this was what she said later, as I replayed it in my head…at the time, the surprise at being publicly dressed down over a hang-tag and my lack of suitable vocabulary for the situation conspired to render me mute and unresponsive. While it is now an amusing anecdote, the entire encounter makes me long for spring, when it will no longer be necessary to take a coat of any description along for a night at the theatre.

PS - Curiosity and a desire to avoid writing a conference paper on hybrid-form theatre has led me to explore the hang-tag issue further. I'm now back in Warsaw with the rest of my coats, which I have now surveyed, along with some of Mr P's. Coats and blazers with tags (by brand and nation of purchase): Wilson's Leather (US), Brooks Brothers (US), J. Crew (US), Zara (PL), Superdry (UK). The only other coat sans tag (apart from random vintage ones) is my black and white full-length Zara wrap coat, purchased, unlike Mr P's peacoat, in the UK, lending (admittedly inconclusive) credence to the theory that tags are added and subtracted according to market. Fascinating.