The Magic and Mystery of two Czech Puppet Makers
- Leah Gaffen
- Apr 8
- 4 min read
František Vítek (born 1929) and Věra Říčařová Vítková (born 1936)
It is impossible to over-estimate the significance of František Vítek and his wife, Vera Říčařová Vítková on Czech puppetry. They have a unique style, heavily influenced by Czech puppet traditions of the 18th and 19th century. In 2017 František and Věra won the Thalia award, the top Czech Theatre award, for their Lifelong Excellence in Puppetry. They have had exhibitions and performances around the world, and you can find a photo of his Pied Piper in almost every book about Czech 20th century puppetry. There is currently an exhibit of called Duše dřeva - the Spirit of Wood - at a gallery in Eastern Bohemia.
In their late 80s and 90s, František and Věra live in Hradec Kralove, a town in Eastern Bohemia that is home to the internationally-acclaimed Drak Theatre. The town hosts an annual European Theatre Festival, one of the country’s most prestigious festivals. The town boasts the country’s largest amateur puppetry community and the region has a strong tradition of woodcarving, puppetry, toy-making and mechanical nativity scenes. Mirek is from Hradec Kralove, and he worked with František and Vera in the late 1980s. touring with their show Piskanderdula.
František started out as a woodcarver. In 1958 he became the main set designer of the Drak Theatre (then known as the East Bohemia Puppet Theatre), which was part of a network of professional state-subsidized puppet theatres established in the 1940s and 50s by the Communist regime. He was inspired by Czech travelling puppeteers of the 19th century, and he carved marionettes with little to no costume. As the Communist regime became less rigid in the 1960s, František and his colleagues at Drak created award-winning shows that drew from Czech traditions rather than the Moscow State Puppet Company, which had been prescribed in the early 1950s.
One of the first shows in this vein was Johanes doktor Faust. It had a direct connection to the Czech travelling puppetry tradition, as one of the actors was a the great grandson of Matěj Kopecký, the most famous traveling puppeteer (read more about Matej Kopecky in my last article). The show was based on the original script from his great-grandfather. The production was performed 273 times and was one of Drak’s most successful productions. Frantisek designed the set to evoke traditional marionette theatres. The production included the character of Kasparek, the iconic Czech puppet character.
Faust (1971)
The most famous work of František was his design for the legendary production, Enspiegel. The main character was Tyl Enspiegel, a folk character who was popular in Central Europe in the Middle Ages. The set consisted of a carved pub and was filled with Breugal like characters carved in relief; they have elements of automata and could move like mechanical nativity scenes. The marionettes on wire were made of roughly carved wood, giving the production its magical quality. There were only two actors in the show, Matěj Kopecký and Věra Říčařová. The set has been exhibited at the National Gallery and at puppet museums across the country.
See more photos of the production here:
Enspiegel (1974)
Vera and Frantisek met at Drak. She had graduated from the recently-established puppetry department of DAMU, the Prague Academy of Performing Arts, and got a job as an actress at the theatre. She was also a talented designer, and she created puppets for the production of the 1968 production based on the Wind and the Willows- again click on the link to see more photos on the Drak website.
In 1981 Frantisek and Vera were forced to leave Drak because of political reasons. They refused to denounce Charter 77, a manifesto written by Vaclav Havel, which all artists in larger institutions were required to do. They both lost their jobs at the state-run Drak Theatre.
Since then, they have worked as freelance artists. Their most famous project was a show called Piškanderdulá, created in the 1980s and performed for over 40 years. It is a non-linear, avant-garde show for people of all ages, an attempt to "discover the essence of puppet art." The title comes from a child's writing that they saw scrawled on a wall near their house . It doesn’t mean anything but evokes the feeling of childhood, imagination. After the Velvet Revolution and the end of communism in 1990, Vera and Frantisk were allowed to tour Piškanderdulá to Europe, America and Asia (it was part of the fantastic Jim Henson Festival in the late 1990s). I found this description of it from a festival organiser who put on the show in a monastery in 1993:
"The evening theater performance of Věra Říčařová and František Vítek in the dark lofts of the granary gave the Hermit symposium a nostalgic and mysteriously grotesque dimension. A public comprised of all ages and backgrounds sat around a small portable stage. Under a pale spotlight were emerging pictures from distant days past: a wooden Primabalerina dancing between two mirrors, a ropewalker above the heads of the public, the interior of a huge wooden head where two figures were wrestling, a love story reflecting desire and death, Kasparek's comical act with horse and a soft horror dance presented by tiny skeleton puppets. With the sound of the raindrops on the roof mixed the creaking of an ancient gramophone, a reel-to-reel recorder and the squeaking of the naked puppets' wooden joints." - https://agosto-foundation.org/vera-ricarova-frantisek-vitek-piskanderdula-or-josefe
You can see some photos of Piškanderdulá and other puppets of Frantisek below.
I highly recommend that you watch this a recording of Piškanderdulá here:
František Vitek's marionettes capture something magical, something symbolic, combining naivety with a mastery of carving, His puppets often have phenomenal technology that comes from historical trick marionettes combined with his own mechanical genius. Others use simple principles of toy construction to create a enthralling effect that captivates both kids and adults in the audience- even in the fast paced 21st century. In the 1960s, he was one of the first designers to return to the use of 'old-fashioned' wire marionettes and show how they could be used in innovative ways.
His respect for the material he works with as a carver, his love for the traditional and the magic of mechanics, his attention to detail has certainly inspired much of Mirek’s art.
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