A festival of Shakespearean midsummer nights at Prague Castle

Prague Castle has been the dramatic setting for the Summer Shakespeare Festival now for eleven years. It was former president Vaclav Havel, himself a celebrated playwright, who thought that The Bard's work might best be experienced there, on a midsummer night. From a single production of Romeo and Juliet in the summer of 1994, the festival has become a major cultural event.

Romeo and Juliet was the very first play to be performed at the Summer Shakespeare Festival. The Czech translation of the classic tale of star-crossed lovers was that of the distinguished dramatist Josef Topol. But the labour of love soon became the domain of Prof Martin Hilsky, the country's best-known translator of Shakespeare, whose original tribute to the court jesters and other noble fools premiered this season.

Festival spokeswoman Magdalena Bicikova:

"This summer we celebrate the eleventh year of the Summer Shakespeare Festival and we have a record number of titles. We have already five titles and three of them are premieres. We have one production of Twelfth Night and we have also one Slovak production, Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet...

This year's festival opened with a special performance written by Martin Hilsky, called "Shakespeare's Fools" It's a thematic evening, focused on the most humorous characters to be found in Shakespeare's plays. The subject matter has long held Prof Hilsky's interest.

"When I started translating Shakespeare I loved the comedy language and the Fools were always a great challenge - the whole gallery of Shakespearean fools - and they still interest me very much. The fool is a kind of commentator, an observer of human behaviour and so on. It's not merely a 'funny' character, it's much more than that. And these are all matters of interpretation - it's fascinating to shape - by words - the characters, because they are after all, made of words. All of them."

Prof Hilsky says he always seeks to lend a 'Shakespearean energy' to his interpretations, to be as "faithful to Shakespeare" as possible.

"[Which] means in matter of verse, whenever there is blank verse there should be blank verse, a rhyme should have a rhyme in Czech, puns are difficult and I thought when Shakespeare uses his puns, more or less, at the same places Czech puns should be used... And this is really, really difficult."

Magdalena Bicikova says that a turning point for the festival came three seasons ago, with the premiere of King Lear, because it was the first heavy tragedy on the bill.

"It was a big change... we were a bit afraid that people would not accept such a heavy title, a tragedy about an old and foolish king and his three daughters. But it was a great success!"

That production also marked the triumphant return to the Czech stage of Jan Triska, a celebrated actor who had emigrated from communist Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s.

"King Lear was his big comeback. We say that Jan Triska came here as a king --as a real king -- because after 27 years or something like that he came back to the Czech theatre. There were about forty thousand viewers during that season and that's when we decided to produce [another of Shakespeare's tragedies,] Hamlet."

To learn more about the Summer Shakespeare Festival at Prague Castle, which continues on until September, please have a look at their website, www.shakespeare.cz.