‘To be Marlene Dietrich’ premieres at theatre festival in Prague’s Grébovka
The 6th annual theatre festival ‘Summer Grébovka’ kicked off on Monday with the highly anticipated production of ‘To be Marlene Dietrich’. The story of the legendary German actress and singer is the work of Theatre MA, who are staging plays at Grébovka until August 29th.
In a career, spanning nearly seven decades from the Berlin Golden Twenties to the apex of Classical Hollywood cinema, Marlene Dietrich was not only a trailblazer on the movie screen, but also a respected humanitarian figure during World War II.
Being a celebrity in one of the most tumultuous times in human history was a narrative that resonated with Marianna Arzumanova, directress of Theatre MA and author of the play ‘To be Marlene Dietrich’:
“It's a story about the Marlene Dietrich phenomenon. I say phenomenon, because she is representative of a type of person who understands what freedom means, who is not afraid to go against the crowd, and knows how to think independently. And that phenomenon, strangely enough, is terribly relevant in our time,” she says.
The production shows Marlene Dietrich in her various forms - as an artist, a woman, a lover, and a mother. Because of these several “personalities”, the character of Marlene Dietrich is portrayed by three different actresses, who appear to the backdrop of a rapidly changing historical setting, as Arzumanova describes:
“The parallel storyline is the news and information that was circulating on the radio and in the newspapers at the time. The political climate that was brewing during that period. In a way, I guess we can compare today's times to what was happening eighty years ago,” she says.
Arzumanova graduated from the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts in Moscow. After stints in Prague and Buenos Aires, she founded Theatre MA in 2013. The Theatre’s very first production also touched on World War II, exploring the fate of Europeans who had emigrated to Argentina in the 1940s.
Now, Arzumanova is pursuing a doctorate at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. The staging of ‘To be Marlene Dietrich’ hence comes with the help of five young actors, who are also students at the Academy. Arzumanova applauds their work:
“I have great actors. This is actually the third year that I’m working with them. They are Pavla Nevyhoštěná, Marie Jančíková, Anežka Burdová, and the guys, Štěpán Gajdošík and Jakub Rezek,” she lists off.
Until August 29th, Theatre MA will stage a total of seven plays across 20 evenings. ‘To be Marlene Dietrich’ will only be on the programme until Friday, August 8th.
The plays will be performed inside the Grotta – an artificial dripstone cave with inbuilt neo-renaissance features, constructed in the 1870s by Moritz Gröbe. His villa sits atop of the former estate, today known as the Grébovka park.
Gröbe moved to what is today’s Czechia from Germany, which was almost the case for Marlene Dietrich as well. Her husband Rudolf Sieber was born in Ústí nad Labem and was a Czechoslovak citizen, before taking up German nationality when relocating to Berlin.
In 1933, with the ascent of the Nazi party, the pair re-applied for Czechoslovak citizenship, for themselves and their daughter Maria, in order to leave Germany. Their request was denied, and the family fled to the United States instead, in 1939.
