Dokud se nade mnou nezavře voda a Už jenom dýchat…
Dokud se nade mnou nezavře voda (Until the Waters Close over Me) and Už jenom dýchat… (Just to Breathe…)

On Two of Bohumila Grögerová’s Plays for Radio

Summary/Abstract: This paper deals with a relatively little known chapter of Bohumila Grögerová’s work, that of her radio plays. Grögerová, at the end of the 1960s, but mainly in the 1970s, the author (often in collaboration with Josef Hiršal), wrote a number of remarkable radio compositions whose genre fits what is known as the New Radio Play (Neues Hörspiel). She openly experimented with language and made productive use of the principle of stereophony. The first two radio plays, Lunovis and Zweiäugiges Wortspiel (Two-eyed Wordplay), were written for West German production at the beginning of the 1970s; her later plays had to be written for posterity, and many have still not been recorded. This paper focuses primarily on two plays in Czech by Bohumila Grögerová, the “micro-play” Už jenom dýchat… (Just to Breathe…, 1975), which was prepared for radio recording by Hana Kofránková in 1991, and the stereophonic composition Dokud se nade mnou nezavře voda (Until the Waters Close over Me, 1975), which only exists in typescript. This paper includes an edition of the two plays based on the manuscripts lodged in the Literary Archive of the Museum of Czech Literature, and has a link to the audio production of the first play. The two plays are remarkable in the way they combine the traditional illusion of the radio stage with linguistic reflexive approaches. The compositions represent a completely unique creative act in the context of Czech literature and radio.

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