Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2004 - 65

Ralph Koltai was originally published in 1997 and was reviewed in
the Fall 1998 issue of TD&T. Lajcha's Ladislav Vychodil is a grand recapitulation of a major designer's work, and a tribute to the man himself.
Although most of the text is in Slovak, an overview commentary in English, French, and German provides a useful perspective on the wealth of
nonverbal evidence in the hundreds of illustrations that make up the
heart of the book.
As noted in the original review, Koltai designed his own book as
"...an Art oriented picture book." Thirty of his productions are illustrated with one or more photos or drawings, mostly in color. Supplementing the illustrations are nine relatively brief comments or essayettes
by Koltai himself and his colleagues and students. The book does full visual justice to Koltai's striking talent for metaphoric stage imagery and
the range of his work, from productions with severely limited, precisely
chosen stylized effects (e.g., Othello, 1985) to scenographic extravaganzas such as his 1989 Metropolis. Since his book was already reviewed in
these pages and this new edition differs only in referring to nine more
productions since 1997, three of which are illustrated, I shall concentrate on Ladislav Lajcha's impressive study of Vychodil's work.
Despite extensive association with Britain's National Theatre and
Royal Shakespeare Company, Koltai has been primarily a freelance designer (and occasional director). Vychodil, on the other hand, has been
associated with one theatre-the Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava, a
repertory theatre established one day after his birth in 1920. Vychodil is
a native of Moravia, the province that lies between Bohemia and Slovakia,
and his training included the study of drawing in the university-level

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Technical School in Prague, as well as study with Frantisek Tröster, arguably the most significant Czech stage designer from the 1930s to the
1950s. Indeed, it was on Tröster's recommendation that Vychodil was
appointed chief of design and production in the Slovak National Theatre
in 1945. A few years later, as Lajcha informs us, Vychodil established the
department of scene and costume design at the High School of Music and
Dramatic Arts in Bratislava, where he trained several generations of designers until the 1990s. Moreover, for a few years after Tröster's death in
1969, Vychodil also served as chief pedagogue in scenography at the
Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in Prague.
The majority of Vychodil's more than 500 productions were done in
Slovakia, chiefly in the National Theatre, but by the late 1950s he had begun to design elsewhere in Czechoslovakia, and subsequently went on to
work in theatres in Austria, Poland, Germany, and other European theatre centers, especially in Scandinavia. In the 1970s he was invited to our
shores and designed several productions in Santa Barbara and also lectured and conducted master classes at numerous university campuses in
the U.S.A. under the auspices of OISTAT.
Lajcha traces Vychodil's roots to surrealism and its Czech avantgarde variant of poetism in the interwar years. Especially important in his
scenography, according to Lajcha, was Vychodil's penchant for collage, a
tendency strengthened during Vychodil's work with the major Czech director Alfred Radok in the 1960s, when the two artists collaborated on
several productions with relatively small budgets and limited facilities in
Prague. Props and furnishings, often fragmentary and metaphoric, were
placed or hung in various planes in the stage space for ironic effect, often
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2004
