The first issue of 2023's Theatre Review opens with Julie Pšenička's essay “On Machov's Scenic Conception of Folk Dance: From the Lachian Dances to the London Bartered Bride.” Through the London production of Smetana's Bartered Bride at Sadler's Wells Opera during the war years, the present essay reflects on the influences of ethnographic impulses of the domestic interwar avant-garde, which shaped Machov's approach to the choreography of this opera in 1943. Based on the given observations, it attempts to expand the perspective of Machov's domestic avant-garde experiences with folk dances with impulses he encountered in the English environment of 1943–1945, which significantly contributed to the shaping of his vision of modern Czech ballet in the post-war years. The case study seeks to broaden the previous knowledge that Vladimír Vašut, the Czech dance historian, published about Machov's work in London in the past, and which František Černý and Ota Ritz-Radlinský briefly mentioned. Research conducted in the collections of London memory institutions made it possible to identify resources and documents that older researchers did not have available. Partial resources of an unclear provenance, the existence of which indicated Vašut in the second half of the 1980s, were identified in domestic collections. Following Machov's approach to the choreography of The Bartered Bride, the analysis seeks to deepen earlier conclusions regarding Machov's London episode. The second study in this issue is Michal Topor's “Robert Saudek in theatrical context.” Although Robert Saudek (1880 Kolín–1935 London) made his mark in the field of theatre with more than one work with immediate resonance, he is almost absent from history, neither in the German nor in the Czech perspective. The aim of the present study is primarily to reconstruct the theatrical aspect of Saudek’s career; this illumination is not primarily motivated by a conviction of the aesthetic height of the author’s theatrical work so much as by the possibilities that open up for a more nuanced understanding of the totality of his career and its (Central) European context. It traces Saudek's movement between the experiments that developed his early dramaturgical considerations to Revoluce na gymnasiu / Eine Gymnasiasten-Tragodie (Revolution / Tragedy at the Gymnasium), and then Saudek's growth into the spheres of commercial, especially merry theatre, and productions across European theatres: from Vienna to Hamburg). The post-war years, by contrast, marked a complete departure from the theatrical world, which might have made Saudek's return to the stage before the mid-1930s all the more surprising, prompting questions about the importance of the theatre in the diverse field of his activities and interests, and attempted answers: with reference to the first few years, one can speak of an aesthetic-pedagogical ambition, later of the primacy of entertainment and extrovert imagination (here too, however, a certain social-critical reflection is possible); the play Schicksal (Fate), then, represents a return to the original gravity: the staging of a problem, a dilemma. Zdeněk A. Tichý and Jan Hančil prepared an interview with Miloslav Klíma, a dramaturge and pedagogue. In the review section, you will find two reviews written by Dalibor Tureček and Otto Drexler, in which both authors discuss two currently released Czech books on the history of Czech theatre. The final section contains Aleš Kolařík's report on the 2022 symposium “Beyond the Horizons of Theatre” dedicated in memoriam to the Czech theorist Jan Roubal.
