Kafka Meets Monty Python

He was Central Europe's answer to Leonardo da Vinci, a genius who left his mark on virtually every area of culture. Jára Cimrman invented the electric light bulb, the telephone and dynamite, though these breakthroughs are often erroneously attributed to others. He was also an influential philosopher, perhaps best remembered for his theory of externalism, which states that "things are the exact opposite of what they are commonly regarded to be." And this month the Jára Cimrman Theater, a troupe founded to popularize the great 19th century Czech's work, celebrates its 35th anniversary.

Cimrman is, of course, too good to be true. The fictional character — who is said to have lived and worked in the fin-de-siècle Austro-Hungarian Empire — is the creation of Zdenek Sverák and Ladislav Smoljak. These two former Prague high school teachers teamed up in 1966 to bring Cimrman to the stage after Sverák first introduced the character on a satirical radio show. The Jára Cimrman Theater was founded the following year, and since then Sverák and Smoljak have penned 14 plays and three feature films, making their troupe the Czech Republic' s equivalent of Monty Python's Flying Circus.

To celebrate the anniversary, the troupe staged Africa, Sverák's and Smoljak's brand-new play. Like all of the ensemble's shows, Africa breaks down into two parts: the first is scholarly consideration of an aspect of Cimrman's life, in this case Cimrman'a efforts to annex a small African nation to Bohemia; and the second is a staging of one of Cimrman's "lost" plays. In Africa, this play-within-a-play tells the story of four Czech explorers who discover an African tribe distinguished by its light complexion and ability to learn Czech in just two weeks. After attending the premiere, Czech Senator and former dissident Jan Ruml described Africa as a cross between satirical Czech novel "Good Soldier Svejk and Kafka's Castle."

Sverák, an accomplished screenwriter who wrote the script for the Oscar-winning Kolya (directed by his son, Jan), and Smoljak, a playwright who directs all of the theater's productions, met at university and still write the Cimrman shows together. Their main target of ridicule hasn't changed: the misguided patriotism and inferiority complex of the Czechs in the face of their bigger neighbors.

Writing under the Soviet regime, Sverák and Smoljak had to contend not only with censorship, but also with audiences reading nonexistent political messages into the plays. "We sometimes had to make changes because people were laughing in places that were not supposed to be funny," Smoljak says. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Sverák worried if Cimrman would survive. "I considered our theater a refuge from oppressive times, a place where a person could take a breath of freedom and playfulness," he says. "I was afraid that the Velvet Revolution would cut the branch we were sitting on."

He needn't have worried. The troupe's repertory has aged extremely well. Cimrman himself has become a kind of national anti-hero, with several streets named after him and more than a dozen commemorative plaques marking houses where he might have slept, had he existed.