"But the Realist Theatre at that moment became a kind of centre where the audience went. Because it felt like something was happening there. So it was kind of a golden period for us, and also the first meeting that was after November 17 was in our theatre. And we were able to overnight... When these things happened, we went to our theatre, where Marysha was opening that night, and we were in my office, and we were making phone calls all over the country, inviting people to the theatre people's meetings to see how these things were going to be handled going forward. And we invited students to do that, for the audience that would be there of those theater people, to talk about the experiences that were going on during November 17th. So the meeting we were able to convene...those people, from the 17th to the 18th, and the meeting was at 2:00 in the afternoon on the 18th, and the theater was packed to the roof. People came all the way from Ostrava, I still don't understand how they came so fast. I guess they got in their cars and drove right away when we called there. But really, the representation was amazing."
"It's just that I'm the kind of person that I was there to associate with expatriates. And when I came back, one day two gentlemen knocked, we were still living in that actor's house, and they took me away. They took me away, as in Prague there is Bartolomějská Street, and in Liberec there is Pastýřská Street, where this facility was. And there I spent one rather nasty day, where it was like a stupid handbook, one good, one bad, and so they passed me around. And it really was from morning till night, it wasn't nice. They wanted me to tell them what I did on which day, from what time to when. I said to them, 'Do you remember that?' What happens when you come to an interrogation like that, at least it happened to me, is that I was completely petrified or I don't know what. I wasn't even scared, I didn't feel anything. Suddenly I just completely froze, and not that I had any courage, but I just sort of... They could see that they weren't going to do much with me. I'm not talking about it being heroic, I'm talking about what happened to me. That I froze. Really, I wasn't even scared, nothing. I didn't feel anything. I just looked at them and I thought it was horrible."
"So it's not like the fairy tale had a happy ending. Let's see where we've been so naive since '89, because we believed, so to speak, in good, truth, and love. And I mean it literally and quite seriously. But we were terribly naive, because most people thought just about money."
"It also worked, the theater became such a center in Prague. Where did the students from the National Class then run, because there were many students. So they came to that theater. And we convened a special meeting during the night of November 17th and a 18th for the afternoon on the 18th. Vašek Havel was not in Prague at the time, he left the week before the celebrations again, as they always locked him up, so he went to Hrádeček, to his cottage. And said that he would call me. So he called sometime on 18th, and I said, 'Well, we convened a meeting here overnight for the theater of all the theatergoers.' Well, on the afternoon of November 18, the theater was packed to the ceiling."
Vlasta Křížová Gallerová was born on 21 July 1942 in Prague. Her parents, Arnošt and Vlasta Galler, worked as teachers, never joined the Communist Party and did not approve the entry of Warsaw Pact troops in 1969. All this marked the life of the family. The father was deposed as headmaster, the mother had to retire. Vlasta had not been recommended to study at university as a child of a petty-bourgeois family. It was only after working in a factory and as a flapper at Barrandov that she was able to study at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, majoring in theatre studies. From the time of her studies, she was active not only in the theatre but also in the dissident environment. In the 1970s, she spent a month at a Shakespeare school in England, which upon her return meant interrogation by State Security. In the 1970s, she worked as a dramaturge at the theatres in Pardubice and Liberec, where she met her husband, director Karel Kříž. In the 1980s she moved to the Realist Theatre in Prague, where her husband later joined. Already in the second half of the 1980s, they began to perform previously banned authors and in November 1989 they actively participated in the Velvet Revolution. In 1998 the theatre was closed and the entire company was fired, which was a great disappointment for the Křížs. At that time Vlasta was already working as a teacher and continues to do so to this day. She worked at the DAMU Prague, the University of New York in Prague and the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University. At the same time, she was a publicist and the author of a representative monograph on the scenographer and painter Jaroslav Malin. She also collaborates with Czech Television and Czech Radio. Since 2008 she has been teaching scriptwriting and the basics of dramaturgy at the Jaroslav Ježek Conservatory. At the time of filming (2024) she lived with her husband in Prague.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
