An exhibition Prague Baroque was taking place in the summer of 1938, for which an open  theatre stage was erected in the garden of the Wallenstein Palace. The project was directed by the director Jiří Frejka, who originally intended to erect an auditorium on a turntable in the palace garden that would move the spectators into different scenes of the play in the garden area. The intent has remained unrealized for too high financial costs and instead of that, a fixed auditorium of an amphitheatrical shape was set up  in front of the palace arcade according to the design by Vlastislav Hofman and was oriented towards the edge of the area by its axis, where a small stage with three portals was inserted; however, it was played among trees in the garden on the left from the stage, similarly as in the  majestic arcade of the right from it. The spectators were mainly sitting not only in rows on quadrantal arcs of an amphitheatre, but in 32 boxes that were frontally oriented and mainly located  in the front section of the auditorium.

There is an important phenomenon in the course of the Czech theatre architecture until the end of the 1930s and that is the way, how  the authors of individual buildings reacted to incentives of the theatre reform movement and to which extent they were able to apply its principles in solutions of given tasks. The Hofman’s garden theatre on the exhibition Prague Baroque was one of the few solutions of the sort that was functionally successful.

In: Hilmera, Jiří: Česká divadelní architektura; Praha 1999, s. 135-136, obr. 198.

autor: Jiří Hilmera