Milan Uhde

The highest award of the JAMU in the form of the title of doctor honoris causa was awarded to Milan Uhde on 19 December 2011. In his ceremonial speech this writer, playwright, screenwriter and former politician said:
„I am a stranger to the avant-garde intolerance which, as Alexander Great, that there are other worlds. I am distant from my own youthful enthusiasm for the theatre conceived as a protestsong, and I am no less distant from the moralism of committed artists who are certain that those who do not express themselves politically and critically with their art are complicit in social stagnation. The playwright is not a clue or a substitute for the court, let alone the Last One. His faith rests on the fact that only the authority of the Last Judgment will pronounce the final verdicts, and that we cannot or should not anticipate them. If the atheist denies the existence of this authority, the dramatist replies that he proceeds on the assumption that such an authority exists.
The dramatist of my heart is a witness who knows that, even if he does not know everything and cannot know it, he has a duty to testify what he knows to all, or more precisely, what he knows to himself. The „invisible hand,“ namely, the ancient wisdom of the dramatic form, will then help him carry the story to its conclusion. If the dramatist has held nothing back, that is, if the exposition has been complete, the drama will at some stage tell itself which way it wishes to proceed and what the conclusion should be in order to sound convincing.
The Czech poet František Halas called this confessional pressure „the weight of a man on a poem“. The playwright’s task, of course, remains the constant uncertainty as to whether this weight will be found light.“

Laudatio pronesené Prof. PhDr. Milošem Štědroněm, CSc.