Dear radio friends and dear supporters of quality culture!
Today’s times are completely visual: those who don’t work with photography and video seemingly don’t exist. Social networks don’t even allow you to save an audio greeting or recording separately. As if separate sound or words did not exist. And related to this is the degradation of word messages; we are wasting words and we have forgotten how to listen.
Any serious actor who has experience with theatre and working in front of a radio microphone will tell you that theatre and the spoken word are the real basis of acting.
It is therefore logical that alongside the regular Thalia Awards for theatre, another set of Thalias were started; this new set is extraordinary, but completely replicates the seal of quality for deep acting creativity and solid artistic work - the Radio Thalias.
And this year’s new feature is related to that: for the first time this year, in 2022, the winners of the Radio Thalias will receive the exact same glass vase as their colleagues on the stage of the National Theatre in Prague. This too is confirmation that radio has firmly placed itself next to the great acting Thalias!
I hope the Radio Thalias, together with the Bořek Šípek’s glass vase, continue to fight on a difficult battlefield: as a defender of the cultivation of the Czech language, of real work with words, with text - against superficiality and the abuse and underestimation of verbal messages. It is an endless and difficult struggle that probably cannot be won - it can only be fought!
Ondřej Kepka, actor and director, president of the Actors’ Association
