The theatre project Tatarka, based on a section of Dominik Tatarka's literary work (Wicker Armchairs, Demon of Consent, Alone Against the Night), creates an image of several epochs/moments of the last century Europe from the author's perspective and inner emotional experience and communicates the confession of an individual in a time of mass and demagogic thinking. In this project, Tatarka's recurring literary protagonist, Bartolomej Slzička, appears in Paris in 1938, just after the Munich Agreement, as a student, then as a national writer in the Czechoslovak Palace of Culture in 1956, and then as a persecuted dissident during the years of Normalisation (1978), and finally as an old man waiting for something that he sadly won't live to see, in May 1989. The Tatarka project captures a part of the author's literary cosmos in its infinitely associative, allegorical and even dreamlike mood. Although much of the work cannot be separated from the period it references, in its more general ideas and aspirations, it becomes timeless and piercing even for contemporaries. But is the current society ready for Tatarka? And is this the freedom he imagined and longed for? Or have brand new demons emerged that would make Tataka rebel again?

 

 

Première November 2, 2024