NORMA is a festival of theatre and contemporary art held in Ostrava. Organised by PLATO Ostrava and by Studio Hrdinů, a Prague-based theatre.

NORMA

csen

Festival NORMA:

Marguerite Duras: La Douleur (Pain/Memoir of War) (CZ)

Location:
  1. PLATO, Porážková 26

Author: Marguerite Duras
Translation: Anna Kareninová
Adaptation: Jan Horák and Ladislav Babuščák
Director: Ladislav Babuščák
Art direction: Jan Horák
Costume design: Tereza Hrzánová
Music: Natálie Pleváková
Choreography collaborator: Markéta Vacovská
Assistant director: Anna Mášová
Actor: Anita Krausová

The performance is in Czech.

Tickets

 

Production by Studio Hrdinů. An exceptional sensitively described portrait of a woman who, in the mass madness at the end of the war, saves humankind with her effort to save a single man.

The stylistically severe and restrained diary of waiting for the return of her man from a concentration camp mirrors an archetypal drama. Marguerite Duras forces us to re-evaluate the notion of humanity and using a simple but powerful dramatic narrative provides evidence of the importance of determination, empathy and solidarity in times when there is so much evil around that we cease to see concrete faces of individual human beings behind it who are the same as us. This is one of the reasons why this 70-year-old text is again topical today.

Studio Hrdinů from Prague ranks in the top ten theatre companies in the Czech Republic. The theatre and its productions have won the Theatre Critics Award, the Alfréd Radok Award and the Theatre Newspaper Award. Currently the exceptional position of Studio Hrdinů is mostly obvious in the ingenious blending of the idioms of theatre and visual arts, searching out and staging non-dramatic texts and devising their own stage performances. A great advantage of Studio Hrdinů is the relatively non-theatrical space of the Fair Trade Palace in Prague where it resides.

 
photo Patrik Borecký