LIVER

 

Liver is a drama written by Jiří Stránský in 2009 and inspired by the eponymous story from his book Happiness. The collection of short stories, based on the author's personal experience as a political prisoner of the 1950’s, was first published in 1969 and banned by the regime before its distribution.

 

In the communist Czechoslovakia, especially in the 1950’s, up to hundreds of thousands of “man intended for liquidation” were forced to work in the inhumane conditions of uranium-mining camps. Among them were a thousands of the so-called political prisoners, of whom over 2,000 did not live through to see their liberation or the "untying" of their sentences (mostly for a made-up treason). From the camps, the prisoners, if they survived the years of hard work in the camps, took away the consequences of radiation - cancer, often rapid death.

 

The Liver is a fictional story of love between mounds of mullock of mined uranium. The former civil worker of the Bytíz camp Květa returns years later with her daughter and granddaughter to the place of the then camp Bytíz, where she first met her life love, then political prisoner Radek. Memories soon engulf Květa’s mind, untying her tongue in a performed narrative. What it was like back then, and how the present is affected by the past.

The small stage of the Anti.kvariát of the Dejvické Divadlo is in two glassed-in sides of the space brimmed with the panoramic landscape of the Bytíz uranic mullock mounds, accompanied by singing of three figures in costumes in the colour of the prisoners uniforms, and the unveiling layers of reality and the past. The whole scenographic landscape is activated as an independent object living its own life in the model of the original landscape of the Bytíz shaft and three adjacent heaps.

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PREMIERE: 29.11. 2019, Dejvické Divadlo

 

DIRECTION: Josefína Formanová

DRAMATURGY: Eva Suková

SCENOGRAPHY AND COSTUMES: Natálie Rajnišová

CAST: Johanna Tesařová, Antonie Formanová, Jana Holcová, Lukáš Příkazský, Anežka Konečná, Klára Fleková, Mariana Hradilková

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