Yasmina Reza, the most performed contemporary French playwright, is famous for her relationship comedies and dramas. In her latest play so far, from 2019, she dealt with a melancholic and nostalgic fate – an ageing second-rate actress holds a press conference to mark the death of her more famous colleague. But instead of talking about her, suddenly she begins to talk about her own life: her fears, pains, anxieties, small joys, and, above all, the elusive magic with which theatre still enchants her even after fifty years.
Yasmina Reza’s monodrama follows the fate of an old woman – but in its first production, as well as in all subsequent ones, Anne-Marie was played by an old man. In the National Theatre Brno’s Drama ensemble, this character fell upon Bedřich Výtisk who embraced the text of the play as his own and proceeded to dramaturgically adapt it for himself. Marián Amsler is an award-winning Czech-Slovak director whose style is characterised by intellectual precision and a sense of atmosphere – both of which he applied in the limited space of the Small Stage of the Mahen Theatre.
The delicacy of her recollection and the hardness towards her own present, the fears of the future, illness, and decay – those are the themes of Anne-Marie’s hour-long narrative with its ability to draw you into the strange world of art, petty and insidious though it can be, but nevertheless enchanting and resurrecting childlike curiosity.
Author Yasmina Reza
Translated by Michal Lázňovský
Directed and stage design by Marián Amsler
Dramaturgy by Milan Šotek
Premiered on 17th April 2025
For those aged 15+