Lenka Lagronová
Receiving Vienna
This intimate dramatic story – a glance back at a woman’s past – is situated in Brno. One of the crucial elements of this play is a rooftop TV antenna. The fine humour of this drama is certain to resonate in particular with spectators who grew up in the 1980’s.
The heroine, a painter named Alma, has never been very keen to return to the place of her childhood and teenage years. The house where she lived with her parents was marked by a troubled past that she of which she was entirely unaware. Coming back to her home town, where the apparently ordinary life of her family took place, she is confronted with memories of this time when ”Vienna was being received” on the rooftops. In the socialist era, if you carefully adjusted your TV antenna, you could receive Austrian TV channels in Brno and enjoy ‘forbidden’ delights. The everyday mundanity of people’s lives had thus been disrupted by dreams of a more multicoloured and happier life in a freer world. The return to socialist reality
could be quite gloomy. Alma, who has never felt any attachment to her birthplace, is well aware of that.
The drama by renowned Czech playwright Lenka Lagronová (*1963) was made to order from the Drama Company of the National Theatre Brno. The dramatist, who is known for her lyrical expression and her ability to immerse the theatre-goer in women’s psychology, set the play in the modernist Jarušek’s house designed by architect Josef Gočár in 1910. She deliberately interwove the personal past of her ageing heroine Alma with the desires and traumas of the other inhabitants of the house.
World premiere: at Reduta Theatre on June 3rd, 2022
Photo by Tereza Jiroušková
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