MEDIATHEK

Prince Bhadra and Princezna Vasantasena – In 2010 J. A Pitínský directed Hubert Krejčí’s story Demon’s Source. Three years later the duo returns with a play that, to a certain extent, follows on from their previous work. This time they have chosen an older play by Krejčí, which he wrote with Pavel Huml, Prince Bhadra and Princess Vasantasena, for which the authors won second prize in 1989 in the LITFOND competition. The play is a very free adaptation of an old Indian story, The Tale of the Hypocritical Ascetic, and is dedicated to the memory of two major playwrights whose plays are still performed today – Carlo Gozzi and Ferdinand Raimund, „in whose plays the audience may perceive the source of ethics and morality,“ as Goethe wrote. The higher moral principle also ends up winning in this play. The central character is a girl called Ambika. Prince Bhadra falls in love with her mellifluous voice and sharp wits, while the evil monk Sonamuki tries to seize her no less pleasing physical charms through stealth and shameful tricks. Fortunately the witch Chandra intervenes, with His Excellency, the monkey Devaki, and finally pure love triumphs over treacherous love. Like Demon’s Source, this play also contains an artful mix of poetry, excitement, a pinch of eastern philosophy, and humour. As in the previous production, here, too, the director and artists have transposed classic material to today’s world, with important sources of inspiration being the gesture alphabet of Indian theatre, and Italian commedia dell’arte.

About the director of the play "Prince Bhadra and Princess Vasantasena or the Hypocritical Monk or the Dog's Tail of Supreme Purity": Jan Antonín Pitínský (1955) – Director and playwright. Studied at grammar school and librarian school and subsequently passed through a number of professions (including that of stage manager at the "Goose on a String Theatre", where in 1981 he and Peter Scherhaufer dramatised Dostoyevsky’s "Brothers Karamazov"). In 1985 he co-founded the "Amateur Circle", where he tried out both auteur-style and directorial work. He also participated in the founding of Brno’s Cabinet of Muses (1991) and of the independent cultural centre Glass Meadow (1993). Since 1992 he has worked freelance, directing all over the Czech Republic and Slovakia, in theatres including the Slovacko Theatre in Uherské Hradiště (to which he regularly returns), the National Theatre in Prague, the Dejvice Theatre, the Theatre on the Balustrade, the Theatre in Dlouhá, HaDivadlo in Brno, Goose on a String, Reduta Theatre and the Zlín City Theatre. He has also directed opera, for example Henry Purcell’s "Dido and Aeneas" in Pilsen in 1998, for which he won an Alfréd Radok award. He has, of course, won a large number of other awards, including the Culture Ministry award for theatre. He is the author of original plays including "Pineapple", "Mother", "The Little Room", "Bulldoggery", "Park" and others, dramatisations such as Těsnohlídek’s "The Cunning Little Vixen", the prose works Prague – "The Intimate Diary of a Hero", "Wolker and Bezruč" and a collection of poetry entitled "A Pipe for Daddy".

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