MEDIATHEK

George Méliès Last Trick - The plot, inspired by the life and work of cinematc pioneer George Méliès, is a mixture of the style of traditonal (brutal) puppet theatre,silent flm and a number of magically theatrical and simply magic tricks. Audience members young and old alike will be asking themselvesthroughout the performance: "How on earth did they do that?"

Jiří Havelka (1980), director of the play "Georges Méliès' Last Trick", is a distinguished figure in Czech theatre, with a good sense of theatrical fantasy and imagination, and a liking for playfulness. He studied at the Faculty of Alternative and Puppet Theatre (KALD) at DAMU, during which time he met Vost05, worked in Studio Ypsilon and now leads KALD. He is also active in a number of Czech theatres, working in both drama and dance, and tirelessly testing the laws and priciples of stagecraf, taking them apart and putting them together again. He does not see theatre as an imitation, but using free principles such as dreams, imagination and irrationality, he creates logical scenic formulae and combinations. He is labelled a theatre magician, a juggler of stage imagination, a metaphysicist of the stage. Jan Dvořák has written of him: "Both the reception of 'Brass Band' and his other recent production, 'The Last Trick of Georges Méliès', confirm that Jiří Havelka is currently on top form, at his very best - both in documentary theatre dealing with political subjetcts in recent history, in other words dramaturgically-engaged theatre, and in the culminating series of theatre with a predominantly direcotirial principle, more subjective, with deeper and more intimate starting points, theatre of the pioneering type, attacking, in all sorts of ways the transcendence of this artistic type.

Review:
The almost prodigal piling up of gags and poetic pictures, entirely in the Méliès spirit, including quotations, culminates in a grand chase with Grim Reapers, in which theatre and film become equal media. The metaphor is one of the strongest, but an incredibly simple one, It intervenes with a precise strike - the immortality of an artist is in his work.
(by Petr Mareček, MF Dnes)

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http://www.festivaldivadlo.cz/en/predstaveni/165/ and International Festival Theatre Pilsen Booklet (Printed Edition)