Apples

APPLES Tabletop theatre scented with apples and memories. “At home we all used to core them. Granny cored, Mum cored, Dad cored, I cored too … Nothing went to waste in our house.” The production was made for the Císařovy nové šaty festival, held in memory of Professor Jan Císař, the remarkable theatre scholar, and nods to a theoretical problem he liked to raise: the overuse of the apple as a symbol on stage.

On the surface, Apples tells of gathering in the autumn harvest, pressing cider, and Granny making her finest apple strudel. On its inner track, it is a meditation on how we live our lives – on whether we are forever waiting for something, on whether we know how to relish the present moment. It is a production poised on the edge of everyday poetry and personal testimony, working at a slow, meditative pace while letting the performer keep a gentle, agreeable distance from herself. A light touch of exaggeration and wit is what keeps Apples from ever sliding into cheap sentiment, and with it into superficiality. For it has no ambition to be the truth; it offers no instructions, preaches no lessons. Its point shifts, too, so that with every reprise the answer to the question of how to live is sought afresh – exactly as it is each day outside the theatre.
ADÉLA VONDRÁKOVÁ, Divadelní.net

Hana Voříšková is a magician who achieves the greatest effect by the sparest means. All she needs is to sit at a table, peel and core apples, and tell her story. And I don’t know about you, but those apples had my mouth watering. Even “the worse ones”.
RADMILA HRDINOVÁ, Zpravodaj Jiráskova Hronova

The charisma, charm and sheer force of Hana Voříšková’s presence are the bedrock of the staging. The character – whom we tend to identify with the performer herself – is wonderfully full, with a finely worked stage existence and a wealth of detail through which she manages to make theatrical play of time, the time the character gradually becomes entangled in.
JAROSLAV JUREČKA, Zpravodaj Loutkářské Chrudimi

HANA VOŘÍŠKOVÁ (1964) Art teacher at an elementary art school in Choceň She draws, paints, writes, sews books, makes things and performs intimate theatre pieces. After a period of paper theatres and moving mechanisms, which she chiefly operated on the technical side (half-hidden in the wings), she has lately been freeing herself from constructed puppets and scenery and stepping out before audiences directly, openly, with the help of a few objects – her helpers. With them she creates stage images, actions and sounds. Now and then she works with musicians. It was at Hradec Králové’s DNO theatre that she long ago met Markéta Stránská (1979) a dancer and puppeteer, and today a physiotherapist too. Later she learned that Stránská was teaching herself the clarinet. When she began rehearsing Apples and realised it needed music as well, she invited Stránská to take on a role both puppeteering and musical. Stránská accepted and stepped up her clarinet practice. They have known each other a long time; this is the first time they have performed together.