My Struggle: A Man in Love

MY STRUGGLE. A MAN IN LOVE Karl Ove Knausgård’s six-part autobiographical novel cycle My Struggle became a worldwide sensation the moment it appeared. Often called a modern-day heir to Proust, Knausgård maps his own life across three and a half thousand pages in extreme close-up, with a candour so unguarded that it drew both lawsuits and outrage. The production starts from the second volume, which follows the years when Knausgård leaves his first wife and his native Norway and settles in Stockholm. There he meets Linda, falls madly in love with her, starts a family and becomes a father. Love is the central theme of book and production alike – not love idealised, but love as a struggle, shot through with the everyday grind and doubt of family life. Knausgård flinches at nothing, laying his relationships, his feelings and his thoughts bare with such openness that a raw, convincing portrait of his “struggle” takes shape. For the creative team this is the latest of several productions drawn from prose fiction. After acclaimed adaptations of Bernhard’s Woodcutters, Balzac’s Lost Illusions and Tolstoy’s Resurrection, they turn to Knausgård to explore marriage, male fragility, parenthood against the pull of writing, and the plain dailiness of our lives – the kind of ordinariness that cracks open into existential drama. My Struggle. A Man in Love was nominated for Best Production at the Theatre Critics’ Awards and won Best Actor of 2025 for Miloslav König.

The production movingly captures the fragile intimacy of an unusually open confession, in which Knausgård lays bare so much of the difficulty of life with a partner, in all its rawness and honesty. König is outstanding, but no one beside him is lost: the playing is focused and authentic throughout, and the cast hold their roles at a cool, everyday distance – a refreshing change within Mikulášek’s directorial signature, so often rich in bold stylisation. Applause to Marek Cpin for a set that is wittily effective and quietly metaphorical, opening the wardrobe onto the author’s most private feelings.
HELENA GRÉGROVÁ, i-divadlo.cz

König, for his part, holds firmly to the character’s ambiguity – now a beguiling intellectual, now a self-centred hothead, now a worn-out parent, now a cowed son floundering with his own mother (Dita Kaplanová). He shifts between the underplayed and the highly charged in a balance that is a joy to watch and to jot down on an awards ballot. You could go through the whole cast like this, praising each in turn, because alongside the dominant König they hold their own. And yet nothing here is showy: Jiří Vyorálek grounds the action with sturdy directness, Dita Kaplanová embodies those strangely ethereal older women – the actors simply settle into the registers that suit them. That is the quiet strength of this unexpectedly excellent production: an absolute, unfussy plainness of craft that never tips into routine.
VOJTĚCH VOSKA, Nadivadlo.cz

The title role fits Miloslav König like a glove; he has not given so focused, so mannerism-free a performance in a long time. He underplays a little without ever dropping the intensity, and the great strength of his reading is its ambiguity, its refusal to be pinned down – both, surely, by design. His Karl Ove is pitiable, funny and maddening all at once. The baseline is a faintly whiny, faltering self-pity, yet he can just as easily turn into a witty, self-mocking companion. So too with his dogged hunt for the man inside himself: at times it looks a little absurd, but you cannot deny the effort, or the almost touching sincerity.
VLADIMÍR MIKULKA, Svět a divadlo

Knausgård’s books may be one vast, unbroken stream of thought and memory, but at Zábradlí, Mikulášek and Štědroňová have drawn a powerful statement about our times out of an undramatic text. They distil the strong moments from his writing: the rifts between partners, the relationships with mother and mother-in-law, the wavering over parenthood, the coming birth, even the cultural gap a Norwegian feels in wholly Swedish company.
TOMÁŠ ŠŤÁSTKA, iDNES.cz

JAN MIKULÁŠEK (1978) served as artistic director of Brno’s Polárka theatre and of Ostrava’s Petr Bezruč Theatre, and has worked regularly with Brno’s Reduta theatre. In 2013, when Reduta’s artistic director Petr Štědroň took over the running of Divadlo Na zábradlí, Mikulášek became resident director at the same theatre. With Divadlo Na zábradlí he won the Divadelní noviny Award for a creative achievement in drama in 2011 for V+W: The Letters; the Alfréd Radok Award for production of the year in 2013 for Golden Sixties; and the Divadelní noviny Award for a creative achievement in drama in 2018 for Woodcutters, for which that same year he also received the Josef Balvín Award, given by the Prague Theatre Festival of German Language. Beyond Na zábradlí he works with other stages, in recent years the National Theatre (The Cremator, Maryša, Nightwork, I Am the State, End of a Priest) and Goose on a String Theatre (Don Quixote, Dictionary of the Khazars, The Marx Family Saga, Everybody Hurts). Mikulášek’s directorial approach often rests on dramatisations of novels, original scripts and devised theatre. He often employs cuts, detail, musical counterpoint, and parallel action. What interests him most about theatre are the contrasts – the tension between precision and sloppiness, the mechanical and the authentic, and frenzy and calm.

DIVADLO NA ZÁBRADLÍ The tradition of Divadlo Na zábradlí is underpinned by the work of a host of major figures – among those who passed through it are Václav Havel, Ivan Vyskočil, Jan Grossman, Evald Schorm and Petr Lébl. Since its creation, Divadlo Na zábradlí has played a significant role in the country’s social and cultural context. It has created numerous productions that have represented the Czech Republic abroad and is home to a pleiad of notable actors. Since the 2013/2014 season, the theatre has been headed by Petr Štědroň, Dora Štědroňová and Jan Mikulášek, who are inclined towards irregular dramaturgy and original theatre. In the 2023/24 season, Anežka Kubátová won the Theatre Critics’ Award and the Divadelní noviny Award for her role as Pavel Juráček’s wife Dani Horáková in the production of About Pavel. A year later, two more Thálie Awards followed: Kateřina Císařová’s for Katya Maslova in Resurrection and Miloslav König’s for Michel Houellebecq in Public Enemies. Most recently the theatre swept the 2025 honours, named Theatre of the Year and taking both acting prizes – Best Actress for Magdaléna Sidonová and Best Actor for Miloslav König. Alongside a busy schedule of guest performances at home, the company has toured widely abroad – across Europe and beyond, from the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia to Colombia and the United States.