PIECES OF A WOMAN A chamber family drama exploring the limits of maternal love. How many pieces can a woman’s soul be shattered into, and who can put them back together? Becoming a mother is not a shame, but what about becoming a mother who does not love her child? A family dinner unearths mutual conflicts and old wrongs. Each character carries a secret inside. The gathering turns around a personal tragedy of the main character. The others take on her suffering, but each from their own perspective. Can we purge ourselves through the suffering of others? Do we always have to find the culprit who caused us pain? In her contemporary play, the Hungarian playwright looks into the topics of physical and mental integrity, motherhood, parenthood and social views and pressures.
The text of the play is rather difficult to subsume under a specific genre. It shows the elements of serious psychological drama, tragicomedy, as well as standard comedy. The director, together with dramaturge Peter Galdík and the actors, use the potential of the text to the full. One minute, they make the audience laugh, the next, they make their blood run cold.
– LADISLAV VRCHOVSKÝ, ostravan.cz
The structure of the play seems similar to that of August: Osage County by Tracy Letts (the dominant sick mother, and her daughters), but it is more concentrated. All the actors skilfully embrace the possibilities their characters offer. While the two men present a sort of delusional parasitic existences, the women roles provide wider opportunities for detailed portrayal of character in the most positive sense of the word.
– JAN KERBR, Lidové noviny
Two performances, which I do not hesitate to call impressive, beat as a twofold heart muscle in this extraordinary project. Kateřina Krejčí portrays the motherly figure, who hurts and is being hurt but never stops loving, in sincere but subtle way, using a generous portion of extra dry humour. Alexandra Palatínusová has created a fascinating being, the modern heroine Maja, who represents what some might call one of the most convincing portraits of a contemporary woman in today’s theatre.
– PETR KLARIN KLÁR, Divadelní noviny
JAN HOLEC (1988) is a leading Czech theatre director. He studied law and later graduated from DAMU. In 2014, he was a founding member of the Spektákl theatre company, where he has already shown his predilection for staging literary classics (Dostoevsky’s The Insulted and the Injured, Lemov’s Solaris). His directions include Dorst’s Fernando Krapp Wrote Me This Letter and Františák’s dramatisation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, both at the Klicpera Theatre, as well as collaboration with the LETÍ ensemble, the National Theatre in Brno, the South Bohemian Theatre in České Budějovice and the Drama Studio Ústí nad Labem. In 2019, he became the artistic director of Petr Bezruč Theatre in Ostrava, where he also has adapted iconic novels and films, such as Loves of a Blonde and The Brothers Karamazov. At the 2023 Divadlo festival, he presented his project based on Kafka’s The Trial.
PETR BEZRUČ THEATRE in Ostrava is an artistically outstanding Czech theatre, as confirmed by numerous awards and audience feedback. The theatre’s dramaturgical plan focuses especially on young audiences and those who are not afraid of pressing issues. The theatre has renowned creative team, and many of its former actors have found fame throughout the Czech Republic (Richard Krajčo, Lucie Žáčková, Tereza Vilišová, Filip Čapka, Jan Plouhar, Tomáš Dastlík, Jakub Burýšek, Markéta Matulová). The long-standing members of the ensemble, including Kateřina Krejčí and Norbert Lichý (who passed away in January this year), have ensured top acting quality of the theatre’s productions. Its signature dramaturgy includes modern takes on classical works, dramatisations of interesting or “cult” works of literature or film, and last but not least, works dealing with regional themes.
