The Wild Duck

THE WILD DUCK At the centre of Ibsen’s story stands the Ekdal family, whose life is shot through with secrets, lies and self-deception. The young idealist Gregers Werle sets out to expose the family’s hidden past, convinced in his unbridled pride that he will bring everyone cleansing and freedom. His determination to lay the truth bare, however, sets off a chain of events that strike deep into the fates of all involved. The play interlaces hard matter-of-factness with embedded symbols, hovering on the border between realism and symbolism. Its central motif is forgiveness. Can we forgive a person we love once we discover that the love has been built on a lie? The Wild Duck is a timeless drama about the fragility of human relationships and the destructive potential of absolute truth when people are unprepared for it. Working from Karolína Stehlíková’s new translation, director Jan Frič and dramaturg Marta Ljubková have cut this old play down sharply, stripped it of its period detail and laced it with contemporary speech. Together with his regular collaborators (Dragan Stojčevski, Marek Cpin, Jakub Kudláč), Frič has created a mesmerising portrait of a family falling apart, set among attic rafters that hamper the actors’ movement and at the same time hold them apart from one another. Performances kept under tight control, dehumanised by the use of body mics, unrealistic costumes and slow-paced live cinema, peel back an oppressive story that serves the viewer a nightmare rather than empathy and understanding. The production was created in co-production with Brno’s Divadlo Aldente, where, under Jitka Vrbková, young actors and writers with Down’s syndrome meet professional theatre-makers without disabilities.

The Wild Duck is in many respects an exceptional piece of theatre, offering such a wealth of layers of meaning and levels of interpretation that a single viewing comes nowhere near enough.
ŠTĚPÁN TRUHLAŘÍK, Seznam Zprávy

This new staging of Ibsen’s Wild Duck holds up a mirror to socially varied human lives, and to questions of the merciful lies we can live with and the truths that can “strip bare” and gut (just like the rabbit skinned and gutted in the production) even a community that has worked until then. The Wild Duck offers a wildly conceived rendering, full of varied stimuli assembled into gliding thoughts and visual images. It will find its admirers above all among fans of alternative and extravagant approaches to staging.
IVETA MACKOVÁ, Novinky.cz

The director places the emphasis on the disintegration of the family – a theme he has been exploring from various angles in recent years. He has managed to carry Ibsen’s iconic play over into contemporary stage language, posing uncomfortably sharp questions to which, however, he offers no clear answers. The most legible thing in this demanding piece is its warning against self-appointed prophets who arrogate to themselves the right to dictate how others should live.
LUKÁŠ DUBSKÝ, Divadelní.net

JAN FRIČ (1983) is one of the most distinctive theatre figures of his generation. His production of Vassa Zheleznova, which he staged at the Estates Theatre in 2021, was voted Production of the Year in the theatre critics’ poll, as were The Bacchae on the same stage a year later and, finally, The Vultures at the Dejvice Theatre, which took the award in 2025. He studied drama directing at Prague’s DAMU under Jan Nebeský and Daria Ullrichová. From 2017 to 2022 he was resident director of the National Theatre’s drama company. He works both with large theatres (such as the National Theatre Brno, the Klicpera Theatre in Hradec Králové, the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre and the Divadlo v Dlouhé) and with intimate, alternative stages (such as A studio Rubín, the Masopust theatre company and Divadlo X10). Alongside original productions (such as BurnOut!, A studio Rubín, 2019) and stagings of contemporary plays (The Father Watches Over the Daughter, New Stage, 2022), he returns again and again to the classics (such as The Bacchae, Estates Theatre, 2023; Oedipus the King, National Theatre, 2019; and Faust, Estates Theatre, 2018).

THE DRAMA COMPANY OF THE NATIONAL THEATRE BRNO has been performing in the Moravian capital under various names since 1884; today it plays at the Mahen Theatre and the Reduta Theatre. Since taking up the post in 2019, the current artistic director, dramaturg Milan Šotek, has been shaping both NdB drama stages as homes for the theatre of drama and ensemble acting, with the aim of building a modern large-scale drama company. The current dramaturgy is marked by an unusual faith in drama and in theatrical texts in general – it almost never adapts literature or film for the stage – and by a care for the contemporary Czech play, commissioning new work. The National Theatre Brno is the principal organiser of the international theatre festival Theatre World Brno.