This Really Happened!

THIS REALLY HAPPENED! The production is based on the work of the French prose writer Henri Pourrat (1887–1959), a friend of the Czech poet and graphic artist Bohuslav Reynek and his wife, Suzanne Renaud. Pourrat was one of the few French friends with whom the Reyneks stayed in touch even after 1948, when they could no longer travel freely to France. For Suzanne Renaud above all – trapped by the communist regime in the Vysočina highlands, cut off from any contact with home – the books of folk legends, tales and fairy stories that Pourrat sent to Petrkov were a lifeline.

Ill health forced Pourrat’s hand: when he fell ill with tuberculosis and had to abandon his forestry studies, he spent the whole of his life in a country house in the Auvergne, the central region of the Massif Central, a land of volcanoes and gorges. On his wanderings through the surrounding country he began to gather and write down folk tales. They brim with life and humour, but with rawness too, often with touches of horror and magic. The distinctive, deeply felt rendering of Pourrat’s stories into Czech, true to the writer’s own voice, is regarded as one of the great achievements of Czech literary translation – Jiří Reynek received the Josef Jungmann Translation Prize for it.

The translator writes of Pourrat: “Anyone who has felt for themselves the healing power and warmth of Pourrat’s prose will scarcely believe that it all began with a grave illness whose happy ending was long in doubt. One basic idea always guided his writing: to ‘reopen the little paths into the garden of childhood’, as he put it himself. And somewhere he added that ‚without a childhood of the heart, a person may be grown up, perhaps, but is not great.”

This is no ordinary theatre. It is an experience of togetherness in an old-fashioned kitchen. On stage stands a great table laden with crockery and cooking ingredients, and around it sit four actors: Lucie Trmíková, David Prachař, Denisa Barešová and Tomáš Havlínek. One peels apples into a bowl, another adds flour, a third kneads dough – and all the while they take turns telling stories. Of a village whose people failed to prize their peaceful life alongside snakes and were taken in by a sorcerer; of a priest whose little pig went missing; of an eccentric who lived in a cottage with wolves; of a fairy who bound a little girl to herself, and so on.
MARIE RESLOVÁ, Seznam Zprávy

The theatricality of small moments is almost admirably simple, yet it radiates great energy; the impressions layer and build. And these are the good old fireside spinning tales we know from our classic writers, with their own magic as well as their high spirits and humour. (…) This Really Happened! is a stage poem that braids sorrow with humour and gathers itself into a single whole, its message plain and true: that a human being is forever a part of nature and the universe.
JANA MACHALICKÁ, Divadelní noviny

The rhythm of the production runs like the current of a river: now swift, with sudden rapids of emotion and grotesque exaggeration; now slowed almost to stillness, when time thickens and a single word carries the weight of stone. The masks enter the play not as a flashy effect but as the sudden opening of another dimension. The folk world here is not quaint. It is dark, bodily, at times even cruel. And when, at the end, the actors bring out a strudel baked during the performance, it is not an easy feel-good ending. It is a return to the shared table. To community. To the moment when a story cannot be parted from the work of human hands.
JOSEF MESZÁROS, scena.cz

JAN NEBESKÝ (1953) is a Czech theatre director and teacher. He studied direction at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts (DAMU) in Prague. His direction of Ernst Jandl’s Aus der Fremde at Prague’s Theatre on the Balustrade won the Alfréd Radok Award for Best Production of the Year in 2004. Since 2002, when the Komedie Theatre company was dissolved, Jan Nebeský has been freelance, working at the Studio Hrdinů, the National Theatre and other Prague theatres (he also works with the company 420PEOPLE and Studio DAMÚZA, as well as Theatre in Dlouhá and the Palmovka Theatre). In 2004, he started to teach directing at the DAMU Department of Dramatic Theatre. In 2011 he founded JEDL with Lucie Trmíková and David Prachař. Jan Nebeský exhibits an exceptional stage imagination, finding his way to the content of texts with the aid of artistic symbols, absurd shortcuts, and stylised, expressive acting. His productions are formed by a pleiad of unexpected ideas, a specific atmosphere and style. Nebeský’s theatre uses layer upon layer of meaning, runs into free association, combines themes in a collage-like way and works with the set, text and actors with unusual imagination.

JEDL Jan Nebeský, Lucie Trmíková, and David Prachař are artists and friends who, in 2011, founded JEDL as a platform for independent, auteur-style theatre. The company currently profiles itself as an independent, alternative theatre presenting original works. Their production is shaped by collaboration with creatives and performers from diverse fields of art (theatre, dance, music, fine arts). The resulting stagings, thus, combine elements of various genres, creating a novel and distinctive context within the framework of Czech contemporary theatre. Their programming strategy builds on two basic pillars: transcendence – in the sense of crossing boundaries – and experimentation – in the sense of combining diverse forms.