POKER FACE
Is there still room for icons in our cynical world?
A witty, original, dark comedy by Czech enfant terrible Petr Kolečko combining realism and physical theatre, live action and multi-media. Prague, 2011. Champion poker player Jana travels the world in style. But behind her success lie dark secrets. Her past infatuation with Václav Havel. Her father’s letters from Africa. Her troubled relationship with her daughter Pavlína…
On the eve Havel’s funeral, when she returns from Tokyo to find Pavlína in the company of Viktor, a young man with political ambitions of his own, an embarrassing family dinner turns into a dangerous game escalating first in sex, then in violence and, eventually, in farce. Is Pavlína President Havel’s daughter? What is Viktor really after?
DIRECTOR:
Becka McFadden
TRANSLATED BY:
Eva Daníčkova
CAST:
Lara Parmiani, Mark Ota,
Daiva Domynika.
Special guest: Arnost Goldflam
Becka McFadden’s direction embraces the Kolecko’s ambiguity and absurdism to create a world in which nothing is what it seems. Characters bluff and double bluff, even objects can’t be trusted: paper garlands become sushi, guns become bananas, and sex is an comic dance.
★★★★★ Raw edged and relevant (London Pub Theatres)
★★★★ Confident theatrical imagination (A Younger Theatre)
★★★★ Very funny and sophisticated (West End Wilma)
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Poker Face was written in 2012 as part of Generational Icons, a European project exploring cultural identity and generational change. The main coordinator was Divadlo LETÍ, in Prague, and the co-organizers were GUnaGU Theatre, Bratislava, Slovakia Wiener Worstaetten, Vienna, Austria, the Arts and Theatre Institute, Prague, Czech Republic and the HaDivadlo Theatre Brno, Czech Republic.
Poker Face premiered at the King’s Head Theatre London, in October 2016. In 2017, the production appeared at TACT Festival (Trieste). Voila! Europe Festival (London) PACTA Salone via Dini (Milan).
The Playwright
Petr Kolečko is one of the most successful Czech screenwriters and playwrights of his generation. By the age of 22, he had his first play, Britney Goes to Heaven, produced at the Petr Bezruč Theatre in Ostrava, translated into English and Polish, and presented as a staged reading at the Immigrants’ Theatre Project in New York. In 2008, he took part in the Royal Court’s international playwrights’ residence. He had a particularly successful seven-year stint as the artistic director of Prague’s A Studio Rubín, devoted entirely to contemporary Czech theatre. His plays have been staged by major theatres in the Czech Republic, and translated into English, French, Spanish, German, Romanian, Polish and Slovak. For TV, he wrote the critically-acclaimed sitcom The Fourth Star (Čtvrtá hvězda). Two of his plays, Icing (Zakázané uvolnění) and Fifty (Padesátka) have been adapted as feature films.
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