Do we still have room for icons?

LegalAliens’ staging of Czech enfant terrible Petr Kolečko’s witty, original and dark comedy combines realism with physical theatre, live action and multimedia. 

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 of sex, violence and power that teeters on the edge of farce. Could Pavlína be President Havel’s daughter? What is Viktor really after?

Our production embraces Kolečko’s ambiguity and absurdism to create a world in which nothing is what it seems. Characters bluff and double bluff, and even objects can’t be trusted: paper garlands become sushi, guns become bananas, and sex is an comic dance.

Poker Face was written in 2012 as part of Generational Icons, a project exploring cultural identity and generational change. The main coordinator was Divadlo LETÍ 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.