The fifteenth text by the playwriting team at the Jára Cimrman Theatre, Zdeněk Svěrák a Ladislav Smoljak, A Czech Heaven went in rehearsals and will open in the Autumn. There will be four premieres at Žižkovské Theatre venue, starting on October 28. The play will involve several Czech national heroes, both real and fictional, such as St Wenceslas, Jan Amos Comenius, John Huss, Karel Havlíček Borovský, Čech the Forefather, Field Marshal Radetzky, Miroslav Tyrš and the Grandmother from Božena Němcová's novel.
It is a similar model, based on getting together of various characters who in reality could not have met, Mr Smoljak used in his own play The Little October that he wrote for the Na Zábradlí Theatre at the end of the 90s. The play successfully dealt with the meeting of historical characters from the beginning of the 20th Century - such as Czech politicians Alois Rašín and Karel Kramář, the famous spy Mata Hari, Lenin and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaia, and Babinský the famous Robber - inside a prison cell of the Brno jail of Spilberg.
Last production by Jára Cimrman Theatre so far, called Africa, opened six years ago. Should A Czech Heaven's run be as successful, the play might be the very last to be produced at the theatre, says Mr Svěrák.
In October last year, the ensemble celebrated 40 years of its existence. The ensemble members reminisced at the time about all the 14 productions that premiered over this period of time and still run in repertory.
The statistics say that four years ago the ensemble reached 10 000 performances, with two of the productions (An Inn at the Clearing and Investigation into the Loss of the Class Register) having passed the one thousand mark.