It is fourteen years since the play about the unsuccessful premiere of the production of Vlasta opened and it is still considered the best to be produced by the authors’ team of Zdeněk Svěrák and Ladislav Smoljak.
The play tells the story of a theatre company that decided to produce a new play. Just before the opening, though, the actor playing the protagonist “drops out” and the company invites an acting star, Karel Infeld Prácheňský, to stand in for him.
The Stand-In Performance, the twelfth play written for the exclusively male Jára Cimrman TC, premiered on 27 March, 1994 at Žižkov Theatre venue. Similar to the previous shows by and about Cimrman, many from the lines in the play caught on and became common currency in everyday talk. The play also enhanced the tradition of Czech humour by introducing one of its perennial figures – the character of Prácheňský.
Last year, the Jára Cimrman Theatre Company celebrated forty years since its establishment. Since it opened, it produced fourteen plays by the elusive and fictitious Czech genius. A fifteenth play, A Czech Heaven [České nebe] is due to open at the end of October.