The world premiere of the new original stage project The Kladno Man [Kladeňák] by the successful Czech playwright Petr Kolečko and the director Tomáš Svoboda will open at the Středočeské Theatre in Kladno on 9 October 2009 at 19.00. The play is a well concocted mixture of tragicomedy, fairy tale and slapstick, loosely inspired by the life story of Czech ice-hockey player Jaromír Jágr. The lead role will be played by David Matásek from the National Theatre in Prague.
Five years after the opera Nagano premiered at the Prague National, the protagonists of the legendary Czech ice-hockey Gold Medal at 1998 Nagano Olympics return to the Czech stage. Or, more precisely, an important personality from the Central Bohemian industrial town of Kladno, Jaromír Jágr who led the Czech team to victory.
The play was commissioned by the Středočeské Theatre whose artistic management approached the up-and-coming young dramatist Kolečko and the successful director Svoboda asking them to write a script about Kladno and its genius loci. The authors came up with the idea of a sort of a “fairy tale about Jaromír Jágr” with a story line balancing between slapstick and an entertaining musical play.
Neither of the authors wanted to write a biopic play or a sports docudrama or a send up parody. Although the text uses some details from the player’s life, the character of the hero of The Kladno Man, Jaromír, is in fact only remotely inspired by his still living model. A large stress in the text goes to philosophy and to another man born in Kladno – to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
It was Wittgenstein who took his inspiration from the idea by the psychologist Otto Weininger who claimed that “genius is the highest moral and as a consequence the duty to every individual. A person either discovers his or her genius, or they are useless to this world.” The authors started with the following questions: what drives a famous athlete such as Jágr, what is his motivation?... The idea that the hero is driven by his career or by his genius brought them back to the Weininger quote. As a consequence, each ice-hockey player character was assigned his own philosopher who appears to the player, influencing him one way or another and tormenting him. Kladno’s Jágr was assigned Wittgenstein in this manner.
Despite the intellectual bias, the audience will not be deprived of the chronological re-creation of the legendary ice-hockey matches of Jaromír Jágr’s career, or of the characters of other real sportsmen, mostly still alive: famous heroes based on ice-hockey players such as Lemieux, Turc, Fyodorov, Sundin and Straka all appear in the production.
Co-staring will be Miroslav Večerka (sports commentator Robert Záruba), Veronika Pavlasová (supermodel Andrea Veresova), Tomáš Petřík (Mario Lemieux), Štěpán Benoni (Alexej Cherepanov) and Jana Jiskrová (Mrs Poldi). The production is directed by one of the co-authors, Tomáš Svoboda.
More information in the following newspaper articles at:
K. Kočičková: Příběh Jágra míří do divadla, iDnes.cz, 22.4.2009.
K. Kočičková: Když nad hokejistou Jágrem ve hře bdí filozof , iDnes.cz, 2.5.2009.
K. Kočičková: Jágra poznám vždy, je jiný, tvrdí David Matásek, iDnes.cz, 3.5.2009.
T. Spáčilová: Premiéra hry o Jágrovi už má vyprodáno, diváky čeká Matásek a Inna, iDnes.cz, 5.10.2009.
K. Kubíčková: Na Kladně hrozí kvůli Jágrovi uchechtání k smrti, iDnes.cz, 10.10.2009.