In a way, communism has always been playing on the masses. There are endless things hidden within the People – power, union and also a great deal of herd mentality. Matei Visniec’s What Shall We Do With the Cello? – performed by Atelier Theatre Studio  as part of the Vault Festival 2017 – delicately opens…

Ognisko Polskie, the Polish Hearth Club, is an exquisite venue: glistening chandeliers please the eye, red velvet lines the elegant staircases; this quiet haven in South Kensington is full of Old World charm. Last Saturday night, a traditional version of Chekhov’s play The Seagull was produced here. Set on a lake estate in Imperial Russia,…

Tracy Letts’ adaptation of Chekhov’s 1900 play – directed by Phil Wilmott – gives an English, deadpan intonation to Russian humor. The expansive, often ironic comedy characteristic of Chekhov’s plays persists even though Letts has cut and altered considerable portions of the original text. The layout of the Union Theatre in Southwark, which has the…

Just before the Barbican screening of his award-winning 2016 film We Are Never Alone, director Petr Václav took some time to frame his work in a conversation that started out with questions about Czech identity, and ended on post-truth masculinity and why We Are Never Alone is, essentially, a feminist film: women have a future,…

Screened as part of London’s Made in Prague Film Festival, Petr Václav’s We Are Never Alone (2016) has a rather dramatic, soap-opera plot: a woman, whose husband is a psychotic, abusive hypochondriac, falls in love with a pimp from the local brothel, who in turn is in love with one of the prostitutes, who is herself in…

There is a joke that several nationalities in CE Europe tell about themselves, and into which almost any national group can be inserted: ‘How many Czechs does it take to change a light-bulb? Four: one to hold the bulb up to the fitting and the others to haul him back from installing it.’ This joke’s…

Described as ‘a fusion between black comedy and drama’, Olmo Omerzu’s Family Film (2015) slowly unravels the superficial layers of a near-perfect wealthy family living in Prague, which falls apart as the parents go sailing in Asia with dog Otto, leaving behind their two children, grown-up Anna and her 15-year-old brother Erik. Moving from everyday…

Marcin Wrona was a rising star of Polish cinema before his untimely death in 2015 and Demon, his final and most ambitious work, would have been his breakthrough had he lived. It’s a curious, unsettling film, made more so by parallels between the life of its director and protagonist, which will no doubt earn it…

In the modern day Czech Republic there’s still some eeriness lurking around the Bohemian mountains – dark forests, forgotten castles and buried treasure. First-time director Andy Fehu’s The Greedy Tiffany tells of a world where all the love has gone and only the internet is left. Based on the recent rise of metal detectors in…

When a creative giant dies it’s always tempting to say we’ve witnessed the passing of an era, even when the actual era has been passing, slowly, for years. So it has been with the death last month of Andrzej Wajda, still a lodestar for Polish film, but whose theatrical take on history has given way…