MUŽ BEZ MINULOSTI - Repertory

Aki Kaurismäki
THE MAN WITHOUT A PAST
A play about love

PREMIERE 21.01.2010

Cast: David Novotný, Martin Myšička, Ivan Trojan, Jaroslav Plesl, Pavel Šimčík, Václav Neužil, Pavol Smolárik, Tatiana Vilhelmová, Johanna Tesařová, Lenka Krobotová , Klára Melíšková, Simona Babčáková / Petra Hřebíčková, Martha Issová, Jana Holcová, Zdeňka Žádníková Volencová and others
Translation: Pavla Arvela, costumes and scenes: Andrej Ďurík, dramaturgy: Karel František Tománek, music and musical training: Marek Doubrava, stage movement: Kristýna Lhotáková

Stage adaption and direction: Miroslav Krobot
Antero Lujanen wakes up and realizes that he can’t remember his name, where he works, or whether he’s even married, absolutely nothing. He finds himself among the homeless, but his fate is in his hands.
He meets Irma, a member of the Salvation Army and everything starts to take a turn for the better, but only until that moment when he learns that he’s...


This kind of theatre is a little "different", this new offering from the Dejvické divadlo. In The Man Without a Past, based on a film by Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, director Miroslav Krobot forces his actors to forget about everything we imagine about acting. With no makeup on, the cast speak their lines “normally”, dry without practically any gestures. But looking at them doesn’t make us forget in the least about that which is really important up there, that they are listening to each other and communicating in silence and with their own special humor. They are characters and themselves.

This extraordinarily sensitive inner-connection among all the players is accompanied by the music of Marek Doubrava, which permeates every scene, gives them a solid structure, a shape... a voice emanating straight from the heart.

The dramatic adaption of Kaurismäki’s film is a simple, almost ingeniously trivial story. A man is assaulted and beaten by thugs at the train station and loses his memory. He has to learn everything again, as if he were seeing the world, things and human relationships for the first time, innocently like a child. He starts from “scratch”, with the homeless, and gradually realizes what is really important in life. He finds love in his relationship with Salvation Army worker Irma (Tatiana Vilhelmová).

The dramatic action shifts to a random episode with bank robbers, thanks to which he finds himself at the police, in the bureaucratic machine... and back in his “former” life. But finally we see the happy ending that makes a person feel relief as with the obligatory fairytale statement “And they lived happily ever after.” We don’t think about whether we’re still talking about the real world or not.

The Man Without a Past is more like a real story about a fable, a picture that summons up disenchantment and the question: what and how much is important of that which we wring out of life. Together with The Man Without a Past (David Novotný) we witness that special lightness of being that occurs with a loss of memory, putting all our apparently important things, values, and relationships “to the side”, and cleansing ourselves of everything that we used to be. We feel that after a long period of time we can once again hear ourselves, hear our hearts beating. Maybe even hear that someone.



Most of the performance takes place without any background, in the bare, empty spaces of the stage. Only for the first scene do we see something, the characteristically diagonal wall of the train station and “homecoming” bordering the empty space (stage design Andrej Ďurík). Unfortunately, handling it was quite disruptive. The short scenes between the robbery and the arrival of the Man Without a Past to the homeless colony were likewise encumbered with some awkward symbolism.

The path to perceiving everything unpronounceable in theater opens up for us a delicate, quite distinctive style of absurd humor contained in the intonations, music and singing, the wordless communication or the movements (Kristýna Lhotáková). At times this type of performance reminds us of a musical, freely dispensing needless bits of joy, at other times it’s like one of Beckett’s existential farces. Some real unique theater.
Marie Reslová, Financial News

The tragicomedy The Man Without a Past has an unmistakable “Finnish” atmosphere, is minimalist in approach and is, despite the cheerful moments and happy ending, quite oppressive. The new look was probably a bigger challenge for Krobot. His interpretation of this drama about a robbed and beaten up man who forgets not only his own name but also everything about his life before and finds consolation only in the arms of a self-sacrificing woman working for the Salvation Army is crazier and funnier.

The shift in perspective is clear: where the film version seethed with hopelessness, the Czech theatergoing public was often quite amused. The comedy steamrolled past the tragedy, with the director adding humor very specific to us and in doing so completely changed the work. He was not afraid to incorporate jokes like Finnish vodka randomly appearing in a dirty old refrigerator or some truly bizarre dance-movement numbers.

The actors, however, do not make faces or exhibit tawdry behavior, thanks to which even the most absurd scene underscores the originality of the staging. The same is true with the costumes, most of which looks like it came from a cheap secondhand shop, and a restrained, albeit intelligent setting that goes well with the interiors and exteriors. The remarkable music of Marek Doubrava also does its part, rounded off moreover with songs by the Beach Boys. After the acting, the music is the next most important workhorse of the performance, pervading individual scenes or coming to a complete stop and suddenly announcing that a shred of memory has returned to the Man Without a Past, who since the beginning has been presented as something of a musical buff.
Kateřina Rathouská, MF DNES

Each of your productions is to a certain degree something like a report about what you’re actually thinking, about the state we all find ourselves in. What is the theme of The Man Without a Past?
I saw an interview with Kaurismäki on YouTube. He drank probably a liter of wine mixed with beer during it. They asked him: What is the task of the director? He stared for a moment and then said: You must give people hope. Or: And what are the biggest problems today that interest you? And he again stared for a minute and said: You know, I have a problem with alcohol. And that was the spirit of the interview and what I felt from it was a great sadness on one hand, but on the other an incredibly entertaining bewilderment that it’s still a play. He himself speaks of The Man Without a Past as a social-democratic romance. There is so much longing for plain, simple things, for home, for relationships. The author is heading towards a happy ending because that’s what he wants or would like to have, but at the same time knows that it’s not to be. I really like to read science fiction. It is also something like a longing for a moment to escape. Make your own beautiful world or something like that... many people have such longings today. I’m not at all ashamed about it, but I would like it to be a little alienated. This is my first such play about happiness. I think that given the situation we live in today, it has a special resonance.
Miroslav Krobot in an interview with Maria Reslová for Hospodářské noviny


Length of performance: 1 hour 40 minutes, without the break