8. 3., 20:00

Directed by Katharina Scmitt
Scenography: Pavel Svoboda
Costumes: Patricia Talacko
Music by Nick Gill
dramaturgist: Jan Horák
Starring Ivana Uhlířová, Irena Kristeková, Hynek Chmelař

England is a play custom written for The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. The British playwright and performer Tim Crouch wrote it in 2007, staged it himself and starred in it together with the actress Hannah Ringham at an Edinburgh festival. The play was a major success and has been played in many European countries ( among others at the Neue Stücke aus Europa festival in Wiesbaden ) ever since.
The text is important and befitting to The Meetfactory in both its form and its theme. Formally, the play works as a conducted tour with actors as conducters who are led by the audience. The play therefore requires an open space, the opposite of opera glasses, ideally a gallery. The Meetfactory, having two theatre stages and a gallery, can thus offer ideal circumstances for staging this play.
England has two parts, the first one will be staged at The Meetfactory’s gallery without any scenography or lights, during whatever exhibition will be held there at the moment. The second one will be staged in The Meetfactory’s theatre.
„To me, the most important theme of the text is the relation between art and body. The „I” in the first part of the text ( the gender of the speaker is unclear, Tim Crouch counts with a man and a woman acting together) is deadly ill and tells the audience about the art that surrounds them. This takes place in a gallery, in a spacet hat has its own, precisely defined, un-theatrical rules and which encircles the audience with the art emphasising the contrast between the supposed eternity of art and the platitude of a sick body. „Art can save lives!” says the „I” speaker, but he himself demonstrates that it is not true. The body passes away, the art stays. In the second part, we can see that the „I” speaker survived, but not because of art, but because he had his heart transplanted. A body is saved in more specific and pathetic ways than art. The confrontation with the story of the new heart is almost unbearable.
Besides the question of the value of art and its importace to our lives, England also deals with the theme of transplantation and relocation. It is a multilayered story of one thing inside of another, a story of a heart in someone else’s body, of a strange culture in another country’s culture, of a gallery in a theatre, of a theatre character in an actor, of an an inscenation in its audience.”

(Katharina Schmitt)