2024-08-01 09:50:25
Dozens of performances, concerts, lectures, but also creative workshops, discussions, educational seminars and exhibitions will be offered by this year’s international festival of amateur theater in Jiráskův Hronov. It starts this Friday, August 2, and runs until next Saturday. Program director Jan Julínek expects that over 45,000 people could visit the show and accompanying program.
It will be played at several locations around the city. The most important events of the 94th year are concentrated in the Jiráská theater, the Josef Čapek Hall, Sokolovná and the space created especially for the festival at the winter stadium. The free HronOff program is mainly planned for the Aloise Jirásk park or the rectory yard.
“The main program will feature 41 ensembles that will perform over a hundred performances, another 33 ensembles will be in the accompanying program. The program consists of a selection of the best productions of the amateur theater, and every year, in addition to the performers, around a thousand others will take part,” calculates Jan Julínek.
Raising the flag is a traditional part of Jiráskova Hronov. | Photo: Ivo Mickal
The event will be started on Friday evening by volunteers from the group Na tahu from Červený Kostelc in Náchodsk. In the Jirásk Theater they will play a conversational comedy with a tragicomic level called Wind in the Poplar Branches. It tells the story of three veterans from the First World War who live in a home for retired soldiers in the early 1960s. From their daily meetings on the terrace emerges a plan to defy fate, when the only perspective is death. The production directed by Rostislav Hejcman features Pavel Zuzek, Jan Brož and Pavel Labík.
The organizers then, as is traditional, light the so-called Lantern of Friendship and raise the festival flag on the square. The opening ceremony follows on Saturday afternoon. In the evening, the SUD association from Suchdol nad Lužnicí will stage a production of Sherlock Holmes or The Birth of Evil in the Jirásk Theater. The author’s detective comedy by Lenka and Vít Chaloupka tells the story of how a famous detective and his inseparable friend cleansed the English countryside of the criminal intentions of a sophisticated villain.
The organizers call Jiráský Hronov the oldest theater show in Europe, probably in the world. The festival was established in 1931 and was not interrupted by the Second World War or the recent covid-19 pandemic. Since 1991, foreign ensembles have also participated in it. It was recognized as a Czech cultural heritage and received, for example, an award from the International Association of Amateur Theatre, which included it among the seven most important festivals of this type in the world.