Vernissage + Five Tet

"When you have what we call an apartment with a face, your life suddenly - whether you like it or not - also gets a certain face - somehow a new dimension - a different rhythm, different content, a different order."

The one-act play Vernissage features Václav Havel's most successful theatrical character, the banned writer Vaněk, and tells of a clash between different visions of life.

A married couple, Michal and Věra, invite their friend Bedřich to show him their new apartment and, through a peculiar "vernissage," convince him of the rightness and perfection of their way of life. Shy but principled, Vaněk refuses to submit to the dictates of the police state during the years of normalization and tries to live according to his conscience.

The production concludes with Five Tet - a short text that Václav Havel wrote as a continuation, showing the fates of the characters from Vernissage in a new era and under a new political system.