Ungelt Theatre: Trout by Italian playwright Eddoardo Erb continues to receive ovations

From Editorial staff June 20, 2025

June 20, 2025

Photo: Ungelt Theatre

The letter finally found its addressee. It changed the life of a car mechanic, his wife and a worker in a local factory. An Italian comedy about fears that can only be faced with humour.

PRAGUE - Summer scene. On 23 June 2022, the famous Italian playwright Edoardo Erba flew from Rome to see the performance of Trout at the Summer Stage. You can see photos from this beautiful evening full of enthusiasm here

"I really liked it, it's a really beautiful version of the game. Maybe I would say even better than the Italian one. It was beautifully felt and very well interpreted." (From an interview for Czech Radio Vltava, given by Edoardo Erba to Anna Kuchařová just after the reprise of Trout at the Summer Stage on 23 June 2022; you can listen to the full interview here

"After the Czech premiere of Houslí, in which Pavel Liška returned to Ungelt after more than twenty years (in the 1990s he excelled with Alena Vránová in the production Stormy Spring), we began to look for a title that would suit Pavel. We found a text that would suit both him and us only after a year and a half of painstaking research. We came across a contemporary Italian playwright named Edoardo Erba thanks to our translator Marina Feltlová.

In 2014, Czech Radio, where Marina Feltlová works as a dramaturge, staged Erb's world-famous nude play The New York Marathon. It was immediately clear from the radio production how remarkable an author Erb is and that he deserves far more attention than he gets (or rather, doesn't get) here. His existential magical-realist comedy Trout immediately enthralled us. It has an engaging story with a cleverly developed theme of fear of finitude, while being surprisingly built on comedic situations.

However, the distinctive combination of poetry and humour was not the main thing that decided to bring this Italian playwright to the Czech stage for the first time. It was mainly the three superbly drawn full-blooded characters that gave the actors - not only Pavel, but also Alena Mihulová and Jaromír Dulava - a fascinating opportunity to make the most of their temperament." (Pavel Ondruch)