the famous comedy about a servant with wits as sharp as a razor
In the streets of Seville in Spain, the beautiful young Rosina lives in a house with barred windows. She is kept under lock and key there by the old Doctor Bartolo, who holds a greater affection towards her than befits a guardian. What misfortune for Count Almaviva when the beauty he fell in love with in Madrid six months ago and has only now managed to find is forced to marry her jealous guardian. Thank goodness the barber Figaro, Almaviva’s former servant, who can turn his hand to everything from shaving and healing wounds to intrigues full of disguises and subterfuge, is in the neighbourhood. It can be no surprise that the young lovers and the barber turn Bartolo’s house upside down.
The famous playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais wrote three plays about the servant Figaro at the end of the eighteenth century that caused a great uproar across the whole of Europe. Two of them, The Barber of Seville (1773) and then The Marriage of Figaro (1775), became permanent fixtures on the world’s stages in the form of both drama and opera (thanks to the works of Gioachino Rossini and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart).
In the first of these comedies, The Barber of Seville, the author brings to the stage the character of the cunning servant Figaro with his quick tongue and unique tactical abilities that create a flood of wonderful comic situations full of sensational humour that continue to provide audiences with perfect entertainment to this day.
It is now also to be performed on the stage of Brno City Theatre, though this time in an entirely new translation by Zuzana Čtveráčková, who also produced a new translation of Molière’s The Miser for our theatre. And since Beaumarchais’s famous comedy has been staged by director Stanislav Moša and is to feature Michal Isteník in the title role of the cunning barber, we can expect another unforgettable production!
