“… Kids grow up so fast, they are expected to do more than they can handle…”
Kurt Cobain

Martin Františák's original play with music by Ivan Acher pays tribute to the "grunge" movement - a phenomenon that originated in the USA at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s and soon swept the entire world. Grunge was a reaction to economic instability, social insecurity, the breakdown of the remnants of traditional values ​​and the fatal crisis of the functional family. It was not just a musical style, but a distinctive artistic and ideological concept. It was a strong reaction of the young generation to the shape of the contemporary world, the last rock rebellion. Grunge, as an offshoot of punk and anger of the 1970s, was based on the impossibility of living in this world without trying to change it. On a categorical refusal to cooperate and the need to create one's own rules. A subculture as a refuge. It was piracy that was never supposed to become popular.

The grunge movement celebrates losers, rebels and outsiders, victims of a destructive system, individuals who do not fit into mainstream society. Its prominent spokesmen was the band Nirvana, with its leader Kurt Cobain. Their generation is referred to as the “failed kids” or the “fucking generation”. Cobain called his generation “the last generation of innocence”. The performances of grunge bands were characterized by a punk surge of energyn and hardcore elements such as state diving. The lyrics exuded hopelessness, anger, disillusionment, a sense of alienation, social criticism, pain, but also cynical humor, a certain playfulness and freethinking. The last global rock rebellion began to unfold. Martin Františák’s play is inspired by Cobain’s story, but also by the stories of other boys of his time, now legendary musicians. One of them was drummer and singer Staley Layne, frontman of the grunge band Alice in Chains, and also Mark Lenegan, musician and singer from the band Screaming Trees, who with his baritone was compared to Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen.

The band Nirvana symbolically points to human stories and the fates of spontaneous rebellions disrupted by the corporate and mainstream tentacles of capital. In Františák's play, Cobain's individual drama becomes a great dramatic story about maintaining personal identity, creative freedom and existential security in a world with which the central character largely bypasses or is directly in conflict. Zielinski's production is staged partly as a drama and partly as a live concert of the actors of the Švanda Theatre, who created a three-member band for this purpose. Vocals and guitar Jan Mansfeld, bass guitar, vocals Jakub Tvrdík, drums Matěj Anděl.

The original text opens the season, which in all its titles deals with the theme of family and also one of the archetypal situations of drama in general – the clash of the individual with society, with its setting, order.

CHARACTERS AND CAST
MARK: Jakub Tvrdík
KURT: Jan Mansfeld
LAYNE: Matěj Anděl
BUDDHIST MONK: Robert Jašków
COURTNEY: Barbora Křupková
MOTHER, DIRECTOR: Anna Grundmanová
FATHER, STEPFATHER, PRODUCER: Jan Grundman

PRODUCTION TEAM
DIRECTOR: Thomas Zielinski
DRAMATURGY: Johana Součková Němcová
MUSIC AND LYRICS: Ivan Acher
STAGE DESIGN AND PROJECTION: Lukáš Kuchinka
COSTUMES: Andrea Králová
ASSISTANT TO DIRECTOR: Blanka Popková
PRODUCTION: Tereza Marková
STAGE MANAGER: Barbora Soukupová Osvaldová