From Les Miz to Shakespeare: 5 English-friendly summer theatre tips

Even today, indulging in one’s love for theater is not all that easy for non-Czech speakers in Prague. But options exist, even during the slower summer months. Here are a few tips.

The Celetná Theater, one of the best-kept secrets of Prague’s theater scene at the very heart of the city center, is staging an English-language adaptation of a little-known 1968 satire by Václav Havel himself.

Rarely performed, The Increased Difficulty of Concentration is a mind-boggling metaphysical farce whose themes of alienation, social control and the struggles of interpersonal relationships continue to resonate today. Expats.cz sat down with the cast a few months ago, you can read what we talked about in the link below.

Put together by the New Visions Theatre Company, The Little Shop of Horrors is a unique adaptation of the 1960 cult classic, low-budget horror comedy film of the same name starring, among others, a young Jack Nicholson in one of his first roles.

Directed by Californian native Jazmín Colibrí with an international cast, the production is a delightfully dark comedy on a goofy flower shop assistant who nurtures a blood-thirsty carnivorous plant. The premise alone sets the stage for what’ll come next.

Running for more than 35 years, the beloved, open-air Summer Shakespeare Festival kicks off once more next Wednesday with a Czech-language adaptation of one of the Bard’s earliest and most mischievous plays, The Comedy of Errors, at the Prague Castle.

Non-Czech speakers will have to wait for July with two English-language performances of Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy As You Like It, on July 17, and the immortal cross-dressing and gender-bending romance of Twelfth Night on July 18.

Not a musical, but the very first original adaptation of French writer Victor Hugo’s immense and iconic tale by the Prague-based performing group The Drama Queens, already no strangers to La Fabrika’s stage.

Not an easy task to adapt Hugo’s 1862 literary behemoth and epic tale of redemption into a short English-language play, Les Miserables is their first post-Covid production after years of hard work, so it should definitely be worth the experience.

All year round, English-friendly performances – usually in Czech language with English surtitles – are produced on various stages of the National Theater.

This summer, you can choose between more than half a dozen shows accessible for non-Czech speakers, from the remarkable Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen, Beauty and the Beast or the iconic Baron Münchhausen to Shakespeare’s timeless Hamlet and Flaubert’s adulterous Madame Bovary.