Prague Fringe ends Saturday

The 15th edition of Prague Fringe ends Saturday, June 4, and if you still haven't caught one of the 52 productions, time is running out.

The big hit of the second part of the festival has been Echoes, staged by Pipeline Productions of England. This play tells the parallel stories of two women who leave England to get married. One is a Christian woman in the Victorian era who marries an officer, the other is a Jihadi bride who meets an Islamic State soldier over the internet. Told from the women's point of view, both tales have a lot in common. The two actresses, Filipa Braganca as Samira and Felicity Houlbrooke as Tillie, are excellent in the play by Henry Naylor. It runs until June 4 at Divadlo Inspirace

Fans of old radio won't want to miss War of the Worlds, a production with a large cast re-enacting Orson Welles famous “panic broadcast” from 1938. Some people apparently didn't understand that it was a radio show and thought that an actual invasion from Mars was taking place. Scena Theatre from the US creates a radio set on stage, and breaks the action out into the space of the theater as well. It runs until June 4 at Divadlo Na Pradlé.

A more contemporary drama is Shooting Blanks, set during a playwriting workshop. The oddly matched students and the not-so-clear instructor don't seem to communicate well and the class devolves into anarchy when the instructor tries to explain why a gun should never be used as a prop on stage.

The ensemble acting by Wildwind Performance Lab is surprisingly good. It runs only to June 2 at A Studio Rubin.

Returning to the festival is A Special Day. It is the tale of two people meeting in Italy on the day that Hitler visited Mussolini. It won two awards when it was first at the Prague Fringe in 2014. It runs until June 4 at A Studio Rubin.

One the less serious side, Zach & Viggo: Thunderflop is a two-man show filled with bizarre comic antics, and a bit of audience participation. They attempt magic, do some nonverbal bits, make fun of pop songs and the like. They bill themselves as high energy and low intelligence humor. The show runs until June 4 at Divadlo Na Pradlé.

Another rather silly show is Douze, which has a trio of enthusiastic but not very talented singers trying out some material and hoping to get into the 2017 Eurovision song contest in Ukraine. Xnthony and his energetic backup singers attempt to stage pop several songs, one or two of which are actually good. The show includes a lot of audience interaction, although it is all scripted. So don't try to actually answer anything, they already have the answers ready. You do get to vote for the best song, though. It runs until June 4 at Malostranská Beseda.

The improv group Men With Coconuts continues its successful run at Malostranská Beseda to June 4, and stage magician Stuart Lightbody brings his show Sleepless Nights to Divadlo Kampa until June 4.


For more information please visit www.praguefringe.com