Prague/Glasgow - The seven-year old film treatment of a famous Czech fairytale story about a baby boy, who is carved out of a tree stump, comes alive and eats his adoptive parents together with many others will get a stage version soon.
Last week the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) announced its program for next year and Little Otik, as the film version of Otesánek (literally "carved out boy") was called in the English-language world, where it made rounds at film festivals, is part of it.
Green light from the film-maker
World renown film director Jan Švankmajer, who won the best film of the year award from the Czech Film Academy in 2002 for his surreal fairytale/horror/comedy movie, gave his consent to the theatre production in Scotland.
"The whole idea came about some time last year. Our artistic director saw Little Otik at Jan Švankmajer's film retrospective and fell completely in love with it. The result of this infatuation will be our play, to be premiered next May," said Severine Wyper, general manager of Glasgow-based Vanishing Point theatre company, which is co-producing the play with the NTS.
Details about the production won't be known before January, Wyper said in a telephone interview with Aktuálně.cz.
Critics "stumped"
Enthusiasm of the interetested parties aside, the first reactions to the NTS 2008 line-up were rather lukewarm in the mainstream media.
The Scotsman, leading daily published in Edinburgh, saw critics "stumped" after the programme was revealed. It might have been a mere play on words though, as the story of Otesánek revolves around a tree stump.
Still, in the same article The Scotsman's theatre critic Joyce McMillan did describe the line-up as "a bit less exciting than some previous seasons".
But she added: "However, it's difficult to say if that's a lull while they prepare the next high-profile project, or a structural problem."
The NTS, which has no stage of its own and tours around Scotland as well as abroad, is currently riding a wave of success with its original production Black Watch, multi-awarded new play about the historic regiment of the same name serving in the British armed forces.
