Toufar, a chamber opera by Czech composer Aleš Březina, tells the true story of a Bohemian priest arrested and tortured to beat out a false confession of faking a miracle. It mkaes a powerful impression at Prague's National Theater.
In the preface to his monumental 1919 play The Last Days of Mankind, Austrian satirist Karl Kraus said that it would take 10 evenings to stage and was “intended for a theater on Mars”. The National Theatre in Prague has got the running time down to slightly under two hours. Otherwise, that's not a bad description of what premiered on Wednesday night under the title 1914.
