Radost Theater

Brno's Radost Theater was founded in October 1949 and has been consistently dedicated to carrying on the puppetry tradition ever since. The founder and first director of the theater was Vladimír Matoušek, a prominent puppet director and one of the leading Czech puppetry personalities of the interwar generation. Later, director Jiří Jaroš introduced various new techniques and brought mask theater, pantomime and black theater into the company’s repertoire, which led to a radical transformation and enrichment of puppetry, to gradually become more comedic and robust. In the 1970s, Radost Theater also began to present productions for adult audiences and the programme for all ages was taken over and consistently developed by artistic director Vlastimil Peška. Since the 1990s, productions for adults have been an organic part of the theater’s repertoire, with varied thematic compositions and key works of Czech and world literature.