Close your eyes, here I come! Mr. Zavřiočka enters dreams and brings with him both familiar and lesser-known fairy tales from the world-renowned Danish storyteller Hans Christian Andersen. You might know Mr. Zavřiočka better as the Sandman, but we are taking a different path to Andersen than is typical in the Czech lands.

We know the Sandman who tells stories to little Jan, but we won’t be focusing on those tales. Instead, we let Mr. Zavřiočka, who according to Andersen knows the most stories in the world, tell us famous fairy tales like The Princess and the Pea, The Swineherd, or The Flying Trunk, as well as lesser-known ones such as The Happy Family or The Butterfly.

Why? In 2025, we will commemorate two significant Andersen anniversaries – 220 years since his birth and 150 years since his death. On this occasion, we want to get as close to Andersen as possible. Most of us are familiar with retellings of his fairy tales, which often contain inaccuracies and diverge from the original. We are turning to much lesser-known and more precise translations by František Fröhlich, a leading Czech translator of Scandinavian languages and English. These translations sometimes shift or clarify certain aspects of the stories.

Mr. Zavřiočka will bring children fairy tales in a contemporary interpretation by sought-after Slovak director Šimon Spišák, who will be working with ALFA Theater for the first time.

Spišák is a director in demand both in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. He studied at Prague’s DAMU under Miroslav Krobot and currently works with several theaters in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. He is a co-founder of the Nové divadlo in Nitra, whose production The Book Thief was nominated for the prestigious Slovak theater award Dosky. He also collaborated with the Divadlo Drak in Hradec Králové and the Bratislava Puppet Theater on the original production Kašpárek a zbojník, co-directed with Jakub Vašíček. Now, he makes his debut at the ALFA Theater in Plzeň.