Director and author of the text adaptation:
Marek Bečka

Cast:
Jose
Gasper Jarni / Tomislav Tomšič

Puppet and set design:
Robert Smolik

Music:
Vit Brukner
Jose

Light and sound design:
Tilen Vipotnik
Tomaž Grubelnik

Language consultant:
Mateja Dermelj

Premiere:
October 2005

Duration: 40 min

Puppet performance for children from 3 y/o

The well-known fairy tale by the French writer Charles Perrault, popular throughout the world, inspiring the young and the old.

About the performance

Once upon a time, there were three brothers who shared the inheritance after their father's death. The first brother was smart but not very good in character - he took over the family mill. The second was greedy and took all the money. And as for the youngest one, there was nothing left except for the poor cat. The young man was very sad and depressed, when suddenly he heard the Puss speak. What a surprise! The young man had to promise he would act exactly as the Puss says and their way to happines would lie wide open, stated the cat. Immediately, the Puss set out to endera himself to the King and his pretty daughter, offering them presents and compliments - all suppposedly sent from His Highness Count of Strrrawledge - the name he had made the young man adopt.

One day, as the young man ws taking a bath in a pond, the Puss hides his clothes and starts shouting they were stolen. Driving around in their carriage, the King and his daughter hear these cries. Seeing his misfortune, the King gives the young man new clothes and invites him into the carriage, where the princess and the young man fall in love with each other immediately. Meanwhile, the Puss hurries across the fields and meadows asking the farmers to say if asked, that all the land belonged to the Count of Strrrawledge.

But not everything goes smoothly. The owner of the all this land and the castle built upon it is a giant, who is a sorcerer. The Puss asks him to show him his magic power by changing first into a lion and then a mouse, which the giant indeed perfroms. Having tricked the giant into making himself vunerable, the Puss catcehs and eats the mouse in a second! When the King arrives to the castle, he is so awed by the splendor, he offers his pretty daughter to the young man in marriage. Ding, ding! Happy end.

About the director

Marek Bečka, one of the most interesting graduates of the famous DAMU in Prague, and now also a professor in this prominent European theatre academy, decided to prepare the famous story about the Puss in Boots in his own, original and specific way - on the stage of Mini teater.

Marek Bečka was born in Pilsen in 1964. During his rich theatrical career he has worked as an actor in the theatre DRAK from Hradec karlowe, and later, as a free-lance author, prepared a number of street and puppet performances for the youngest audiences. In 1991, he founded the theatre Bouchty a Loutky (=doughnuts and puppets), where over the course of 13 years, he has created more than 25 performances, some of which are well known to the Slovenian audience from international festivals like LUTKE, Mini Summer, Lutkovni Pristan, or Primorski poletni festival.

Marek Bečka also collaborates with other theatres in the Check Republic and has lead a number of workshops with professional and off-theatre puppeteers from the Chech Republic to Hong Kong. His directing for Mini teater will be his first in Slovenia.The Puss in Boots project is being created for our youngest spectators; it belongs to the line of our projects working on the basis of a famous literary groundwork and creating research puppet performances.  Definitely an interesting and intriguing project, Puss in Boots is bringing innovation and a great deal of specific puppeters' humour into our theatre; a humour so typical for Marek Bečka.

From the reviews

"The show is fully functioning in all areas, with many outstanding directorial, visual and acting solutions. It tells a familiar story in a fresh, playful and fun way." Justification of the Puppet Harbour Award, Maribor, August 2006

"An established guest director (Marek Bečka), who has achieved his own visibility by his daring, sometimes even crudely simple and direct choice of expressive means, by breaking some of the self-evident puppetry laws and by his freely joyful and humorous relationship to both the literary template and the audience, and most of all to his own medium, has also asserted the limited characteristics of "his own writing" in his first collaboration with Slovenian artists. His rather free adaptation of Perrault's fairy tale is meaningfully set in an ascetic setting, the central element of which is an axis "on the gaming table" and a height-movable staircase connecting, for example, the two sides of the stage. The "underworld" of the giant's dungeon with the royal court or the giant's palace, where the richest, most modest but also the fairest of the three sons of the miller is finally, with the decisive help of the wondrous Puss in Boots, victoriously settled with the princess. /.../ Jose and Gašper Jarni's acting, singing and animation were relaxed and detailed enough, but also with considerable scope for further development, to bring the magical cat to life and to caricature in a stylised way the protagonists from the countryside and the royal court, burdened with individual human failings." Slavko Pezdir, Delo, 7.10.2005

Festivals and awards

International Festival Di tutti i Colori, Florence, Italy, June 2006; Festival Days of Puppets in Novo mesto, June 2006; LENT festival, Maribor, June 2006; Festival Zmaj 'ma mlade, August 2006, Postojna; 17th Puppet Harbour, August 2006, Maribor (award for animation/play and award for best overall performance).