The Excursions of Mr Brouček

Matěj Brouček really wants just one thing: to be left in peace. The world outside is too loud, too complicated, too exhausting. He would rather retreat into the safety of his own four walls. But life has other plans: Brouček is torn from his comfort zone – first catapulted to the moon, then into 15th-century Prague. Awaiting him are grotesque societies, bizarre trials, and a past that feels surprisingly contemporary. But will these journeys truly change him – or does he remain the same after all?

With The Excursions of Mr Brouček, Leoš Janáček created an opera of biting wit and profound comedy – a satire on bourgeois complacency, moral laziness, and humanity’s eternal inability to learn from history. Janáček’s music moves with virtuosic ease between irony and earnestness, between waltzing bliss and passionate choral passages, between the everyday and utopia.

In the staging by US-American director Yuval Sharon, Brouček is not portrayed merely as a staggering petty bourgeois, but as a man unaware of his own narrow-mindedness. An evening at the opera full of delicate humor and existential depth.