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Cafe de Profundis - A Surreal Portrait of a Circus Artist

 
Roger Kay Review by Roger Kay 3 Published: 2 Jun 2025 Malostranska Beseda Galerie Show Dates: 29 May 2025-31 May 2025

Some performances—especially those featuring circus and juggling—can only truly work in a large space. However, Café de Profundis has at its core an intimacy, making the Beseda stage at Prague Fringe a fitting venue for this show.

Surreal and impressive skills displayed by Ofelia Grey

The stage is minimally yet intriguingly set: a small table and chairs stage right, and a glowing circular shape affixed to the backdrop. Ofelia Grey enters deliberately and strikingly. Is she stalking? Her movement evokes a flamenco style. She begins by using the glowing orb to showcase her balance and movement dexterity.

In the next vignette, she abruptly shifts to puppetry and monologue, interacting with the unseen waiter, Sebastian. A coffee pot and napkin are woven together seamlessly to become a puppet—perhaps the embodiment of a childhood friend?

Next, she portrays a playful woodland creature concocting a magic potion to provoke her uncongenial neighbour into dance. This is followed by a circus-style display of movement and physicality. The character’s abrasiveness begins to feel like a mask—perhaps hinting at deeper insecurity. Like the coffee pot, the fish may represent an imaginary companion.

As the piece unfolds, Grey switches fluidly between characters and performance styles, showcasing an impressive range of theatrical talents: dramatic monologue, mime, physical theatre, clowning, storytelling, and juggling.

The production is surreal and steeped in fantasy. Is Sebastian even real? It's difficult to discern what is reality, memory, symbolism, or pure imagination. This is where Café de Profundis doesn’t entirely land—the blend of concepts and theatrical disciplines feels overly broad, leaving some audience members unsure of what they had just witnessed.

“Things fall apart all the time,” notes our protagonist. Yet the striking finale strongly contradicts that sentiment. Ofelia Grey is a talented and creative artist who will no doubt return with more startling work in the future.

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The Blurb:

Surreal, unreal, fantastic - the performance that the 27-year-old Ofelia Grey completes alone. - says Andrei Schnell from ZirkusPlus.

I always knew that beauty was there - exclaims Ofelia to the audience while frantically sipping her coffee and a colourful storm of emotions, memories, adventures leap out in an explosive manner to prove her statement.

Café de Profundis is an experience you take together with the protagonist, see the world from her point of view and feel the Don Quixotian fire to fight for the unrealistic ideals of beauty, love and magic that suddenly seem to matter more than anything else in the world.