#Burn #IAmHere #Herostratos

In 356 BC, a man called Herostratos allegedly set fire to the temple of Artemis in Ephesus. He did so for the sole purpose of making history forever. And apparently, he succeeded. He gave rise to the term herostratism, which in psychology refers to the pathological desire to become a celebrity at any cost.
In 1980, Mark Chapman shot dead his idol, John Lennon. In 2017, three young men set fire to a wooden church in Guty near Třinec, a protected cultural monument. In 2018, Vladimir Putin posed this question: “Why would we want a world without Russia?” All of them—and many others—became, in a way, famous. But at what cost? Did their acts bring them hapiness, or at least satisfaction?
And how would Herostratos do today, in the age of social networks? Would he stream his act online on Instagram? Or would he have chosen Snapchat? Or TikTok? How many likes would he collect? And would he be satisfied with the final score? In any case, we seem to be living in an age that favours herostratism in its many forms more than any previous one…

Just like the previous production of the Naive Theatre, I Would Tell Some Joke and Then I Would Die Laughing, #Burn #IAmHere #Herostratos is primarily aimed at a teenage audience. It takes place in the virtual world of the internet and computer games, an environment that is very close to today’s teenagers. The creative team from Hradec Králové—playwright Tomáš Jarkovský and stage director Jakub Vašíček—has signed a number of award-winning titles for teenagers in a number of Czech theatres, such as ALFA in Plzeň, Minor in Prague, and Drak in Hradec Králové. In the Naive Theatre of Liberec they previously staged several successful plays (e.g. Camel, Fish and Hen, and Neklan.cz), and also cooperated with the Theatre of F. X. Šalda in Liberec.