The Mark Ravenhill Award is part of the Center of Contemporary Drama project that has been carried out by the LETÍ Theatre since 2010. After the one-year break caused by the pandemic, it was the 11th award and included productions in the two years. The independent jury of eight members could choose from more than 120 premieres in 2020 and 2021 with the final eight productions. Apart from Emil or About Hácha in the D21 Theatre, the nominations included Only Mothers Know What the World Is About in A Studio Rubín (a theatre documentary with the features of a comedy and tragedy based on time-laps interviews within three years), The Doctor at the National Theatre in Brno (a variation on Arthur Schnitzler’s “Professor Bernhardi” about the uncompromising stance of the public), The Legend of Lunetic at the NoD Theatre (a documentary theatre examination of the childhood and adolescence of the 1990s with the legend of that time – the Lunetic band), The Magnificent 294 at the Pod Palmovkou Theatre (a docufiction based on a true story behind the Anthropoid operation), Plan at the G Studio in Ostrava (commemoration of the legacy of Ryszard Siwiec who set himself of fire, protesting against the Warsaw Pact invasion in Czechoslovakia). Two nominations went to the LETÍ Theatre for The Suicide Forest (a modern love story from the future that is too close – a story about Hansel and Gretchen, but mostly about Gretchen who was getting lost in the world for too long that she lost herself eventually) and The Pub Quiz about the Future of the World (a staged pub quiz with live music) and the Jedl Theatre Company for Marital History (about August Strindberg’s relations to and with women), and for the production of Zahradníček/All That’s Mine Is Yours (about the life of Jan and Marie Zahradníček).

The Mark Ravenhill Award for the production of a new text is the award for Czech authors for their work in contemporary drama. A new text is understood as a new piece written within ten years before the respective award. The awarded production is selected as a result of a consensus of the members of the Council of the Mark Ravenhill Award based on the symbiosis of a good text and the quality of its staging. The Council also monitors authorial and collective production, with the decisive factors of the final text and its transferability outside the specific production and theatre for which it was written. The Centre for Contemporary Drama was founded by the LETÍ Theatre in 2010 under the auspices of Václav Havel