We had three premieres, on all our stages in March 2022!
On our main stage, Jakab Tarnóczi directed Melancholy Rooms, musical solitude for eight voices. The company of the Katona József Theater creates a musical and visual composition together. Its characters are figures isolated from each other and from the world. Their story was inspired by the archetypal figures of European culture and the common trauma of recent times.
Parallel loneliness lives, monologues narrated in prose and singing. One-act theaters that don’t have an audience in reality. Constantly moving flesh and blood music clip.
On our studio stage, Kamra we presented Secretary-Generals by György Spiró, directed by Gábor Zsámbéki.
Spiró’s documentary play speaks about perhaps the darkest years of the communist regime in Hungary: the decade between 1946 and 1956, when several hundreds of people were condemned, tortured and killed for political reasons. Mátyás Rákosi was in power, trying to establish and stabilize the communist system. All depended on the decisions of Stalin and the other leaders of the Soviet Union, among which in 1949 there was the order of clearing the communist party from its internal enemies. In Hungary its scapegoat and most famous victim was László Rajk, minister of foreign affairs in those times, one of the most devoted communist leaders of the country. He was killed on 15 October 1949, after a show trial. In 1956 he was rehabilitated, his reburial was one of the most important antecedents of the ’56 revolution. In 1953 Stalin died, which also in Hungary meant the end of Rákosi’s power and cult of personality. The communist dictatorship led by Imre Nagy became more moderate and wanted to be more independent of the Soviet Union, but then Rákosi regained power. The ’56 revolution was a clear sign of people’s dissatisfaction with the regime and they were at the point of sweeping it away. But a new emerging leader, János Kádár, who afterwards was Secretary-General of the Communist Party for another forty years, was summoned to Moscow and convinced to supress it.
The play show scenes of the encounters of Rákosi and Kádár in various political situations, the ups and downs of their political careers, their unexpected and incalculable rises and falls.
On our Sufni stage, we presented first chapter of Gypsy Moses (titled Genesis), by Zsolt Kácsor.
“At first, zero spread and began to spin around itself, so that matter evolved from its own whirlwind, time, and then the internal friction of the world's dust produced heat, and the heat created the organic life that gave birth to the largest idiot in the universe, the man.”
This is how Zsolt Kácsor's novel begins, of which first chapter, Genesis, is a strange, swirling, amusing, “gypsy” reading of the biblical history of creation. Zoltán Bezerédi made a theatrical monologue from this.