Cult: “Hungary is a slaughterhouse, there is much more beef in it”
Punk Ban
– this could also be the title of Csaba Székely’s new historical drama, the pop opera of Hungarian princes and kings hidden in the Adidas susos, The land of Marynak. It was as if Csaba Székely had translated one of Shakespeare’s royal dramas, but not in a linguistic sense: he broke one leg of the English throne glistening with golden smoke and set the rocking chair in the mud of the Hungarian fallow. If poetry at Shakespeare is composed of resounding jambus, then at Szekler garlic-flavored swearing and profanity in the pig intestine.
In all respects, Csaba Székely (the first three masterpieces of the playwright from Marosvásárhely was about Szeklers) wrote a short but perhaps characteristic section of Hungarian history. King Louis the Great is dead, and so the poor have failed to produce a son heir, and only a king should be in charge of the country. Although Lajos gave birth to his daughter, Mária – proving that changing the gender of minors is indeed an ancient Hungarian custom, it took only 750 years for someone to start a fight against him – but the country’s nobles are not yet reconciled to a woman sitting on the throne. . that is, for a woman to command them.
So the battle for the thrones begins: it is up to the many possible royal candidates to decide who has an interest in being crowned, with the only problem being four counter-interests for all three interests and something like this with insidious intrigue, snake-tongued lobbying, and all the ropes. to arrange – as the mother of the royal candidate from Naples points out: “Hungary is a slaughterhouse, there is much more beef in it”. Which may not be so good for the country, but for the theater, especially if the intrigue, lobbying and mowing in question fall into the hands of the directors of Róbert Alföldi. As happened now at the National Theater in Szeged, where director László Barnák shows for the first time how much more he wants to take part in shaping the processes of the Hungarian theater profession, even more so than many of his colleagues in Budapest. at the invitation of one of the most significant Hungarian directors.
Recently, a graduating high school class had a graduation poster patterned on a porn site that his teacher did not recognize the genus (or not admit to recognizing it): well, it was not as vulgar as Csaba Székely’s poster, otherwise it is still moving, and three-dimensional, in every sense of the word. Because it sounds like any hell to say a drama to a historical billboard, if anything, well then it really is. Szekler uses interregnum confusion to draw as many types of politicians as possible at any given time. Anyway, because even though they have a sword rather than a granite-strength tablet, the mindset seems more unchanged than the armament.
What is truly granite-strength here is the monopoly of self-interest: not finding anyone whose country’s destiny is paramount, and not its own survival, enrichment, and retention of power — just to further list the elements we still know today. At Szekler there are all the figures of the pantheon: a noble, with a thick gold necklace, a noble nobleman who reigns on the outskirts; the sane manner, who cares for nothing more carefully than to accidentally have his own opinion, since it is safest to always follow the current winds; a manipulator moving thousands of threads from the background who, if necessary, would put someone else’s hand in the fire for the purpose; and the one figure who still looks just fictional, downright fairytale, from whom no one would look, and then in the end he will still be a good king.
Not only the very modern text of Csaba Székely, but also the costumes of Eszter Kálmán, make sure that the 1300s do not go through our heads during the performance. the characteristic attributes of a thousand-year-old noble costume, be it a bocce, an attila, a save, or a cloak (plus one of them made a scaled-down piece for a plush doll, that sister had a talking role in the drama anyway, so it would be more memorable than anything). .
Of course, in Csaba Székely’s play, far from the world of language is not the most lasting, but humor, although the author is also happy to play with world, that is, by mixing the elevated and the profane. In fact, this is the main difference between Shakespeare and his approach: while his big-name English colleague always has one or two characters who bring the closeness to the earth and humor, like the pub flower Falstaff, in Szekler essentially every character is like that.
Perhaps it is not even accurate that Szekler translated Shakespeare in his own way: he would rather have written the royal drama that Falstaff would have put on paper if he could write.
Which is good not only because most people like to laugh, but also because it is an eternal truth that even more serious content really goes through when dressed in humor, see Béla Pintér’s complete oeuvre.
However, this is exactly what The land of Mary its only minor strong feature is the underlying, deeper content that should be packaged into humor. The first three dramas of Szekler, Mining flowerthe Mining and the Mining water disguised very serious and deeply lived human dramas as an incredibly funny comedy, and the The land of Maryon the great Transylvanian prince and the unification of Romania Mihály Vitéz also gave a good few scenes that are hard to forget, such as when the winners write history, that is, literally; in a given scene in a jacuzzi, they reshape the history books according to the taste of their own mouths, as they can do. This is the deeper layer they are missing from The land of Maryfrom; it is not a mistake, it is not a failure, it feeds on a different need. Because this piece is really primarily a tabloid: shows there are plenty of types of politicians, and he does so wisely, aptly, with good ideas, and cleverly, so he makes no more of it than that politicians have always been, will be, and yes, they are now. And while there are, of course, individual destinies in the story, loving relationships, moral dilemmas, and private losses, these are by no means as elaborate as the caricuristics of the characters.
As a director, Róbert Alföldi finds perfectly how to bring these cartoons to the stage most accurately. The game rides on noble-looking little gold lions with nobles fighting sponge bars instead of swords, and in every other way it underscores everything that is funny in the text: with more exaggerated – but always within the limits of good taste – gestures and accents, the text says I also do my best to bring the characters to the ground from the pages of the history books, highlighting the presumed intentions of Csaba Székely. Actors watch TV – God forbid, propaganda – carry a bag of shopping from the store and never do anything out of heightened political reasons – such as patriotism – but out of resentment, genderedness, selfishness or plain out of greed. Alföldi also saves all this by making the coffin of King Louis, the forgotten main element, in the middle of the room, which is sometimes pushed aside and sometimes even had sex with it – so much for the respect of the ancestors.
But what is perhaps most important, albeit more invisible, is that the Great Plain masterfully finds the right rhythm to make every joke work, every entry memorable, or every short look noticeable, or in short: to make the performance work as well as it should. it works well and how much audience success can be predicted for it. Although it is the most conspicuous wink that is the most problematic: at one point an orange rolls out of one of the characters’ pockets, which is such a specific and telling indication that it would be much more precise why it happens there and why, but it doesn’t. row.
Only the last performance of the Great Plain, that it plays an almost important role in some of the twenty-something plays with at least ten main characters, so that all the performances in it really seem almost equal. Tamás Borovics, for example, plays palatine Miklós Garai, the great manipulator and assassination designer, as if he were at least a susin Lajos Kossuth, with all the ridicule of the Nazi and all the looks of Kossuth: we would believe that he would hold Hungary in one hand if he grabs the current usurper in his throat and is able to sit as an exile on the otherwise open, large-space stage as if he could barely fit in it, stretching the walls with his shoulders. And Eva Botos plays as the widow of the former king’s widow, that there would be a similar Kossuth caliber in it, only the male world wouldn’t let her out of her tiny female body, but it shows that if she could break out, it would be like a dragon fire .
Krisztián Gömöri’s master without maneuver is so smooth that an eel would envy him, especially because his humor is certainly not so good, and as archbishop Róbert Szegezdi knows immeasurably funny that he speaks with the same devotional expression all the time. also, when he asks the big question that determines the fate of the country, “Now what are we going to do to fuck?” Or in the last scene of the performance, when it is necessary to decide which of the many bad and bigger bad guys will lead Hungary, driven by selfish interests and not even a joke: “But with you what will happen? ”
That’s the big question. The big question that makes the The land of Mary It will be current in 2022 as well, as it was not last posted in 1386. But yesterday.
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