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“I have a kind of constant longing for Debrecen, I can’t wait to come here”
Debrecen – In the door, the young Magda Szabó played the older one in Für Elise. We talked about theater, life and time with Klári Varga. Interview.
In the role of the adult Magda Szabó of Für Elise, it is as if a well-known portrait of Magda Szabó comes to life, as we see Klári Varga. It is not the first time that the actress takes on the role of the writer from Debrecen, as she will make her debut in front of the local audience with The Door during her contract with the city of Cívis. Since then, Magda Szabó has been accompanying her as a companion – as a companion in letting go, and even in the way she experiences the passage of time as an artist.
Dehir: The writer has acted in several plays produced in Debrecen in recent years. What did the adult Magda Szabó character of Für Elise add to all of this?
Klári Varga: My acquaintance with Magda Szabó really did not start now, but in 2016, when we presented the stage adaptation of her novel The Door. In this, I experienced a special symbiosis, a complete mutual attunement with Anna Kubik. Anna revealed a lot of Magda’s personality to me from the start, the way she approached the character of Emerenc, it was revelatory even now, playing Magda Szabó in Für Elise is like returning to a house you visited a long time ago, or to a village you know. You know where the well is, the walnut tree you loved, you just enter the garden from the other side. And what’s even better is that in The Door, I’m playing the young, now older Magda.
I watch as the years go by, I become more and more scratched, as my personality is basically scratched by life.
As a tree ages, and I love how a tree ages. This figure also came back older and resonates with my life, which I try to look at with humor, because we constantly experience our losses as we enter into life.
Dehir: How was the image of Magda Szabó nuanced in this old, familiar house?
Klári Varga: There is his house, the statue, his writings. My life in the theater in Debrecen and my acquaintance with the troupe began with the Old-fashioned story. I went from Magda Szabó to Magda Szabó. It weaves through and through my life. Uncle Sanyi Csikos took us to the Reformed College at the time of The Old Fashioned, so that it would be clear what the story was about, where the locations were, so that everyone could inhabit the play in their place, smell what kind of world it must have been. Magda Szabó is inevitable, she permeates everything, she is everywhere. For example, my dear husband grew up in Júlia Street, he was the neighbor of Magda Szabó. He called Gábor the violet-eyed boy, who tells me a lot about Aunt Juliska, Emerenc in the novel, and of course Magda Szabó, as she existed. She always had a kind word for everyone and always left the house like a queen. It was very mysterious.
Dehir: Walking along Magda Szabó’s walk in the theater, it is very striking how much Debrecen today shows a different image after the passage of time than what Magda Szabó saw and experienced in her youth. Can his lines and thoughts be found within the walls of the theater, living in the city?
Klári Varga: Yes, but I’m not an authority on that. Debrecen is a very special element. I go back and forth between Budapest and Debrecen. I also have a kind of constant longing for Debrecen, I can’t wait to come here to get off the train, breathe its air and see the Great Cathedral. In Debrecen, Magda Szabó’s sentences come to me on a daily basis. Because Magda Szabó was an incredible artist of letting go and was fantastically generous with herself. This generosity of forgiving myself, forgiving situations, somehow has a much greater weight in my life now than before. This is definitely an age characteristic. It is instructive how he could be generous even with the struggles life gave him, and how he could transform his story, life experience, self-irony and sarcasm into humor in such a way that I stumble upon him every day.
Dehir: Do you feel that mentality is your own?
Klári Varga: His figure, shape and way of thinking are increasingly guiding me. The way he saw his life and the way he saw the people around him. Even his words. He coded that he was the most read, the most educated in his environment, and that he marked his boundaries in a world dominated by men, and there is not much to say that he sees differently.
Dehir: Anna Ráckevei said about directing Für Elise that it was the biggest challenge of her life. How did you experience the trial process?
Klári Varga: It’s passionate and magical, and there were points where it made it very difficult. He understood and was able to play every character and situation immediately to a degree that we usually don’t.
Dehir: Anna Ráckevei also stated that it was a great challenge for her to be on the other side, to put her pressures and feelings into words, and to instruct the actors. Is it frustrating to be played for your role, if the director is someone who is also skilled in acting?
Klári Varga: No, in fact, it’s very, very good. I constantly went next to Anna’s skirt and asked questions, because I am an outsider on stage, I am not part of the situations, that’s where the difficulty lies. The adult Magda looks at the events from different points of the stage.
It was unusual in this outsider role that something had to happen on stage first, and I only react to it afterwards, until then I have to inhabit the stage from the front, back and sides.
I have to let myself pass the events, and a lot, a lot of Anna’s unparalleled sensitive and passionate delivery, as she filtered this text through herself and showed that she imagines my presence. We could draw from his passion, but we also had to grow up to the task, because we were not immediately at the same level of heat that he was at right away, already at 10:02 a.m., at the very beginning of the rehearsal.
Dehir: He played the young Magda Szabó, already here in Debrecen. For actresses, the neuralgic point in the career is when the roles of mothers come, and at the beginning of the interview, she mentioned letting go, that her personality is getting rougher as she gets older and that she is paying more and more attention to herself. Is it self-consolation, or is it really how you experience it?
Klári Varga: God is gone, don’t console yourself. I have no reason to console myself. Looking in the mirror in the morning is hard to deal with. I see it every day. Yesterday I thought it was the end of the world, but yesterday I didn’t see myself today. And there is no end to it. Because what I have about myself is very different from what the mirror shows. You have an image, a habit, an energy level, and compared to that, your reflection shows something different. But thank God, I’m lucky in this: I have a very critical family, more precisely my husband and son see me very objectively. Along with my whining, my desires, along with the hundreds of trains that have long gone, and they are telling me to stop this now. They immediately alert me to the positives, which helps me a lot. They also say that we are rational so that the director is not the one who throws you off balance.
No matter what I do, I can’t stop time. The most I can do is to focus on the outside, the inside and the latter, elegant wear with great self-irony and humor, the way life turns me into a dried fruit.
Dehir: Magda Szabó has a text, I’m not quoting it verbatim: I’ve been bullied, I’ve done life, but I’m beautiful. After all, this can be said even at 70.
Klári Varga: Of course. And not to mention that there are more and more good roles, because I have already moved to the other side, playing the roles of mothers and grandmothers. I still present myself with challenges that are almost unsolvable, just think of Oldás, Áldás, where I figured out that I would build the set and put together the sound, everything. This was so successful that by the time I start playing the piece and have to go through Gábor Katona’s choreography, I am already so tired that I could give the opportunities to anyone. In that respect, let’s be honest, I’m not normal. I pack an iron and take a forty-kilo log out of the car.
Dehir: And there is also an extremism with long-distance running, and perhaps some self-torment in his mental habit, or testing his limits.
Klári Varga: I really have it in me, and what’s more, I really hope to die by collapsing in a forest. This is what I chant: grant, dear good God, that I may give up on the spot and eat it while running. Let the earth accept and breathe in Klári Varga!
Dehir: If that’s the case, he’ll be on stage for a couple of decades before that… Let’s just watch the next season! What roles will you play?
Klári Varga: We will start with Für Elise, we will renovate Toldi and present it in September. It only became a film that was shown in schools, but had not yet had a theatrical release. We recorded it for three days and never played it again, we loved it so much. After that, Matyi Lúdas, for example, I will be Matyi’s mother there, and after that The Old Lady’s Visit, which we also couldn’t show despite trying to premiere it three times, because it always swept away the Covid. Then follows the Csokonai play with László Keszég. I also prepared for work, because in the summer I wandered around a lot, read, bought a kayak and obliviously cut the foam, dubbed, got a role in a movie that will be shot in the spring, and watched the swallows playing above the water! And if I can, I’m quiet!