theater Archives | Bálint Botos

Pillars of Society

Purple Acacia

The Broken Pitcher

Pillars of Society traces Karsten Bernick’s shift from a identification with a paternal figure to identification with a maternal figure

Ibsen’s dramatic texts focus the reader’s attention upon the protagonist’s enactment of self. These texts tend to position a central figure, the protagonist, between two other characters, each of whom represents a particular vision of the protagonist: who he is and how he should behave. Characteristically, these images of the protagonist’s self are intelligible in Oedipal terms. That is, the protagonist stands between a maternal and a paternal figure. Over the course of the action, the protagonist exchanges (of refuses to exchange) identification with one of these figures for identification with the other. For example, […]

Pillars of Society traces Karsten Bernick’s shift from a identification with a paternal figure to identification with a maternal figure, while Hjalmar Ekdal, the protagonist of The Wild Duck, does not make such an exchange. In this way, Ibsen’s texts stage the Oedipal crisis in a revised form.

Oliver W. Gerland

DIRECTOR: Bálint Botos
SCENOGRAPHY: Blanka-Alíz Bajkó
MUSIC: Magor Bocsárdi

CAST:
László Mátray, Ágnes Benedek, Márton Szőcs-Torma, Zsuzsa Gajzágó, Zsolt Fekete, Hajnalka Szalma, László Szakács, Zsuzsanna Vass, Dezső Derzsi, Gellért Pignitzky, Levente Nemes, József Kolcsár, Annamária D. Albu, Imola P. Magyarosi

For beauty itself is agitational and ultimately identical to the eternal human good.

The book is filled with images – organic images that belong to the organism of the novel – and these images strike the chord of pain, resonating in the reader’s heart. There is humor too, this charmingly smiling and smile-inducing humor, as if it had first bathed in the waters of pain.
The local values of the novel are perfect. The milieu is perfect and almost shockingly lifelike, the external lives of the characters, who have walked from the street onto the pages of the book, are perfect, the thinking and dialectical fusion of Budapest are perfect, and not a single false or deceitful note hurts our ears. Like a lens focusing sunlight, the local subject and form gather and concentrate universal human desires into a stronger light.

The fundamental motif: the pain of unfulfilled, because unfulfillable, desire. This has been the eternal motif of poetry since time immemorial and will remain so until the end of time, as the purest source of tragedy. The desire of youth, the orchestra of unfulfillable desires, resonates through the book, and at the end of the symphony, the reader clutches their heart in terror – Why do I live?
The suggestion of the beauty of art is enough to make a person – consciously or unconsciously – bow their head in ethical contemplation. For beauty itself is agitational and ultimately identical to the eternal human good. And it depends only on the stage of cultural development in what artistic form the humanly understood law of truth and beauty manifests itself.

Tibor Déry

DIRECTOR: Bálint Botos
SCENOGRAPHY: Bajkó Blanka-Alíz
COREOGRAPHY: Csaba Györfi
ADAPTATION: Sándor Guelmino

CAST:
Hunor Sebestyén, Eszter Román, Noémi Tasnádi-Sáhy, Róbert Kardos M., Levente Kovács, Ágnes Gajai, Géza Hajdu, Csaba Kiss, Attila Balogh, Anna Kocsis, Enikő Fábián, Dávid Scurtu,

Kleist ruins any hope that the realities he creates can be sorted out.

It is better to acknowledge such complicity with mess than to defend an illusion in the name of perspicacity. The illusion we easily fall prey to is based on our confusing subjective and objective confusion. As more or less naive readers of Kleist’s perplexing scenarios, we tend to invest in the idea that the protagonists simply misinterpret the situation. This allows us to take a firm stand against mess.

But, indeed, Kleist ruins any hope that the realities he creates can be sorted out. If we read a character as mistaken, we might find it possible to objectively resolve the issue, but doing so will most likely get us caught in a subjective confusion of our own.

Katrin Pahl