Hungarian translation commissioned by PanoDrama: Zoltán HALASI
With: Eszter CSÁKÁNYI, Ágnes KASZÁS , Péter SCHERER, Marianna SZALAY
Set and costume design: Lili IZSÁK
Light design: Balázs CSONTOS
Directing assistant: Zsófia Tüű
Directed by: Róbert PEJÓ
Associate director and creative producer: Anna LENGYEL
The Nobel Laureate playwright’s first Hungarian premiere is produced by PanoDrama, an organisation devoted to producing new international plays in Hungary and new Hungarian drama abroad. Stecken, Stab und Stangl was voted Best Play of the year in 1996 and is Jelinek’s first theatre work directly inspired by social events. A racist’s bomb murdered four young Roma in the Austrian Burgenland in 1995, just because “they made the mistake of not putting on in time the looks and names of our acquaintances”. Jelinek stands against the crime committed by a racist, who is in the minority, but condemns even more the chorus of the hypocrite mourners of the majority, for thanks to them life goes on as if nothing had happened.
The award-winning Austrian-Hungarian film director, Robert Pejo’s first stage work draws on the theme of his film Dallas Pashamende, but its form is defined by the poetic text, barely divided into roles by Elfriede Jelinek. Beyond the - in Hungary - painfully timely subject matter PanoDrama’s production examines one of the most exciting phenomena of the Hungarian theatre, the appearance of young film directors on Hungarian stages from Mundruczó to Gigor.
In a theatre culture of rather few outstanding contemporary playwrights, Hungarian stages offer almost no reaction to some of the most crucial issues of today’s society. Even devised pieces tend to refrain from discussing the most burning issues - in a country famous for its political theatre during the Communist regime, when artists knew how to wink at the audience and spectators knew how to read the critical political thought between the Shakespearean lines.
