Kovács Bálint - Színház
(2013)

Some productions are mostly and above all about the theater itself. I think that we can agree on that one, that among these the first place goes to the festivals biggest success, the Serbian National Theater from Novi Sad and their six and a half hour long Seagull, which asks most of the questions that could be asked about theater and all the themes related to it. All four part of the performance tries to think and make us think along different assumptions. But even like this the main question for us stays: is it even possible to get and keep the attention of the public for more than seven hours? (In fact the answer is pretty obvious, even if most of the Hungarian theater-makers won`t belive it: of course it is possible – almost nobody left from the Seagull, even if there was at least three opportunity for that).
 

The director Tomi Janezic constantly tries to out- and subvert, or to destroy completely the traditional performance playing and receiving. The first part is the text first part`s  early stage rehearsal: the prompter helps some of the actors, there is no costumes or set, on the table in the middle there are all kinds of beverages and they are constantly arguing between them. But even this attempt is somehow turned upside down by the director, because he is playing some recordings about the opinions regarding the show, or one of the actors has to read a letter about how he destroys with every occasion a chair. But only after this comes the part about the stereotypes of theater directors or the real revelation of the purpose to show us the actual   creating process. That is, when the spectators are ready to categorize this performance as some kind of hyperrealist reality-imitation, it has to figure it out that there is no reality in this, only pure theater. This leads us to the next part, where on the fully costumed and decorated stage, the actors are almost playing, the performance is almost ready, when everything that was build up in this almost Chekhovian part turns to an orgiastic madness, where the public is no longer part of the action, they try to lock them out by painting the plexi-walls, hiding all of the mad and twisted intimacy that happens on the stage. And the creators succeed. To the third part the public s moved from the stage to its “regular” place, from where you cannot see that place of the actions, only the back of the slips. This way we don`t see any of the actions, the voices and sounds of the play are coming from some kind of recording, from behind of the slips, and all we can see are the actors, as they sit there in front of us, waiting for their cue. And this is the part where Janezic shows us all that was written behind the lines. The true nature of their relationships.
 

At the end in some way we switch back to the first scene. The traditional Kosztya-Nyina scene is completely missing from the reality of the stage; instead we can watch it as a movie that was made during the rehearsal time. The constant presence of the director makes it almost impossible to empathies with the two characters story.
 

With all of these solutions Janezic finds at least a dozen ways to destroy and to confront the traditional empathy based interpretation of the action, hoping that by the persistent put off of the public will help them to understand in a deeper level Chekhov`s text. Sadly one of the biggest problems of this performance is tightly connected to this idea.  All the parts about theater and artistic creation looks like it has been treated independently, in a harsher way to speak: they are only for themselves and for the director’s sake. And even if the questions that are asked during the show are valid, the answers that Janezic tries to give us are a bit too long. Sometimes twenty minutes is more than enough to understand what the director wanted to say.