FESTIVAL DIARY 4.
It was a great evening.
Two balanced and intense performances with completely different rhythm and frame of mind.
“
MEDEA on media” directed by
Kim Hyuntak (
Theatre Group Seongbukdong Beedoolkee, South Korea) shook us with its pop-culture enthusiasm, adding its completely unusual energy to the festival spirit. I had the impression that we were participating in a videoclip shooting or a taekwondo master class.
The ancient plot about Medea (her love, anger and revenge) are told here through several genres of the mass culture – the classical movie style, the reality show, the cartoon iconography, the TV fitness emission and a pop song.
Medea’s problem is spoken loud and clear: she is a complete stranger – she is not a Greek [in ancient terms she is a barbarian], she is expelled from Corinth by her husband and has no home country to go back to (because she betrayed her father). Several times she mentioned the word exile, which is in fact the thing that bothers her mostly - in ancient terms it means a hard life without the privileges of the free Greek citizens. So, not having a useful move, she decides to revenge herself on Jason... we know how. Why? Because it’s in her nature, she’s a black magician… Look at
Kim Mi Ok – she looks really daring, decided and well trained… And she’s armed.
This Medea reminds us that a desperate stranger is unpredictable and dangerous.
In
Tompa Gábor’s performance “
Endgame” by
Samuel Beckett (
National Theatre of Targu Mures, Tompa Miklós company) the alteration of pause and speech, of silence and sound has a faultless rhythm – we wait neither too long nor too short for the characters to start the game of human beings.
Gábor Tompa was generous to the characters and left them some natural, even sincere face expressions. Clov (
Lászlo Zsolt Bartha) has a clear childish face while slight traces of self-irony humanize the more creepy face of Hamm (
József Bíró). The dustbins in which Nell (
Annamária Biluska) and Nagg (
Lajos Makra) live, look more like elegant laboratory containers. The old parents sit inside like experimental objects.
Some virtual images are still alive in their tired brains and recover their ex-world – the sea, the sand, the Como lake, some stories and jokes; laugh and voices, tears are still here… all this is a fortune, it’s the whole world reinvented. And the nature, also dying outside, is still generous to them by sending a flea and a rat – for a change. These remains of human countenance save the characters from being perceived as pure allegories of the end of the human world (or maybe it’s a larger, dramatic view of a private dead situation, maybe it’s happening to every man).
Still those four souls have a problem: Provisions are finishing faster than life. Than the desire to live.
They try to pray and wait for an answer.
HAMM:
Silence! In silence! Where are your manners?
(Pause.)
Off we go.
(Attitudes of prayer. Silence. Abandoning his attitude, discouraged.)
Well?
CLOV (abandoning his attitude):
What a hope! And you?
HAMM:
Sweet damn all!
(To Nagg.)
And you?
NAGG:
Wait!
(Pause. Abandoning his attitude.)
Nothing doing!
HAMM:
The bastard!! He doesn't exist.
Aglika Stefanova-Oltean
