Country Ran Out of Air | Oxygen Crisis Explained

Benedek Totth is one of the domestic book successes of the past decade A tieand Rita Halász Deep air after his book Dénes Krusovszky Who we will never be his novel also found the stage as a monodrama. The three mentioned works also have in common that breathing is a prominent motif in all of them. It is hardly a coincidence that the generation coming from the death throes of socialism as children to the empty space of the nineties is thematizing the experience of lack of air.

It is not easy to get through Krusovszky’s book in one breath, but adapting it is not a small task, not only because of the length, but also because of the time management of the text, the jumps and hiatuses built into the plot, the forward and backward references, and the speed changes of the narrative.

Condensation, gin, dust particles

It was staged at the Budapest Puppet Theater by Barnabás Dékány Who we will never beet, who became a monodrama from a fourth novel (a I was most afraid of womenin) interested as an actor. So he knows the pitfalls of the snaking monologue and the possibilities offered by a narrow space. Of course, it is also thanks to this that a well-thought-out, meaningful adaptation was born. Patrik Macsuka, who condensed the 540-page text into 90 minutes, also did a great job, but the performance rests on the shoulders of Zsombor Barna, who voiced and set nearly a dozen characters in motion.

While we are heading towards the Kemény Henrik Hall, located one corner away from the main building of the theater, I wonder what the play kept from the novel. Electronic music is playing softly in the narrow room, and I find a place under one of the spotlights in the auditorium full of thin cushions. Yesterday’s specks of dust dance in the warm light. I don’t know yet, but this will also be written on the show. After all, Barnabás Dékány’s direction focuses on overcoming immobility, moving in place.

Good, good, but what kind of immobility, what kind of dust from yesterday? For the stage version To dzsinn is based on the chapter of the novel, which takes place in 1986 and is set in the lung sanatorium in Hajdúvágás. This is where Ferenc Aszalós has been lying for thirty years, who is presented in the book as follows: “A captive, helpless genie, coming out of the sluggishly blowing miracle lamp”. THE miracle lamp in fact, it is the bulky iron lung that has kept Aszalós alive for three decades.

According to the plot, the man asks Zoltán Lente, a nurse, to tape the confession about the fateful event in his life. Lente complies with the request, even if it thoroughly disrupts the daily life of the institution operating according to strict rules. Aszalós recalls his role in the 1956 Hajdú slaughter pogrom, and according to the story set in the 2010s, the tape is found by the nurse’s nephew named Bálint. A bit convoluted for a monodrama, isn’t it? Nevertheless, the presentation presents the events in a way that is easy to follow.

Fingers and timbres

Barna Zsombor enters the space with a gray sports bag and a jacket. The stage is barren and dark. In the middle is a gray camping table, a white camping chair, in the background a shabby dressing cabinet, a microphone stand and a clothes hanger. Barna hangs her dark-colored jacket on the latter, and puts it back on herself after an hour and a half, before bowing. In between, if he wears a blue shirt: he speaks as a nurse, and if he is in athletic clothes, he narrates the story on behalf of Bálint Lente.

Just like the lung nurse, the performance also operates according to strict rules. Zsombor Barna not only practiced the steps with millimeter accuracy, but also the movements of his fingers have a precise dramaturgy. Moreover, after he shapes all the characters, he also has to play with his voice throughout. In my opinion, the performance is more developed in terms of movement than vocally, but it can be an amazing task to create a balance between the two from night to night. Either way, Zsombor Barna’s movements and accents accurately depict the story.

Rubber gloves, syringe and mirror

Movement is the central idea of the performance, which means that the text is in the best possible place in the Puppet Theater. The stationary patients of the pulmonary sanatorium live their lives in their heads, which is why it is a great decision to bring the novel to life with the tools of object play based on abstraction and imagination. The peculiarity of this is that the actor plays with ordinary objects instead of made puppets.

Zsombor Barna shows the doctor who creates a toxic atmosphere and abuses her power with blue rubber gloves, the squeamish chief doctor with a syringe that functions as a pen, two patients lying next to each other with a roll of gauze, one of them with a delicate white sheet, and the central figure of the story, Aszalós, with a breathing mask and a first aid kit. (The red cross may be somewhere around his heart.) The latter is made of metal, in a squeaky, gray box that comes out of the travel bag, so almost all the characters of the show can fit in it.

Zsombor Barna switches between the figures with subtle gestures, and although the audience laughs once in a while, the tension resulting from suppression dominates the playing time. Although the story gravitates around Aszalós’ trauma, the performance also successfully conveys that the others also have to face obstacles. Perhaps the most beautiful moment is when the space opens up and the interior of the shabby cupboard floods the auditorium with a sliver of light. We see ourselves as in a mirror or in a blurry photo. It is immediately understandable: what we see also applies to us.

The text of the novel confronts us with the fact that we cannot escape our fate, and at one point it is said on stage: there are stories that no one can tell for us. So Aszalós – coughing and choking – begins. It is an exciting solution that when this man with a weak voice speaks the memories that paralyze his mind into a tape recorder, Zsombor Barna speaks into a microphone.

Can we breathe?

Air! – shouted Attila József in 1935, and Róbert Bérczesi continued 65 years later that “you can only drown here”. In vain, observations about the functioning of the lungs have a remarkable tradition in Hungarian literature. And as we listen to the story of Aszalós, fatherless, abandoned and condemned to immobility, we realize that not only he, but the entire country has become paralyzed by the spiritual sediments of the 20th and 21st centuries. The man’s determined look in the mirror suggests that we can only breathe if we set the pieces of trauma stuck inside us in motion.

The Who we will never be it recalls the darkest moments of our history, but not only brings them to the stage, but also shows a possible solution. It suggests that moving forward may mean leaving comfortable monotonous routines. If we open the closet full of skeletons instead of turning our backs. The Who we will never be it is therefore ultimately about healing. I remember this already on the way home, when I listen to something similar to the pulsating electronic music of the performance, which never comes to the fore, modeling the pulsation of the machines (Dániel Eklics did an excellent job).

Zsombor Barna pops in to take the medicine box out of the travel bag. So, it’s true that we often carry a very large travel bag day after day, but it’s easy that the medicine is also lying deep in our luggage. You just have to dig deep, which won’t be pleasant.