About performance

“I am interested in live bodies that fill the theatre of relationships. In theatre, I am not merely interested in their story. The so-called ideas are of no interest to me. They are the subject matter for philosophy and literature. What I am interested in the theatre is the world of relationships that are embodied in life bodies. I see an image; I try to fill the musicality of language and to create a film of live bodies where the actors open the innermost of them.” (Péter Nádas)

Péter Nádas is among the great figures in Hungarian literature, with unin´mitabel style of writing, something unique within the entire opus of Hungarian drama.. Nádas wrote the Encounterin 1979. The play was premièred in 1985. It is part of the trilogy Purification, Encounter and Funeral. All three are deeply rooted in Eastern Europe of the 1970 and 1980s. The Encounter is a confrontation of personal and meta history. Young man and woman together relive and re-suffer history together. That is the only way to penetrate the innermost layers of human soul. The Vígszínház production offer the most beautiful love story narrated by the universal language of theatre. It is composed of model situations and the incredible power of poetic language. The entire text has been composed as a musical composition. It is a play of wisdom and elegance with subtle sense of humour and a description of reality that touches our senses. It is a play with a strong psychological charge where even the silence is eloquent. Self-control struggles on stage with madness, forgetting with remembrance, awareness with ignorance. Simply, a woman and man meet. Nádas speaks through the mouth of the woman about the complexity of life, the life in the past that, however, interlaces with present. The plot has bene inspired by a true story of a lady who had been expelled from Budapest in the 1950s. Today, however, it is not a masochistic memory of the past and the tragedy, but a gesture of forgiveness and reconciliation. The two characters were simply bound to meet.

Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes.

With English and Slovak subtitles.

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