Péter Kárpáti: Everyman

Synopsis

Contemporary Hungarian playwright Péter Kárpáti transfers the well-known medieval play with the same title into the apostatical present of our time. Looking back on his life, what would a modern person say to himself before his death? What would we do, if it suddenly turned out that we have one day left alive?

Radu Afrim, Uniter-prize winner director said „at first reading the play seemed strange, not quite comprehensible, which is intriguing as the text doesn’t just proffer itself. It is about a woman’s going mad but in a way of sliding sometimes to the surreal. It is very emotional and funny as well. Of course, it is of utmost importance to have a company. I have seen a couple of their performances, so I knew them to bee good, but I would have never imagined me having such an easy way with”.

130 minutes without interval

Photo Gallery

Fotó: Barabás Zsolt

Public

(…) Radu Afrim highlights with great talent the basic dilemma: what can a woman do who senses she has left only one day? And with a greater talent he creates the grotesque setting, the milieu of the present Hungarian underworld - if a subway station can be considered the underworld. Emma is surrounded by helpless, selfish, purposeful people, by everymen. By keeping the meaning of the archaic morality play, namely what does a woman do before the „dead true” arrival of the end, her environment and all the grotesquely charming world of the characters take a mortifying shade. This can happen to any of us. This is the course of life, if it has one at all, as according to Afrim, this course is quite diffuse, and helped by the text itself, Mr. Péter Kárpáti as well proves to be lacking the unreasonable optimism of the weak-minded or the believer. Here in this charmed space, unfolding itself like a leporello, nothing is certain, everything can happen and the opposite as well, just as Wittgenstein wrote: „The world is everything that is the case”.
(László Bogdán: The life and death of Emma –
Háromszék,, 19th October 2013.)

(...) It has been a long time since we have heard such heart and mind-moving questions directly asked from the audience. Life and death, these are the questions of fate, beginning with why are we on Earth? Is it to throw rocks on each other? Or is to make a little profit during the few years? Contemporary playwright, Péter Kárpáti transmitted the medieval play by making the genre check up with the present lifestyle with all its uncolourness and affliction. (...)
(Zoltán Czegő: The drama of the account –
Székely Hírmondó, 18th October 2013.)

(...) Péter Kárpáti’s text is extremely risky because of its moralizing substance and also because of the strangeness of how the author mixes dream with reality, this life with the afterlife. Yet, the imagination of Afrim could make its way through the surreal lewdness of the Hungarian playwright that was helped by the talented team of the Tamási Áron Theatre. First of all, the director had luck with actress Gyöngyi Pál-Ferenczi who vested Emma with the incurable melancholia, with the hopeless melancholia of those arrived at the neighborhood of death, when one has nothing left but the irony of admitting: “And still, to live, to live - I think that is what I will miss the most. Life’s like nicotine, you become addicted to it.” (…)
(Nina Tînţar: Anyone (Everyman) who comes to the latest premiere of Afrim, will leave with
Péter Kárpáti’s Emma – Agenda Liternet, 2013 octombrie)

cast

EMMA
Gyöngyi Pál-Ferenczi

DEATH, PÉTER, RIPORTER
Tibor Pálffy

DOCTOR
László Szakács

ARANKA
Zsuzsa Gajzágó

TÓDOR
Gábor Erdei

VERA, BOAR, GAMMER
Kati Kovács

MARI, GAMMER
Fekete Mária

GIRL, GAMMER
Ágnes Benedek

ERIKA, GAMMER, GIRL ROOM TENANT
Eszter Nagy

LADY
Gábor Erdei / Annamária D. Albu

GYULA TÓTH
Attila Diószegi

DRUNK
Dezső Derzsi

OLD WOMAN
Gizella Molnár

OLD WOMAN
Szidónia Krizsovánszky

MRS.KÖVESI
Kálmán Debreczi

DJ. ÁGOTA
Bence Kónya-Ütő

Music & SFX
BENCE KÓNYA-ÜTŐ

Set Designer
JÓZSEF BARTHA

Costume Designer
ILKA GILIGA

Director’s assistant
BOTOND NAGY

Dramaturg
SÁNDOR NAGY B.

Director
RADU AFRIM

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