On November 17, Sándor Lezsák's drama Eighty Buckets of Air will be presented in the Studio Theater of the Jókai Színház in Békéscsaba, directed by Béla Merő, starring Gyula Bartus and Krisztina Tarsoly.
Theater director Zoltán Seregi said at the public press audition that he wanted to stage this special play as early as 1988, but Károly Károly, the director of the Thália Theater at the time, did not allow it. This is also my old debt, he added.
According to the director Béla Merő, the play is a "tragedy of Hungarian closed-mindedness". Even today, there is a war situation all over the world, so one half of the play is terribly relevant, he said.
He added that fear pervades the stage work, the fear of all kinds of changes, to which is added the feeling of disillusionment with life.
The man in this piece wants nothing more than most people today: to survive, he said.
József Sándor Lezsák, the Attila Prize-winning poet and the vice-president of the Parliament, also participated in the reading test in Békéscsaba, where he said: he accidentally came to Lakitelek at the age of 19, where he taught in a farm school without a qualification. There, he met such fates that he realized: the people - who were forced into the teapots at that time - were "practicing the technique of survival".
The play is a drama of two narrow minded people. He transferred the typical Central and Eastern European feeling of life, the fear and the desire to survive hidden in our instincts into the work, said the writer.
The main characters, the married couple Old Man and Old Woman, live on a farm in the Great Plains, the viewer can assume that the story takes place at the time the work was written, in the second half of the Kádár era. Fragments of the depressing events of the Second World War, the Rákosi era and the 1956 revolution appear in the series of memorial images of the old man, but not in a logical order, but in a chaotic, surreal whirlwind.
As a result of the trauma, the Old Man does everything he can to prepare for the nuclear attack he predicted.
He builds a bunker in the side wall of the wheel well of his house, where he accumulates large quantities of food and air reserves to ensure survival, and where he regularly conducts air raid drills with the involvement of his wife. The woman once becomes entangled in a pipe, which turns out to be a gas pipe that her husband built so that if they hide in their hiding place, they can blow up the area above them.
Béla Merő said that the play is performed in one act, with many props.
MTI
The Jókai Theater in Békéscsaba presents the play of Sándor Lezsák
Source: Facebook/Sándor Lezsák
