0.1 mg
performance/play
The Ensemble of András Urbán/‘Dezső Kosztolányi’ Theatre, Subotica (Serbia)
Cast: Zoltán Pletl, Hermina G. Erdélyi, Henrieta Varga
Music: Szilárd Mezei
Costume and set assistant: Tünde Varga, Attila Úri
Direction: Szilárd Mezei
The duration of the play is 60 minutes. |
‘The text by Géza Csáth serves as a starting point in creating the world of the play ‘0.1 mg’. Urban makes no adaptation – he makes a vision. Instead of telling us a story, he depicts feelings – fears, hidden passions, murderous desires; a man’s attitude towards the time and women; torments of the conscious and unconscious, dream and reality, faction and fiction, sanity and madness. On the stage covered with soil, on the side of which the audience sit, there are only a few additions: a metal bed resembling a cage, a chair, a wooden cradle, some dry twigs, an axe, knives, and animal skulls.
Independent pieces, music parts (the violin or Szilárd Mezei’s song) and picturesque etudes come one after the other, and it seems there is no connection between them, until a very expressive iconographic answer to our fears arrives: an image of a fish melted from a piece of ice triggers a series of associations, in which Géza Csáth’s madness transforms into a myth of human madness in general. Images symbolic of the story about Christ (for instance the scene of a woman and a man in the pose of Pieta), standing in sharp contrast, imply the absurdity of our existence: the human aspiration to the divine perfection and purity, and a parallel incapability to achieve such a state (our angel wings are just wings made of wire).
This borderline of madness is the central metaphor of the play. After killing his wife in a state of morphine induced madness, Géza Csáth was committed to an asylum, but he escaped. He was caught at the demarcation line, where he took a lethal dose of morphine before his captors’ eyes. In the final scene of ‘0.1 mg’, we see a man who is running on the spot for a long time, while two women keep shouting: ‘Stop! We’ll shoot’! in Hungarian, Serbian, Russian, German and French.
This scene is not only a biography, but a symbolic essence of the play. It demarks the ultimate subordination of a man, and his struggle between the heavens and the woman.’ (from the review by Melánia Miklós)
The Dezső Kosztolányi Theatre
The theatre was founded by the municipality of Subotica in 1994. Until 2006 it operated from the house of the Subotica National Theatre. In 2007 the theatre got its own hall with 94 seats and a permanent ensemble of 5 performers. There are 14 employees at the moment, together with the management, administration, technical crew and maintenance.
Other productions:
Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
William Shakespeare: Taming of the Shrew
Slawomir Mrozek: Tango
Co-productions:
Bram Stoker: Dracula –Light of the Moment
Bertold Brecht: The Hardcore Machine
www.kosztolanyi.org |
