Theater: Kornél Mundruczó: Keine Frage der Perspektive

It is these three that we will follow over the next two hours: Éva, Jónás and Léna. The setting for the dialogue-rich self-examinations is Éva’s apartment in Budapest. We meet her, mother and grandmother, on stage as an old woman (Lili Monori), who does not let go of how she was thrown into life until she dies. Kasernenstrasse in Auschwitz is listed as the place of birth. An inmate’s daughter found herself in the death camp as a newborn – and became a survivor. It is a trauma that spans more than one generation.

Léna (Emőke Kiss-Végh), Éva’s daughter, wants one thing above all: to get away from here, to get out of Hungary, which is – and not just yesterday – illiberal and anti-Semitic. She goes to Berlin with her son Jónás (Erik Major). After Éva’s death, they both return to the country in which they were born.

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This evening at the theater is not called “Parallax” by chance. “Parallax,” as an online encyclopedia explains, “is the apparent change in the position of an object due to different positions of the observer.” And so in Kornél Mundruczó’s latest stage prank, we change the position more than once and, not least, follow the change in position, which arises from the various opponents.

In the first part of the production, which presents us with Éva in 2013, we only see her through the windows in her apartment; In it she is filmed live. Two screens above the action show sometimes her, sometimes her daughter, sometimes the whole person, sometimes a detail. However, even with the best will in the world, one cannot claim that these means would be used in such a way that statements would actually be made on the difficult question of identity.

Éva knows what the attribution “Jewish” can mean. And so she, whose entire life was so deeply influenced by the Holocaust, tries to evade any objective classification from outside. Her daughter, who suffers from her lost childhood as the descendant of a Shoah survivor and from the social stigma she is exposed to in Hungary, wants to at least use her family history to turn her back on her homeland and go to Germany. The Jewish community should ensure that their son gets a place at school far away.

Jónás, who is presented to us here as an average hedonistic twenty-something from Berlin, seems to ignore the question of whether he is Jewish or not. On the eve of Éva’s funeral, he stays in her apartment overnight – and has orgiastic fun with four men, between coke and anal sex. The television realism in which the entire evening is held is somewhat strange. In these scenes, despite his progressive demands, he gets something unintentionally staid. Is what is being discussed here really material for a chamber play?

A further identity-political contradiction is exemplified using Jónás: If the question of open or hidden gay life arises among the Hungarian characters, he feels uncomfortable with this type of categorization and sees himself as a fluid lover and lifer. In the last part of the production, Léna also arrives in Budapest, comes across the legacy of Jónás’ excessive evening activities and in the end comes to terms with herself, with her mother and with her son in a conciliatory, kitschy way.

The production does not give any impetus to what Jewish life in Europe after the Shoah can actually mean. Making anti-Semitism and homophobia an issue at all in Hungary (where Kornél Mundruczó’s work is now unwelcome) is certainly meritorious. But the overly Solomonic response to the dilemma of identity politics seems inappropriate. Under these circumstances, the juxtaposition of Holocaust experience and queerness proves to be extremely difficult. It’s not all a question of perspective, not everything can be negotiated based on your feelings. The Auschwitz ramp is a reality. A reality that has not been erased with the death of the last witnesses.

»Parallax« will also be shown in Hamburg, Paris, Geneva, Milan, Athens, Strasbourg and Orléans.
www.protontheatre.hu

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