Muck, a country soap opera

Those who saw at the Divadelná Nitra 2007 the production called The Queen of the Cookies, know what they can expect from the playwright and director Béla Pintér. The formal and form-shaping theatre language, inspired by a ritual, using various high or low expression of culture… In the case of Muck “Pinter’s people”, painfully and daringly, do not reflect the past, they speak directly and openly about here and now, about us, our presence, our stereotypes, flaws and guilt.

The Roma issue and racist demonstrations are issues in Hungary as well as Slovakia; it is sad that these phenomena connect our countries, but at the same time they divide them. Pintér confronts the audience directly with these phenomena, but there is still some time until we realize that the protagonists of this balladic story, connected with nature and naturalness, head for disaster. Of course, Pintér realizes that building a production on such a hot yet for years not solved problem like the ethnic hatred and extremism is the walking on thin ice. It is uneasy not to slip into moralizing, to criticize and use irony but to keep human view and sensitivity. There are two worlds helping Pintér which he depicts exactly – on one side, there is the world of traditional folk ballads which by its coded language and metaphors symbolically comments the sweetly painful, soap-opera-like story of adopted girls; on the other side, there is the world of a village amateur theatre and some provincial theatre showcase which this theatre maker (Pintér) knows to his fingertips. While the folklore, poetry of ballads, accompanied by monotonous music, almost hypnotize our mind and make us to perceive reality in a different way than rationally and logically, in the case of depicting the life of the amateur theatre, which is funny an exact even for those who have never worked in such a theatre, we realize broader connections of the reality of a community, the independent theatre which Pintér and his ensemble are. The work with a folklore material is typical for the theatre and creative work of Pintér, nevertheless in this context it is given another dimension – not only during the period of communism were folklore and old traditions abused for false pretending of national feelings, self-confidence and identity.

Despite it being a political, socially committed theatre, it does not bring only facts and does not work only with pamphlet. It is exact in the psychological depicting of the characters, mainly their development – the transformation of the Roma girl Anita into a woman and her almost animal following of instincts and of what the majority of society (i.e. the audience) awaits (that she steals, lies, makes intrigues), and the transformation of the white Rózsika from an ugly girl full of complexes into a “convinced defender” of the social justice and rights of her adoptive mother, clothed in the uniform of an extremist movement.
Romana Maliti

“Pintér and his ensemble have incredibly high sensitivity and sensors which can create more than mere categories of good and evil; through irony they reject and judge everything what is really amoral, what really offends, hurts and humiliates people… Today’s Hungarian society is exactly like the character of Rózsi: she has got a feeling that nobody loves her and so she is angry, and for this anger she gives punches and pseudo-truths from left to right.”
Bencsik Orsolya, XX. Theater Fesztivál, Szeged, Kisszínház