The Racing Demon

The renowned British playwright David Hare took contact by his play with the perennial problem embodied in the question: What does a present-day Christian still believe in?

His reflexions on faith in his play The Racing Demon are those on doubts of faith. The playwright has raised the perplexities implied in that question to a value which is to be taken into account together with doubts and uncertainties.

lf this topic – tabooed here far whole decades – of faith and God who is not only a transcendent opposite of man, but likewise an in-depth dimension of humanity, is being staged in Slovakia precisely by Martin Huba (1943), it is undoubtedly because Huba the actor and Huba the producer poses himself in- depth and essential questions.

After having staged the plays From the Life of Earthworms (O. Enquist, 1988) and Showmen (T. Griffiths, 1990) where he introduced himself as an actor and producer, he now completes a triad of his stagings with that of D. Hare´s The Racing Devil.

A seemingly excessive audacity (a producer and protagonist in one person) had led M. Huba to a peculiar synthesis of statement in which he makes his subtle approach to the topic by his actor's art of an “introspective appearance” and through an unobtrusive, cultured “producer approach”, he gently and exactly gropes far the individual’s and the period’s neuralgic spots. His matchless “conscious spontaneity” in intellectual statements is in fact a consistent meditation over the fragile equilibrium of man's disrupted integrity, man living in a vortex of contradictions.

The deliberate, tranquil surface of Huba´s stagings is but a semblance of calm, rather, it is an earnest plea far preserving the entity of vulnerable people. In that grave tone and gentle smile, in the value of that silence is concealed – the vigour of his play.

Zuzana Bakošová – Hlavenková

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