Andrea Tompa’s novel begins in 1944 in the Transylvanian city of Cluj-Napoca, as the city’s Jewish residents were being forced into a ghetto, and ends in the early 1990s, when the region’s inhabitants were finally liberated from dictatorship. The plot focuses on a woman who, as an infant, is entrusted by her Jewish mother to a housemaid in order to rescue her from a terrible fate. The child grows up in this new family with a new name and eventually becomes an actress whose career and life are both haunted by her search for her own identity. Our production, developed by a multilingual, multinational creative team and incorporating the various languages and complicated ethnicities of the characters involved, seeks its own answers to the questions of silence and how we face the past.

“There were three major themes I was exploring: the question of fate and origin, issues surrounding adoption, and how the theatre allows us to learn things about ourselves by immersing us in the lives of others. (...) A very important starting point was how the past was lost. A black hole was created by the fact that tens of thousands of human beings were dragged out of this city. It’s not just this child’s parents who disappear, many others go there without a trace. The desolation is so great that it affects everyone: the past of many of the characters is one of obscurity, lies, role-playing, identity changes, and everything else. So what’s gone is gone, this is a fact that we have to live with, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

The show is partly live-stage, partly live-video transmitted from the original rooms as a site-specific surroundings. So, we use as scenes among others the wardrobes, the theatre-buffet, the big auditorium, the street before the entrance, the storages for props and set, the basement with its original metal door with the inscription “Shelter for 41” person. The performance is an international cooperation between Örkeny Színház, Budapest, Hungary and Theaterhaus Jena, Germany.

PERFORMED BY Szandtner Anna, Takács Nóra Diána, Szaplonczay Mária, Friedenthal Zoltán, Ioana Niţulescu (Theaterhaus Jena), Florian Thongsap Welsch (Theaterhaus Jena)

MUSICAL COLLABORATOR Matisz Flóra Lili

ON VIDEO RECORDING Pogány Judit, Ficza István

DIRECTOR Gáspár Ildikó

Foto: Judit Horváth