Brecht – The Hardcore Machine at MU Theatre Budapest

A few words about Dunapart and the performing arts platform: a huge personal disappointment. An awful crowd, snobbish fancy dressed theatre goers and critics, talking some disgusting French, probably just for the beautiful intonations, claiming the last pantheon of being bourgeois: the experimental theatre.

I went to see one show that was so promising: Brecht the Hardcore Machine from Andras Urban Company, based on Brecht’s Buckow Elegies. It had its premiere last year in Berlin and it is supposed to represent a break with literary drama and post-dramatic theatre that is not performative enough for them and still too much based on texts. “This performance is not a play” they say. And I remember using the exactly same words two weeks ago about my Beckett trilogy. Not following a particular narrative, the performance approaches a young working girl that enters “the wonderful world of ideology and corporeality.”

And more they say: “Labour. Starvation. Sex. Power. Fun. Class struggle is not dead.” Not to mention the goody goody focus on the body of actors, very third theatre style. Very Barbaesque. Very exciting. The first feeling that something is fishy about this show was when I entered the small MU and I saw an awful exhibition a la bible belt post-feminism with pop art playmates spreading messages like “Dworkin and Queer are Dead”. Nothing to do with the show one might say. Not really I say. A show for me cannot exist outside the space of the performance, the artists’ usage of spectators with their breaths, their bodies, their nicely combed hair and their greedy eyes. And this public was just horrible. Together with the unfit space of MU for such a show.

Continuing with the show: beautiful ideas, generous attempts, ingenious solutions, hard working actors but a limited vision, a shitty director shitting his pants, not leaving the actors think with their bodies and dilate them just for the sake of some shitty fixed images, weak scenes and a personal gratification. And no hysterical creativity here. Trying to tell a retro-political revue they ended up with the most horrible clichés that made me feel embarrassed. But on the other hand, the commodification of Brecht is not new-fangled and it doesn’t have to be subtle all the time. Maybe the good news is that Brecht sells and is sold again and these guys proved it once again. Because as good ol’ Brecht said “What is theatre if not a night of good entertainment?”

Like Arpad Schilling after this bitter taste performance, I ended up dreaming of a theatre made in the forest where no one dares to come. Or like Tadeusz Kantor to secretly dream of all artists dropping dead.

A happening in Belfast

here is what Arpad Schilling told me a few weeks ago. it makes you think about what kind of theatre you want to make:

"It was very funny, I met this Irish street artist and I tried to explain this problem with the theatre in Hungary and it was funny because in Ireland theatre is not so important inside the culture. No big theatres, no big companies, just a few money for theatre and he told me that he didn’t understand this problem. Because what is a theatre? Is it a big auditorium and a big stage? I’ve never been to a theatre, I’m not interested in theatre. I think that the interesting place is the street, back to the people, to paint something on the wall, to make a real action. A happening is good because is a real meeting and it has real effects. He showed me one action that his friends made in Belfast. They made an action in an army center. Some activists, they were actors or clowns, went to this army center and made a funny situation but it is a different culture. The army called the police and police arrived but it was not possible to take them out because is a different culture and a different kind of democracy. It was an interesting situation: the police, the army and between them there are the clowns. It was a real situation, with no in or out. They were able to take out the clowns in the end after one hour but after that the army center was closed. It was a big success for this theatrical action. It was only one day but they had to close the army center. And that was the real aim. "