Schedule
Things are not going well at Bábelna, in the woodworking cooperative. The factory is dying. Then a new investor from Azerbaijan arrives, buys the company, and brings with him fifty Azerbaijani woodworkers and their families. The local workers protest and vandalize the new owner's car. They distribute obscene flyers on the factory premises.
Zoltán, the company's old-new personnel manager, tries to convince the factory workers – the audience of the performance – that welcoming the Azerbaijani families is a great thing with a small stage show, a so-called cultural gift basket.
The setting is the factory canteen. The cultural gift basket presents scenes from a thousand years of Hungarian history – from St. Stephen to the 20th century – with the lesson that acceptance and openness have always been beneficial to the Hungarian nation.
The artistic quality of the scenes is greatly diminished by the fact that Zoltán and Gyula, one of the factory's woodcarvers, play all the roles in the show. Another factor that diminishes the quality is the arrival at the very beginning of the show of Gusztáv, the factory's best carpenter and union leader, who was not told that there would be a show here. Gusztáv is also the leader of the Bábelnai Magyar Gárda, a self-defense group. Zoltán is definitely not missing him being here. But to use his own words, "the show goes on," meaning that even a deliberately critical audience does not deter the enthusiastic staff from presenting their cultural gift basket.
