TÁP Theatre - Antal Szerb: Passenger and moonlight // Trafó

Michael runs away from his wife on their honeymoon in Italy, even though he had almost convinced himself that he was a decent, reliable and serious man. But one brief encounter with an adolescent friend is enough to shatter the bourgeois self he has spent years building up. The ghosts of a repressed adolescence surface, forcing Michael to finally confront the shadows of his time in the mysterious Ulpius house. Michael's escape is also a search, a search for his own life, or perhaps more importantly, his own death.

The production, entitled The Passenger and the Moon, is based on the director's 2002 radio play, which he was commissioned by Tamás Turay to create with the collaboration of Antal Szerb from his classic novel. The radio play breaks with the classical form of alternating dialogues and musical interludes: the director has mixed atmospheric sound effects with the entire dialogue body, highlighting certain layers of the story and complementing the dialogues. For the actors who playback to the radio play, the rehearsal process of the performance is a serious actor's training, a task they would not encounter in any other situation. The encounter between the live actor and the recorded spoken text automatically raises the theme of vulnerability to events, reinforcing the sense of the characters' fatal drift. By alienating actor and voice, sound text and musically highlighted subconscious content, by juxtaposing or even compositing them, and by using a varied, expressive visual world, The Passenger and the Moon can become a multi-layered and multi-layered full-length performance.

The Passenger and Moonlight is over 80 years old, but it is unashamedly fresh and youthful, shaming its contemporaries. The TÁP Theatre pays tribute to Antal Szerb's cult novel with a playback performance of a unique visuality. The performance, which lasts around five hours, is undoubtedly an unconventional and daring attempt to evoke the world of the novel, and to miss it is a real travesty.

The formal predecessor of the production is the TÁP Theatre's 2007 production of The Seekers, which was a great success with audiences and professionals. The special feature of Seekers was that it featured a previously recorded radio play by the director, with the actors on stage gabbing over the dialogue of the audio play, accompanied by a variety of visual effects that deepened the experience.

According to Péter Molnár Gál, the Seekers is "an acoustic-visual romp. An ear-eye orgy. Matrix on stage. Op-art, pop-art, Dadaism, disintegrationism, collage, pathos and parody from wall to wall. Digital reality. A mad spectacle, a mind-boggling hallucination purposefully operated.