Last Show: To be or not

Sára O. Horváth's drama To be or not to be deals with the variety of problems that arise in connection with having children. The setting: contemporary Hungary.

The social background, life situation and age of the characters are very different. They include a middle-aged couple, a lesbian couple considering having children, a young girl with cervical cancer who wants to have a child, and a woman who has been a victim of sexual violence. These different people are linked by the issue of having children. As the plot progresses, the eight separate lives become increasingly intertwined, with more and more encounters and more complex relationships between the characters. The drama is structured as a series of interwoven yet (apparently) independent textual sequences, which sometimes converge, form short dialogues and then are left to themselves again. The stories that emerge are so contemporary and personal that the audience can feel that any one of the eight people on stage could be themselves. This is the very aim of the production: to convey a sense of confession, of "it could happen to anyone". The domestic social environment puts enormous pressure on women. The question of childbirth, of having children, is a kind of moral obligation. The performance tries to get to the bottom of the problem and to confront, without political rhetoric, what it means to have or not to have a child in Hungary today. The creators hope that the award-winning contemporary drama will be a sensitising and niche-replacing performance, which will approach this topic, which affects everyone in our lives, in an open and bold way, without taboos.