11. Madách International Theatre Meeting

“This play by Géza Szőcs is a historical insight into the collective European and global conscience. It brings historical reality into focus through the fictitious lens of Rasputin. This fiction appears to be the last refuge for a passionate survival in the apocalyptic forest of mankind. It has this childlike desire for world peace, for a situation without killing each other in wars and in society. In the world we create here, all the poetry flirts with reality. All the desires dance with surrender, and all the deeds with philosophy. This drama is just like our contemporary image of Rasputin has become: divine and infinitely human, and at the same time, horrendously historical. It is because the both sacred and sinful figure of Rasputin is incomprehensible. His power is not of the kind that emperors, kings or tsars have, but like the enchanting look of players and swindlers.

I often imagine what it would have been like had there not been so many deaths during the 20^th century. What my grandparents, the friends and relatives of my great-grandparents who did not survive the hard times could have been like. There was no end to these people’s painful cries in the last century or even in ours. Or even last year. This year. I always believed that we as human beings are able to hear those lost voices through our imagination and empathy. Sometimes, it is not about how exactly something has happened… The point is not how precisely we can reconstruct history, but how we live our truth or truths.

There are as many truths as people and nations, all slightly different. Through the dramatic figure and journey of Rasputin, one can discover the daily, historical and universal truth of extinct eras and characters, and one can relate to people never known. This show will be also a commemoration of all the innocents or people who would never have used weapons, if they had had the choice.” (Sardar Tagirovsky)

(Photographer: Károly Süveg)