11. Madách International Theatre Meeting

Valère Novarina, a French-speaking author and director who was born in Switzerland, has now brought his fourteenth work to the stage, making his second excursion into the “forest of names.” In 1986, in his play Le Drame de la vie (“The Drama of Life”), he let 2,587 names run wild, with the continuous arrival of characters on stage. In Le Vivier des noms (The Breeding Pool of Names), a play consisting of 52 scenes, he uses 1,000 “verbal spirits,” referring to 1,100 characters by name, though not all of them appear on stage. Novarina situates the historian in the middle of the forest of names, and she orders the story to begin. Worntooth, the dog, knows well that he will never appear again, the anti-people are plotting something, the actor who flees others proves once again the opposite of what he’s thinking, the Minister of the Exterior declares Latin to be a living language, the parietal children come every fifteen minutes to empty a sack full of prejudices... Over the course of two and a half hours, the stage is dismantled and put back together, and then filled with rebuses. Time sighs: no one has noticed it. The actors walk on the periphery of language, between words that free and words that enslave.