At the opening performance of the 13th HolnapUtán Festival, on Monday morning, we took part in an alternative, interactive literature class on The Tragedy of Man, held in one of the classrooms of the Eminescu National College in Oradea.

The creators of the Figura Studio Theatre from Gheorgheni condense the greatest human drama of Hungarian literature into just 35 minutes — a story for which Imre Madách needed over four thousand lines of verse and Marcell Jankovics nearly three hours of animated frames. In exchange, we get an intensely packed half-hour.

The three actors in colorful T-shirts (Míra Szilágyi, Gábor Kolozsi Borsos, Norbert-László Moșu), who play both themselves and the three main characters (Eve, Adam, Lucifer), dart through the story in a deliberately chaotic way, switching tones, capturing and dividing our attention. The three do entirely different things at once: one sits at the teacher’s desk rattling off Imre Madách’s biography, another sketches it briefly on the blackboard, while the third mimes it in a parodic way. The contrast between stereotypical teacherly and student-like behavior is also present in the succession of lofty readings and cheeky debates, or in the T-shirts themselves, which on one side display famous quotes from the work (“I feel like a mother, oh, Adam, myself”), and on the other their emoji equivalents (pregnant woman).

Throughout, the actors remain sensitive to the participants – in this case, eleventh-grade math and computer science students – who arrive not with literary training, but with pop-cultural awareness and receptivity. What looks like impulsive storytelling is, in fact, a conscious selection guided by the questions: what is important, what is funny, what can we relate to?

The performance approaches the compulsory reading through the rhythm, language, and references of young people. The intertextual, fast-paced text is driven by associations. In the Paris dream-within-a-dream scene, Christopher Nolan’s Inception is brought up; since it’s the French Revolution, a song from Les Misérables is also sung, and we learn that Victor Hugo’s novel was published in the same year as The Tragedy of Man, in 1862. In the Roman scene, we are invited to reenact the iconic “What have the Romans ever done for us?” moment from Monty Python’s Life of Brian – which, incidentally, also rehearses answers to a potential history exam question. The actors highlight personal points of connection, such as the fact that the last three scenes – the phalanstery, outer space, and the ice world – represented the future for Madách, but for us are already the past, since we have experienced communism, space travel, and are now facing climate change.

Audience participation was also encouraged through smaller and larger roles. We were the wailing Egyptian slaves (wail as if you had to take your final exams in Romanian on The Tragedy of Man), the furious Athenian mob (throw paper balls at Miltiades), and finally the rebellious Parisian crowd (who didn’t even need prompting to clap the rhythm back, the situation being self-evident). Thanks to these gradually built interactions, during the small-group workshop following the 35-minute fixed performance, we were able to reflect – albeit briefly due to the 15-minute time limit – on the kind of world we would like to live in.

The Tragedy of Man is stimulating, entertaining, educational without being didactic; it sparks curiosity and offers reference points for engaging with this work. “I said, Man: strive and trust, and trust in thy striving!”

Originally published on the website of the Szigligeti Theatre in Oradea.