In the age of irresponsibility and unscrupulousness, when man and human dignity have no value whatsoever, it must be said that it could be done differently. You have to have a conscience! It was already eliminated in the twenty-first century, but it can still be found in fragments in the twentieth. In various formulations, it took shape that there is such a thing as individuality, that there is freedom, there is responsibility. We can think about the environment in which we live, what we call society, and how the individual with his smallness can exist in it. How big can the individual's freedom of movement be, and is there any at all, if the authorities don't want to take notice of it? The inalienable subjectivity of man is the freedom in which he creates himself. According to Sartre, existentialism is humanism. If there is no designer (i.e. God), then there is no inner essence of human life, and therefore there can be no human nature (which must be man). Instead, we must find our purpose, our own “essence”. The writer-philosopher dealt with this question in his rich oeuvre, novels, and plays.

The Flies is Jean-Paul Sartre's first drama, which was published in 1943 almost simultaneously with Being and Nothingness - An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, considered the author's main work. The question of the individual's freedom is explored through the myth of the House of Atreida. It stretches through the myth of House Atreida. in fact, it is not a fairy tale, but a parable. The characters are familiar: Agamemnon, Klytaimnestra who killed her, who cheated on her husband with her cousin, Aigist, son and grandson of Thyestes. The children of Agamemnon and Klytaimnestra can be known from the stories of several Greek tragedians. The girls are Chrysotemis, Elektra and Iphigenia, and the boy is none other than Orest. In Flies, Orest is the protagonist, who defies the gods and enforces his convictions with actions. He is not bound by the past, he just wants to find his own way and his own life. Our real contemporary in this. The others relate their stories to him: the revenge-hungry Elektra, kept as a servant, Klytaimnestra, who is dominated by his senses, and Aigist, who clings to power and exists only through it.

Their movement in the special space is adapted to the abstract content. We feel that what we see is not actually a fairy tale, but a parable, represented by the figures. The space of the performance - the story takes place in a huge, mandala-like red circle - was designed by Zoltán Balázs. There is no decoration, only movable red chairs, which could be the castle walls of Argos or a windswept Peloponnese mountaintop. The roads formed from sunflower seeds, which can be erased and destroyed, also convey disintegration and the constant change of living conditions. Andrea Lukács' Elektra, saturated with hatred and yearning for revenge, came to life from Euripides' drama. Brigitta Erőss' Iphigenia is the opposite. Playful and naive, with whom events happen, she is only the subject and not the driver of her life. (She also notes the great musical cues.)

The movement of the actors (in addition to those mentioned, Gedeon András, Brigitta Dőry, Zoltán Pál, Gáspár Mesés and Kornél Ádám) - this is the director's concept - is not subordinated to the text. In this way, the fact that we are dealing here with questions of life, not storytelling, is even more valid. About what we are in the course of events.

Under the direction of director Zsuzsanna Juraszek, a very uniform, rhythmically well-structured performance suggesting a strong directorial vision was created.

Ágnes Józsa, Criticai Lapok, 2023

Translation by: Zsuzsanna Juraszek