The show is a production of the Hungarian State Theatre from Cluj and is presented as part of the National Theatre Festival 2022.

14+
Performance in Hungarian with translation into Romanian and English

Ionesco's Macbett is not simply a parodistic turn of Shakespeare's masterpiece, but an x-ray and an expose of a dumbed-down public life, close to absurdity.

The play depicts, with unrelenting humor, public life animated and driven into chaos by constantly stimulated hostility. The Macbett in the vision of Ionesco also speaks of the absurdity of conspiracy. It addresses today's audience with surprising acuity. "Shakespeare's Macbeth is a monster, at the same time a puppet, of course, and Lady Macbeth is also a monster. My Macbett is not a monster. He's just as cowardly, villainous and power-hungry as Duncan, Banco, Glamiss or Candor. He's an ordinary man." - says Ionesco of his acidic play, which dramatizes the intellectual and moral emptiness of man. He draws our attention to the fact that since the Cold War years, politics has been overrun by petty, clueless characters who cling to power with bloody fingernails and see no further than the obtuse logic of defeating and destroying their political opponents. The opportunity that arose in the 1930s - that the clowns, infused with the mania for power and playing politics under the spell of bloodbaths, could be brought to power through free elections - is not a thing of the past, but an ever-present temptation that it is better to face than to continue to repeat the horrors, infused with the illusion of considering ourselves enlightened. András Visky

Photography: István Biró

Translated by Andreea Codrea-Boeriu