Parallax

PARALLAX The acclaimed Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó is known to the festival audience for his analytical reflection on topical social issues and his spectacular and expressive stage works featuring naturalism, nudity and often graphic depiction of violence. His rich, uncompromising and provocative theatrical style offers theatregoers a unique experience. Mundruczó’s new production Parallax is a triptych, where each act focuses on one character. The director uses breathtaking visual flourishes to illustrate the time skips between the individual parts. The production skilfully interweaves surreal poetic images with hyper-realistic scenes. The production opens in a set divided into three parts. The central part provides a look through a window into a lifelike kitchen where we see the mother and daughter arguing. The actors also appear in close-ups displayed on the screens installed on the left and right. Eva’s relentless narration about her Auschwitz experience is hardly bearable, just like the despair of the daughter who had to endure these stories throughout her whole childhood. Their fierce and bitter quarrel is as horrible as it is ridiculous. The saga of a Hungarian family serves the director as a backdrop to show how different generations deal with their Jewish heritage. A grandmother, daughter and son are in a cramped Budapest apartment. The grandmother, a Holocaust survivor whom life has taught to hide her Jewish identity, clashes with her daughter, who lives in 1990s Berlin and intends to use the same identity to enrol her son in a better school. But the son, now adult, wants to abandon identity altogether, having found his place within the LGBT+ community. Yet, is it possible for an individual to remain neutral in a society struck by a crisis where the social gaps are deepening and the far right is on the rise? This report on the current Hungary sheds an uncompromising and raw light on the persisting traumas of the past and the painful taboos of the present.

 This company is brilliant. (…) The characters they shape with empathy and love seem absolutely real, just as their relationships with each other. I would especially like to highlight Lili Monori’s acting. Watching her, watching them is a truly unique experience.
ARD Audiothek

 The word “play” is far from sufficient to describe what we see on stage. Proton Theatre from Budapest, founded by Kornél Mundruczó 15 years ago, is a theatrical wonder. The acting is perfectly lifelike. It is impossible to imagine that they do not identify with their characters – despite the fact that we’ve already seen most of them in various different roles over the last few years.
GABI HIFT, nachtkritik.de

Dense and concise, but never didactic dialogues alternate with magnificently lavish playfulness in Parallax. The light streaming through the window beautifully indicates the time of day. The director masterfully combines live video with the scenes on stage, mixes realism with the ancient magic of theatre, and makes us laugh, only to be followed by dead silence in the auditorium.
Der Standard

KORNÉL MUNDRUCZÓ (1975) He studied at the Hungarian University of Film and Drama and is now a renowned European film and theatre director, whose creations premier at the most prestigious festivals all over the world. He has been working for the stage since 2003. For new projects he very often casts the same actors, who are working as creative partners to him. It is with them that he devises the productions. After freelancing with more or less the same group of people for several years, in 2009 he founded his independent theatre company, Proton Theatre. He was nominated for the Faust Award in 2017 for his outstanding directorial achievement in Proton Theatre’s Imitation of Life. This was the first time in the history of this award that a non-German theatre, in this case a Hungarian independent company was nominated. His production called Evolution, a co-production of the Proton Theatre and the Ruhrtriennale, was considered the highlight of the 2019 edition of the German festival. The theatre performance has been turned into a film, which premiered in 2021 at the Cannes Film Festival, in the Cannes Premiere section. Since 2003 he has directed on the opera scene as well. The Makropulos Affair which premiered in the Flemish Opera in Antwerp was nominated for the International Opera Award in the category Best New Production. Thus, was the first Hungarian nominee. He made his directorial debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 2003. His first English-language film, Pieces of a Woman, was in competition at the 77th Venice International Film Festival in 2020 and became a hit on Netflix. Mundruczó first appeared at the Divadlo International Festival in 2011 with his stage adaptation of Sorokin’s novel Ice prepared for the Budapest theatre, followed by the productions The Bat, It’s Hard to Be a God, Disgrace and Imitation of Life. With his disturbing view of the world, he captures fundamental, essential themes through highly artistic means, sentiment, genre clichés as well as ‘pulp fiction’ elements, all combined to create a peculiar, elusive and sometimes irritating whole.

PROTON THEATRE In 2009, film and theatre director Kornél Mundruczó and theatre producer Dóra Büki founded the Proton Theatre, a virtual art company organised around the director’s independent productions. Their main goal was to preserve the artistic freedom to the widest possible extent while providing a professional structure for their independently produced theatre plays and projects. They prepare their works predominantly as international co-productions, most frequently with Wiener Festwochen, HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, KunstenFestivalDesArts in Brussels, Trafó House of Contemporary Art in Budapest, and HELLERAU in Dresden. The Proton Theatre has attended over a hundred festivals with their productions, including the Avignon Festival, the Adelaide Festival, the Singapore International Festival, the Bo:m Festival in Seoul, and the Züricher Theaterspektakel. Currently, the theatre receives no subsidies from the state and struggles to support its future operations.