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ANITA RÁKÓCZY
Gábor Tompa, internationally acclaimed Romanian-Hungarian artist, earned
his degree in stage and film directing at the I. L. Caragiale Iheatre and Film
Academy, Bucharest, in 1981. However, he was only a second-year student when
he staged Samuel Beckett s Happy Days in 1979, and this, his first acknowledged
production as a theatre director, marks the beginning of his artistic career.
Since then Tompa, general and artistic director of the Hungarian Theatre of
Cluj, Romania, has staged more Hungarian-language Beckett productions than
any other director. According to the Productions Database of the Hungarian
Theatre Museum and Institute, he has directed Waiting for Godot three times
with a Hungarian-speaking cast (Szigligeti Theatre, Szolnok, 1992; Vig Theatre,
Budapest, 2003; Tamási Áron Theatre, Sepsiszentgyörgy, 2005), and another
four times as a guest director (Staatstheater, Freiburg, Kammerspiele, 1995;
Lyric Iheatre, Belfast, 1999; Manitoba Iheatre Centre, Winnipeg, 2001;
Theodore and Adele Shank Theatre, San Diego, 2017). His credits also include
two Hungarian-language Endgame productions (Hungarian Theatre of Cluj,
1999; National Theatre Targu-Mures, 2016) and a staging of Play (Thalia
Studio, Budapest, 2003). In the 1980s, Tompa befriended and later began to
work with the dramaturg, essayist, and playwright Andras Visky,? who shared
his devotion to Beckett, and has been the dramaturg of most of Tompa’s
Beckett directions ever since. Beckett’s indisputable influence is detectable in
the great number of Beckett’s plays and their perpetual recurrence in Tompa’s
directorial oeuvre, suggesting that his first encounter with Beckett before
graduation was not accidental but one of those instinctive, ontological choices
that shape one’s entire life. This chapter, through interviews, reviews, and a
selection of his Beckett productions, sets out to explore Gabor Tompa’s artistic
approach to staging Beckett.
Happy Days: WHEN THE SYSTEM CRASHES
As Andräs Nagy argues, Tompa’s dynamically expanding directorial oeuvre
never ceases to have exciting experiments and surprises in store, as “in his fate
and growing up that could become (an artistic) blessing which otherwise was
a (historic) curse [...] In his most formative years, intellectual breathlessness
and the vacuum space of theatrical talent proved to be inseparable in
both Bucharest and Cluj.”* Unlike the director-centered tradition that the
2 Andras Visky (1957) is a playwright, essayist, and dramaturg, born in Targu-Mures,
Romania. Visky is the artistic director of the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj, and developer of
the term “barrack-dramaturgy.” His plays have been staged in several countries including
Romania, Hungary, France, Italy, Poland, Slovenia, England, Scotland, and the United States.
He is one of the co-founders and the former executive director of Koinönia Publishing.
3 Nagy, Andras: Beckett — Mult idében [Beckett — In Past Tense], Szinhdz (July 2003), 8.
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