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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. + 88 +
