Oldal 93 [93]
ANITA RÁKÓCZY
entire field of shoes becomes visible. Estragons fight gave Tompa the idea for
the set, " and Vladimir’s remark in Act II, “To every man his little cross.”
Estragon (Tibor Palffy) fails to come to terms with his shoes, and for most of
Act Ihe is wearing only half the pair. When the sun sets and before the stage
darkens, the spotlight lands back on his shoes, which he takes off and leaves
downstage center, inherently a potent location. At the same time the moon
rises — the same size as the circular pool of light around Estragon’s boots
— a pattern of visual symmetry and repetition that characterizes many of
Tompa’s Beckett directions. Act II also begins and ends with the spotlight on
Estragon’s shoes as he had left them the night before or for the night to come.
He is reluctant to accept his footwear as his own, and puts them on only
when Vladimir (Lorand Vata) convinces him that they are not his, but belong
rather to someone else with smaller feet. Following this logic, the stage is full
of shoes that their owners wished not to own, or could not own any longer,
remnants of abandoned fates or broken walks of life. However, Tompa goes
one step further on the road of individual and collective traumas: each time
he directs Waiting for Godot the audience is asked to provide the shoes for the
set. As he sums up, “We love this. It means that the theatre acquires the used
footwear by posting a classified ad, and before the premiere, members of the
audience themselves give us their discarded shoes, thus playing their part in
the production and the fates of Vladimir and Estragon.”"
Another significant innovation of Tompa’s 2005 Godot is that the role
of Lucky is given to the actress Hilda Péter. This, as Tompa argues, aims to
emphasize not the femininity of the character but its genderlessness.’’ Istvan
Zsehranszky notes in his review that Péter’s rendering of Lucky perfectly
justifies Tompa’s choice of a woman for the role: “Several millions of women
keep playing this unexplainable but still understandable servile fidelity. The
inability to revolt. The horror.”1* Péter, who in 2005 was awarded the UNITER
Prize for the best supporting role,'* mobilizes a great variety of energies in
her role of Lucky, ranging from vulnerability — such frailness that it almost
results in physical transparency — to neurotic spasms, followed by unearthly
4 Ibid., 185.
15 Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works, London, Faber and Faber, 1990, 58.
Zsigmond, Andrea: Zárt formák rendje. Beszélgetés Tompa Gábor színházi rendezővel, a
Kolozsvári Állami Magyar Szinhäz igazgatöjäval [The Order of Closed Forms. Interview
with Stage Director Gábor Tompa, Director of the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj], Székelyföld,
X/1., January 2006, 113.
7 Ibid., 113.
Zsehränszky, István: Bohóc az egész világ [The Whole World is Clownery], Erdélyi Riport, 2
February 2006, 11.
Metz, Katalin: Birkózás léttel és idővel (Wrestling with Being and Time], Magyar Nemzet,
8 May 2006. UNITER Prize is awarded every year by Uniunea Teatralá din Románia, the
Theater Union of Romania (established in 1990, after the 1989 Romanian Revolution) for
outstanding contributions to theatre art.
+ 92 +