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SHOES THAT ARE LEFT BEHIND: GÁBOR TOMPAS BECKETT HERITAGE
music of Attila Demény, and Pergolesis Stabat Mater. A hand appears from
time to time, playing the piano, turning suddenly into a skeleton palm and
fingers to gently suggest that nothing lasts forever.
The urns of M, W1, and W2 are touching each other. However, unlike
Beckett’s stage instructions, they are neither grey nor exactly identical.
Although these pieces of Andras Both’s “neo-futurist,” X-ray machine-like set
are of the same size and roughly the same material,”’ they are individualized
as their inhabitants have their unique stories to tell. With their small built-in
drawers, they are reminiscent of sideboards, but confessionals, guillotines, old
stoves, and private crematories also come to mind when exploring these wooden
structures: the closed doors with handles in the middle and the carved, arched
chin rests to which the heads of the characters seem to be fixed. The urns stand
on a podium surrounded by innumerable forks and spoons lying on the floor,
evoking the broken intimacy of breakfasts and dinners — kitchens of places M,
W1, and W2 once called home — unwillingly shared cutlery.
All three are pale, chalk-white in fact, their hair slightly red, other-worldly,
as the light, the fourth character, begins to make them speak. Light is torture.
Speaking is torture. But darkness is worse. They speak neither slower nor
faster than they would in their living rooms, but their bleak stares, radiant
from suffering, are fixed to a point straight in front of them in the dark,
their eyes not moving an inch. Later, when they mention the “change” after
the blackout,”* their gazes change direction — from that moment, just like
Tompa’s Lucky during her monologue, M, W1 and W2 keep looking up
towards the sky until the end of the play, indicating that they are sinking
deeper and deeper in their situation and that the light, which they desperately
long for, reaches them from an increasingly higher and more distant source.
Their confessions, however, are not forced by an external authority: they burst
out (in colorless monotone) due to an “insatiable internal urge from which
there is no escape, apparently not even after death. On the contrary, the story
becomes truly fatal afterwards, as all possibilities for change and action cease
as soon as death sets in.”
Before the thirty-seven-minute production — Tompa’s shortest-ever staging
— is over, 9 the hands of W1 appear from behind her urn, her irresolute,
searching fingers, and she opens the small cabinet right in front of her. The door
reveals a cold, aluminium-foil interior with a cage and a parrot in it, brightly lit.
Then it is M’s turn to unveil the secret space at the center of his urn, preceded
7 Metz, Katalin: Holtszerelmesek holtidézéssel [Dead Lovers Evoking the Dead], Magyar
Nemzet, 24 November 2003.
28 Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works, 312.
29 Zsófia Bird: Play Beckett, Criticai Lapok, April 2004.
https://www.criticailapok.hu/25-2003/33940-play%20beckett, (accessed 14 May 2017).
30 Ichim: Tompa Gábor, 198.