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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.
