Kritikai visszhang / Reviews

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If it would be possible I would clone this performance. If I would be a maintainer I would support it hundred times more.

In the time of the plastic surgery it must be re-thinked what the huge nose of Cyrano could mean on the stage and in the life. There are always people who thinks themselves ugly, unfortunate, unloveable and this is more interesting than a big nose or the appearances from which the new gods can bring out anything.
In this performance our future Cyrano is a girl who is not an ugly but more like a beautifull lady subsists inside her own uglyness and unloveableness.
The emphasis is on the right place: in that inside space which could be more hardly corrected, where surgery scalpels can not ever reach. And that the Cyrano-like mail sending incognito today when everybody is online obviously will be in a cyber space – this is also in the best place. Because we can feel that this enters our personal space every time when we bend over our computers. Those who have never had conflict on internet by a person who stay in incognito are lucky. People can often feel that authors who use countless community sites, public but still belived to be secret blogs are not aware of the life-like of their games and the power which can shape and destroy lifes.
The Cyber Cyrano goes around these appearances which can roughly surmount real life.

The „ugly” girl makes herself loved by her classmates with a roleplay on internet. One of them is her rival and friend, the other one could be her love. She starts to speak about how someone fall in love with the diplomat child who lives in Switzerland, sailing and riding a horse and having clairvoyance or with a dreamgirl who has perfect, exotic and common face. But the performance overcomes the appearances with its precision, acting justice, internal human charge. This is an exceptionally talented production. It doesn’t consists of cliches and didactic truths but sharp positions, excellent, authentic actors. György Vidovszky director and his team have created the performance.
Bracket: searching on the web for the title of Cyber Cyrano the first hit is not the performance but a dating site from where we can navigate to a site: „ Do you want to be a dream women or a mat?” As I’m watching the profile photo of my youngster acquaintances: everybody want to be the previous but feel like the mat. Simply this is the story of the performance.
Our heroine Anna Nemes is deep, rough and true in her every motions. This girl lives in her closed, depressive internal world and she is not able to look out and see herself. The problem becomes exciting already with the choise of actress. She shows just the surface of herself, hiding her deepness but maybe at the end of the preformance opens a door to present the demon who lives inside her. Her classmates (Zsolt Dér, Lili Varga) bring more superficial characters because they will fall in love with the appearances but within these frames they are proper, real youngsters. They have humor, plenty of brutality and they have secrets. I don’t expect more from an actor. I note that it would be easy to play their naturality and viridity off against the professional actors, we don’t do it.
How these youngsters desire the relationships that they are not able to realize in life Vidovszky let us see in the waltz scene which is on the verge of chatarsis. This scene is about the possibility which is over there but when they are practising the duett for the school party none of them dare to give him/herself at all. It’s like everybody have fear for the reality. This is why everything become rough. „If I friend you, will you confirm?” asking from each other as they are afraid of the refusal even in the virtual world. The work of the visual designers (Anita Sárosi, Viktor Vicsek) is also exceptionally: innovative, smart, playful.

The play was written by István Tasnádi who is one of our few playwrights – suddenly I wouldn’t know whom to side with him because there is no one similar to him – whose plays serve theater. He is not a playwright for its own sake but a creator who is thinking in theater and able to co-operate with it. He knows – uniquely – how to write for a certain age-group. His sentences are punctual, he knows the language of the youngsters, how they write, he listens to their voices, sees their world ( I mean our world).and he knows how to build a story, how to write a situation. There are a huge lack of these dramas and this kind of theaters in Hungary. If it would be possible I would clone this performance. If I would be a maintainer I would support it hundred times more. We shouldn’t sit in a cellar or we should because we need the intimacy but we need this kind of theater in every spot of the country, in every district of Budapest, every single day in every high school. The youngsters are dreaming about the same yacht, the same perfect face everywhere. For the present we hardly can find a place and provide theater experience for those who are just getting youngster in which they can recognise themselves . But now, here – in this cellar in Andrássy street – is the best place amongst „Klamm’s War, and Hello Nazi!” the other great productions of Kolibri. (Szinhaz.net - Andrea Tompa)

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IRL

“My first memory is of a monitor” – this is the starting sentence of Cyber Cyrano and within a minute it is complemented with a very strong image: thousands of letters and special characters mould together to form the portrait picture of the main character projected on a screen. This screen remains the only object on the stage of the Kolibri Theatre. The first minute already explains the play perfectly: it is about digital natives, who didn’t need to learn to use computers and the internet, but started to use them naturally from their birth, the same way as they would play with a toy car, a remote control, or a sheet of paper and a pencil. From this aspect it is no wonder that their personality is complete only if we add their online presence to the real one. (This is also demonstrated by an abbreviation used on the Internet: IRL, meaning In Real Life. This is what separates – and gives it an identical importance – verbal interaction from virtual communication.)

Understanding all this and interpreting it to the language of theatre is what makes György Vidovszky’s direction one of the best in the season. After the first expressive figure of speech the projection designed by Anita Sárosi and Viktor Vicsek becomes the forth main character of the play. When the characters first step on stage their profile appears on their chest: name, height, age, and occupation. On other the screens all around them other, equally important characteristics are listed: their photos uploaded to MyVip community portal about themselves or their field of interest such as favourite music, movies, and actors. Later authentically reconstructed chats and funny videos appear from Youtube. All this is not only remarkable for the creation and use of a new, previously almost unknown form of expression, but also how deeply Vidovszky knows and understands the habits of this generation.

Not that István Tasnádi’s new drama wouldn’t be extremely strong in itself. (Kolibri not only selects great subjects but does very well in featuring contemporary Hungarian dramas, too). The play is based on a true story, the analogy with Cyrano is given: two schoolgirls created non-existent virtual persons (avatars) and chatted and e-mailed to their classmates on their behalf who had absolutely no idea who their real chat partners were.

Tasnádi uses only three characters to make everything clear: Zsuzsi, the ugly duckling of the group can’t stand it any longer that the coolest boy at school, Máté, whom she is in love with, ignores her. To top it all, he courts one of her friends, Heni. Zsuzsi creates a virtual boy for the girl and a virtual girl for the boy. “Before I couldn’t trigger any emotions from Máté. Now I had a tool that enabled me to delight him. Or distress him. (…) He was in my web. (…) Ha was talking to me but he saw the invented girl, Moira’s face in front of him. All sentences I wrote became a lot more interesting, knowing that he’d never read them if he knew that I had written them” – says Zsuzsi in Tasnadi’s play. What is weird in these sentences is that they are all too logical. That everybody thinks about it this way and in a similar situation we might act the same way.

All the rest is built logically and expressively around a beautiful dramaturgical arch: Zsuzsi’s motivations, the form of implementation and manipulation, the playing with emotions and finally the inevitable downfall that almost leads to tragedy. Tasnádi offers all this without beating about the bush, all is concentrated and he has a good sense of humour, too. The language he uses is authentic from the beginning to the end, never unnaturally juvenile, his words are in their place. Prefect knowledge of these unusual forms of communication is demonstrated both in Vidovszky’s direction and in the play itself. It all fits within the world of teenagers.

Cyber Cyrano – with the help of both the playwright and the director - offers insight to a problem that most adults would never be able to even recognise becuase the ‘cultural context’ within which these young people operate is so alien to them. This problem is a deformation in behaviour among secondary school students, something that the Kolibri production explains while offering a straight road in this maze-like space of communication. (Ellenfeny.hu - Bálint Kovács)