Budapest’s Katona József Theatre, which has kept partnership with tri-bühne for many years, chose to express itself with wry comedy and humour in its production, featured on Stuttgarter Europa Theater Festival. The characters are raw, but humane, blessed with many life-rendering faults. The human greatness of the direction stands in showing these faults. (…) Satan is just a staggering drunkard who seemingly gives it all up when he suddenly dies in the pub. We see in this show the real depths of human behaviour and the coarse spirit that reminds us to wine drinking in the farmers’ world. This temporarily steals a smile on our faces but in the background of all this tragedy underlies, the emotional derailment of melancholic people’s lives. In György Tiwald’s simultaneous interpretation vulgar expressions break openly to the surface, but it can be felt that Egressy’s shallow pub-style does not want to humiliate or provoke, it merely carries out an environment study.
Armin Friedl
The show meant a real refreshment at the festival. This performance was about the fact that one only has to search for them, because they exist. The dialogues are truly powerful; the traditional theatrical tricks mix with incredible precision with the modern interpretations. These everyday men live, they are not parts of a wax museum nor the parodies of themselves. It has been a while ago since I last felt sadness of this kind in a theatre like when in the end Masni steps up on stage wearing ragged pullovers and looking around silently- for me, this was the most honest scene. I liked the way the writer tried to hyperbolize our world today, that attracts and repels many times and we try to escape its force- even by going to Portugal.
Zuzana Ulicianská, Divadelná Nitra
The mimes, the situations and the texts are comic as well (we might have an idea about it, thanks to the simultaneous interpreting) no doubt, but the play is also full of emotions. Far from all naturalism, this conventionalized acting is as controlled as ballet; this acting, that is so characteristic of the countries of the Eastern block and that fits Katona József Theatre so well, puts us back into our spectatorial viewpoints exactly because it creates a separate world from the stage, the play and the actors, a world, that functions like clockwork, but still is very human and full of question marks.
Marie-Francois Grislin, Hebdoscope