Written by Béla Pintér based on the works of Giacomo Puccini

"In spring 2015, Gábor Máté asked me to direct at the Katona József Theatre. I asked for time to think about it. I was already inclined to say no, albeit with pain, when one evening I was listening to Puccini's opera The Cloak again on the balcony at home, and suddenly the solution came to me.

The play is set on the banks of the Seine, sometime in the early twentieth century, on a fishing boat. A ship captain kills a stevedore because he discovers that the man is his wife's lover.

On that particular evening, on the balcony, I thought of how the play could be rewritten to make it astonishingly original and contemporary. I took up the invitation.

I didn't know the Hungarian version, I had always heard Puccini's opera in Italian, so nothing was binding, I could easily substitute the characters and situations I had invented. Later, reading the Hungarian text, it became quite clear to me that I didn't want to keep a single sentence from the original. Since I had radically changed the characters, the setting and the time period, the language was also changed accordingly.

The contrast between the sublime music and the profane content is an almost constant source of humour, while the poignant moments are made more relatable by the natural language and gestures."

Béla Pintér