Radu Afrim and his House Between the Blocks

House Between the Blocks

(Târgu Mureș National Theatre Romania, Tompa Miklós Company)

The adventure of Romanian director Radu Afrim's travels in the not-so-distant past, an adventure frequently equivalent to a self-referential discourse, has already been employed in a set of performances, of which, of course, the top of the list remains The Retro Bird…, created, yes, also in Târgu Mureș, a city that seems to offer the director the type of mental state necessary to return to subjects that are never definitively closed. Very intimate, personal, and signed with a special tenderness, such performances obviously occupy top places in Afrim's creation due to the intense way in which they contain their creator. The House Between the Blocks  is one of these works written not only for the audience, but also for himself...

The house between the blocks, a kind of island with volatile temporal relevance (it is no longer in the calendars, but in history, so its existence is assured forever, as one of the characters demonstrates), resembles a "coffin" at the bottom of a grave whose walls are the blocks that surround it. Through the window covered and uncovered, successively, by curtains, as through an incision into the Real made from inside the Unreal, we see a fragment of the concrete grandeur of socialism and we hear the children of the workers playing in the yard that once belonged to the house. Interestingly, communism always remains on an outside; everyone who enters the family Both's house seems to "take off" their shoes when they get here. Tender-ridiculous, a decrepit aristocracy seems to want to symbolically oppose the great mutations of the real.

The interior is vast, ironically imperial, a "palace" room in which Mother Both, the "friend" of Empress Sisi, lives her century. The green Viennese terracotta stove, the stained glass in the window openings on the back door, the 1875 ceramic service, furniture whose shapes evoke a submerged world, all of this clearly defies the 1980s, but coexists, willingly or by necessity, with the radio, the bottle, the worn Persian carpets, the poverty, and the cold. The result is a dizzying mix of illusionary luxury and crude modesty, but also a strong air of retro-(un)reality. This is where the Both women live (Mother Karola and her two daughters, the old ladies, Ida and Etelka), together with the child brought by the waters, the orphan Misi. They live from "art", as the sisters have made a profession out of painting works reproduced on post stamps. Their art does not imitate the real, but imitates imitations of imitations of the real, as if the real reaches them at third or fourth hand. Individually, the paintings are true definitions of kitsch, but together, in the high paneling inside the house between the blocks, they have the air of distant, enigmatic, misunderstood aesthetics...

The connection with the present is made especially through two characters: Misi, the orphan from the 1980s, who today arrived for a few hours in the town of the Both sisters, suddenly remembering all this thanks to the muffin-like smell of the paint colors from the cemetery shop. The second connection is through the character Pythia, the neighbor who sees the future; her predictions (the unbearable heat of a future December 1989 – the Romanian Revolution, the time when democracy will be threatened, paradoxically, by the fact that everyone has the right to vote, the Americans, the Russians and their wars etc.) are also a refuge in the future for a woman traumatized by the past.

As usual, Afrim composes picturesque, but problematic, vulnerable characters, capable of provoking laughter, but also of making us think: besides Misi, two other children, Rocco, the boy conceived on August 23, and Adam, the gossipy child, then the forester Cornel, the small entrepreneur Csongor, organizer of the not very profitable film club in the Both sisters' house, the gynecologist's daughter, who came here to prepare for admission to Art School, in Cluj etc. They all seem attracted by something indefinable, something rare and very precious that the dinosaur mouth of the bulldozer threatens with definitive destruction. The relationship with reality of all the characters is so ambiguous that more than once you have the feeling that the stage is invaded by children who are playing art, life, communism, history. The tone is set by the fascinating character of the mother, a doll-like being cut out of Marquez's century of solitude, hyperlucid, and cynically observing, as if from inside a trance, the world and its transformations. The old woman mixes temporalities, mixes truths with fictions, becoming a spokesperson for the imaginary, but also for values ​​that seem to belong only to the past: love, beauty, poetics.

From her imperial bed, herself a museum of her own uniqueness, she revisits her erotic correspondence through her personal biographer, Misi, who will write a book about the love in the blank spaces between the words. The mother is also responsible for the entry of the ghostly into the scene: the soldier Kázmér, her first and great love, breaks away from the old woman's dreams and becomes concrete. Afrim keeps him in sight, integrating him into several memorable images such as the one in which, perched at the head of the sleeping old woman, he melancholy caresses strands of her long hair. In the end, he will lead her to the cemetery of heroes, accompanied by the echoes of dogs barking in the darkness of the golden age.

But the ghostly also comes from the future, or rather, from the debates about the future of some characters who, from this point of view, feel Chekhovian. More than once, the sisters make you think of Three Sisters, especially in sequences like the one in which Ida, Etelka, and Pythia (who will turn out to be born of the same father as Etelka), together with a "Vershinin" from the Forest Department, talk about “what will be someday”. They do it in a way that berates the eternal reduction of people queueing in communism, and valorizes, instead, what these people think, what they dream, what they idealize. The video sometimes emphasizes escapes into the realm of the ideal, as when the block across the street is suddenly replaced by a plunge into a painting (a seascape à la Aivazovsky) and with a ship sweeping the scene.

When you are ready to believe that the show is primarily about the life of the Hungarian community in Transylvania in the 1980s, in communism, Afrim imposes a dramatic turn, shifting the emphasis onto the concept of family and the nebulae behind the family. The importance of the biographer Misi grows exponentially, he himself getting caught in parallel biographies from which answers to identity questions are successively revealed. The blood family is doubled by a community family, then, symbolically, by a generally human one (with circumstantial references to Adam and Eve). Paradoxically, in this world of still life paintings from which human beings are missing, no one seems truly alone. Neither the ghosts that cross Eternity, nor the Hungarian Romanians in late-stage communism.

The show is dedicated to the director's first graphics teacher, a detail that Afrim wants to emphasize at the end of the show, opening a new perspective on the House Between the Blocks: one related to art, regardless of its quality or scope, as a form of resistance not only to ideology, but also to the daily misfortunes of existence. For decades, the two sisters sacrifice their lives dedicating themselves to colors, discussions about how to draw bears or mountains too high to be the Carpathians. What they do is, in equal measure, small and grand, even if only through that sense of meaning that, at least for a while, their lives acquire. From their repetitive, mass-produced paintings, meant to beautify the canteen of the rolling mill or whatever other living space of working-class people, art, in its most minor definition, can hope to save the world. The remembrance that the sisters hope for is not just about remaining in someone's dreams, as they believe, but is also possible through traces of this kind left by colors (the 50 nuances of the gray color) on a canvas. Just as Afrim's first art teacher remains in memory through this show dedicated to her...

The depth of the relationship between the director and the Hungarian troupe from Târgu Mureș has been written about repeatedly. It has materialized, over time, in collaborations that have led to landmark performances not only for Afrim, but for Romanian theater in general, like Tihna [The Composure] Castingul dracului [The Devil's Casting], Beție [Drunks], Pasărea retro… [The Retro Bird…], Grand Hotel... and so on. Diverse, versatile, playful, it's the kind of troupe that successfully fulfills the ambitions of characters that are as complicated as they are seductive.

Where elsewhere could a Karola Both like the one from Târgu Mureș have been born, for example, in the amazing travesty of Csaba László's, an "Erendira" without anything caricatured, haloed by a very particular poetry of decrepitude, a bridge between multiple planes, generating humor and nostalgia, of egoism, but also of real superiority in relation to the world in which she lives her end. Erzsébet Fülöp, the performer of Ida, the older sister, confidently steers a woman's persona in whom she shows us resignation, hope, care, aging, but also dignity; she is supported by Katalin Berekméri, a strong element of the female-family triangle, then delightful in the character's transition to a new path, that of self-change, and overwhelming in her collapse in the last part of the show. László Rózsa skillfully alternates the many perspectives from which we see Misi, from the always available character from whom sensitivity emerges, to the narrator in whom deep emotions of encounters with the past reside, from the son upset by the parents' meeting, to the teenager who discovers love. László Zsolt Bartha presents us with Csongor, a mixture of harmless perversity and bankrupt entrepreneurship, but also an emissary of new times in which Bruce Lee films, Video, and a certain way of being will build careers.

They are complemented by Gábor Viola (the virile and good-natured forester Cornel), Balázs Varga (the dead soldier, resurrected by the dreams of his youth's lover), Dorottya Nagy (the enigmatic and warm Pythia), Szabó Fruzsina (the gynecologist's daughter, the latter an amazing extratextual character, so well-defined that we almost look for him in the cast of the show), Nóra Szabadi (the red-haired Pentecostal woman), Botond Kóvacs (her husband with slow sperm), Bea Fülöp (Etelka's former classmate, the one who  illicitly sells paint), Szabolcs Csíki (the aquatic child). You look at them all during the curtain call and feel grateful for the pure theater they offered you.

On another note, perhaps the time has come to take Afrim seriously as a playwright. We have done so in the past, but always subordinating the playright to the director, refusing the absolute autonomy of the text and the status of "disposable play" that his scripts have assumed. I had access to the text a few hours before the performance. Afrim does this especially when he knows that for four hours we will depend on subtitles. Well, the reading was thrilling, the literary qualities of the dramaturgical material being, at least in my opinion, remarkable. A piece of dramatic literature of the highest quality, far above what, in general, contemporary Romanian playwriting produces. The situation is quite strange because it brings the theatrical ball back into the court of ... the director. What is certain, however, is that we can no longer talk about this dramaturgy without including in our debates, in our analyses and histories... the playwright Radu Afrim.

Târgu Mureș National Theatre, "Tompa Miklós" Company - House between blocks, written and directed by Radu Afrim. Set designer: Anna Kupás. Costume designer: Orsolya Moldovan. Choreographer: Blanche Macaveiu. Stage manger: Lehel Rigmányi. Assistant director: Bea Fülöp. Video design: Samu Trucza. Prompter: Katalin Tóth. Translated by: László Sándor. Sound: Radu Afrim. Sound design: Vince Oláh. Lighting design: Radu Afrim, István Adám. Cast: László Rózsa, Erzsébet Fülöp, Katalin Berekméri, Balázs Varga, Csaba László, Lászlo Zsolt Bartha, Gábor Viola, Dorottya Nagy, Szabó Fruzsina, Nóra Szabadi, Botond Kóvacs, Bea Fülöp, Szabolcs Csíki. View date: 13th April, 2025