József Attila’s poetry is at once folk-like and modern, simple and philosophical, transcendent and tangible, cheerful and infinitely tragic. Full of contradictions. He knocks on the gates of heaven while his feet are already in hell. In his depths, he experiences tender and cruel emotions without disguise – thereby helping his reader to face the angels and demons hidden within. His love poems are unavoidable, yet his love life was accompanied by a series of failures. His everyday life was also overshadowed by the bitter legacy he experienced already as a child: the convulsions of maternal warmth and attachment; then the absence of the fulfilled experience of love. And perhaps for this very reason, and because he had nothing to lose, he could not lie in verse.

His lyricism is a precise, relentless confrontation with ourselves, a prayer that waits in vain for God’s reply. His poems cannot be spoken in any other way than how the poet himself lived – and this is a demanding, extraordinary task for any actor. His texts do not tolerate falsehood, nostalgia, pathos, or hollow loftiness. József Attila lives with us, and this obliges us to an honest life. Our performance also attempts what the poet himself undertook in his verses: to be contemporary, alive, and human.

József Attila’s poetry is universal and polyphonic, and therefore we present his poems through the voices of several actors, in varied shades of male sensitivity. This is an experimental performance about the metamorphosis of the soul, about the stages of decay, through the recollections of his last love, Flóra Kozmutza, and through the presentation of selected, representative poems from the poet’s oeuvre. This is our work, and (it) is no small thing.

The performance is held in Hungarian, without subtitles.