- Genre: dramedy
- Hall: Main Hall
- Premiere: 10 march 2025, 19:00
- Length: 4 hours with 1 pauses
- Set Designer: Kupás Anna
- Costume Designer: Moldován Orsolya
- Choreographer: Macaveiu Blanche
- Stage manager: Lehel Rigmányi
- Assistant Director: Fülöp Bea
- Video design: Samu Trucza
- Prompter: Katalin Tóth
- Translated by: László Sándor
- Sound Universe: Radu Afrim
- Sound design: Oláh Vince
- Light design: Radu Afrim, Ádám István
A house full of landscapes and still life. A house with huge windows that offer a glimpse of the reminders of communism: the flats. A house where melancholy and seemingly real illusions coexist. A house waiting to be demolished…
The story, in which the spoken texts, thoughts, the sequence of events and emotions intertwine, takes place in the Both House in a small Transylvanian town, between the winter of 1983 and the spring of 1984. The Both sisters, Etelka and Ida, are amateur artists who paint pictures inspired by postcards from the turn of the last century. A glimpse into the lives of the two sisters and their mother is brought to life through the voice of Misi, a child from the orphanage.
Over the past 11 years, Radu Afrim has become a defining creator at the Tompa Miklós Company of the National Theatre of Targu-Mures. Over the years, he has created several critically acclaimed shows loved by the Târgu-Mureș audience, such as Tranquility, Retro Bird Hits the Block and Falls on the Hot Asphalt, Grand Hotel Retro Bird, The Devil’s Casting, Drunks or The Meaning of Emma’s Life, and can thus almost be considered a “house” director of the National Theatre of Târgu-Mureș. His most recent production, The House Between the Flats, is an absolute premiere, the text being written by the director especially for this Company.
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Misi, foster child, who spends his time in the Both house -
Both Etelka, amateur painter, Ida's sister -
Both Ida, amateur painter, Etelka's sister -
Both Karola, their mother -
Soós Kázmér, Austro-Hungarian soldier -
Horgos Csongor, a guy, who deals with small businesses -
Cornel Paranciuc, forester at the Wodds and Forests Office -
Pataki Pythia, a clairvoyant friend -
Kónya Zsófi, Kónya Töhötöm's gynaecologist's daughter -
Kerekes Ráhel, a Pentecostal woman -
Kerekes Benjámin, her husband -
Csepel Erika, Etelka's classmate, paint store sales assistant -
Karácsonyi Rocco, a boy, who was concieved on the 23rd of August -
Adam, a gossipy childRoland-Ádám Csiki stud.
“The mother lies in bed, while the two sisters paint as part of their daily routine. In Ceaușescu’s Romania, vulnerability and fear are in charge. Yet, from the perspective offered by the production, we only sense them faintly.”
The full review can be read in Hungarian by clicking on the link below.
“Radu Afrim’s production, staged in Târgu Mureș last year, has already won the appreciation of both audiences and theatre professionals on numerous occasions in Romania and Hungary. The UNITER Award-winning production was now presented as part of the Szemle Plusz competition programme at the Városmajor Open-Air Stage in Budapest.”
The full review can be read in Hungarian by clicking on the link below.
“There are performances that do not merely take place on stage, but seem to live on within us, like fragments of memory recovered from a life we never lived, yet instinctively recognize.”
The full review in romanian can be read by clicking on the link below.
“The feeling I have after his performances is that I have just finished reading a book that has left a profound mark on my being. Because theatre usually does not alter my temporal or physical coordinates – Afrim does.”
The full review in romanian can be read by clicking on the link below.
“The real and imagined history of how Hungarians in Transylvania lived under communism deserved a literary page worthy of the fascinating multiverses born there.”
The full review in romanian can be read by clicking on the link below.
“Afrim gracefully and delicately enters the intimacy of that collective memory in which many of us still preserve, somewhere – perhaps in an attic filled with letters and postcards from the city of our childhood – a stubbornly surviving house with an aristocratic air. A house that was forgotten for a time among the concrete structures of communist construction sites, inhabited by eccentric characters who seem to have stepped down from a bohemian carriage of history into a frozen reality, blackened by the plague of troubled times.”
The full review in romanian can be read by clicking on the link below.
“Paintings stacked all the way to the ceiling surround the characters in House Among the Flats, written and directed by Radu Afrim.”
The full review can be read in Hungarian by clicking on the link below.
“Their emotional range is wide, swinging from cold to warm and back again, drawing viewers in with poignant moments mixed with humor full of clever ideas, making us cry and laugh at the same time.”
The full review can be read in Hungarian by clicking on the link below.
“You look around and you can’t help but sense a gray scent of socialist realism.”
The full review in romanian can be read by clicking on the link below.
“In the frothy mix of lines and comic, absurd, soap opera-like, nostalgic, or tender scenes that Afrim creates, there is an almost equal amount of Chekhov and of local socio-historical analysis.”
The full review in romanian can be read by clicking on the link below.
“In the play House Among the Flats, Radu Afrim achieves a subtle, a perfect blend of laughter, tears, irony, and comedy. A different kind of laugh-cry than what you find in Nichita or Sorescu. Radu Afrim performs an incision into everything that life means. A life condemned to be merely survival.”
The full review in romanian can be read by clicking on the link below.
Very intimate, personal, and marked by a special tenderness, such performances clearly occupy a major place in Afrim’s body of work through the intense way in which they contain their creator.
The full review in romanian can be read by clicking on the link below.
