“1978”, Csiky Gergely Hungarian State Theatre, Timișoara
Jeremy Malies in Romania
3 February 2025
January 4th, 1978. An almost certainly rigged process in Chile sees voters supposedly endorse dictator Augusto Pinochet who greets his victory by saying that there will be no more elections for ten years.
Photo courtesy Csiky Gergely Hungarian State Theatre.
Twelve thousand kilometres to the north-east, exactly three weeks later, it is the eve of the sixtieth birthday of another enlightened leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu. And this is when we begin, in a recreated Communist-era flat staged within a former hydrotechnics college on the outskirts of Timișoara.
This is impressive found space work rather than site-specific, but it smacks of Frantic Assembly. The flat never quite leaves us; even if the scene is the Eastern Front in World War One, the apartment occupants are still looking on from their kitchen in this gorgeous if behemoth-like memory play.
No author is credited for 1978 and I guess it is largely a devised collaboration. Actors contributed family stories from one or two generations earlier, and they come out of character to describe having researched historical content with occasional use of Google. Why not? The performers also make references to their conversations during rehearsals.
Photo courtesy Csiky Gergely Hungarian State Theatre.
The drab apartment is created three times in set design by Branko Hojnik. The unseen child narrator also has his birthday on the morrow which gives him the honour of writing a letter to Comrade Ceaușescu whose milestone will be celebrated across the nation. The adults are in early middle age and describe their daily grind, privations and loss of dignity.
The most notable detail is risking a beating simply for attending a party to listen to western pop music. This would have been covertly through headphones, and undercover police are hinted at skilfully throughout by director Tomi Janežič. Think Stasi and the film The Lives of Others. When a consignment of Italian shoes ends up in a lake,the townspeople prove so desperate for footwear that they descend on the shoreline with fishing rods. The comic elements and a child reflecting on adults suggest the Lasse Hallström film My Life as a Dog.
There is a witty video interval scene (design by Carlo Zoratti) that suggests Pirandello with a dismantling of our nonsense phrase “the fourth wall” that has many in the audience laughing out loud. The sequence contains a mini lecture on just why the wretched Archduke Ferdinand got to be heir apparent as his car went through Sarajevo. Whether you already know the history or not, it proves palatable through Janežič’s disciplined direction and the charisma of actor Kiss Attila.
On several occasions the production shows that it needs an extra technical rehearsal so that all the effects can run smoothly for an international audience. What might be a coup de théâtre after we have seen the apartment from a new perspective fails as a shutter door refuses to close. But surtitles in idiomatic English (the dialogue is in Hungarian) function at all times.
A huge transition and location change (there is a promenade element) get the third act underway with the scene being trench warfare on the Isonzo Front in present-day Slovenia. There are a few too many new major characters here, but also satisfying explanation of earlier details and resolution of anecdotes. Janežič’s direction succeeds with the reverse chronology. We are in similar territory (and fighting on the same side) as the title character in Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk.
Now and again 1978 risks numbing spectators with relentless bloodshed and dragging-about of corpses in this phase. It’s quite a set, with a massive pit dug into the concrete floor to represent trench combat.
A flash-forward post-1978 works well. We hear about Queen Elizabeth hiding (corgi cradled to her) amid the shrubbery of Buckingham Palace to avoid Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu after James Callaghan made a disgraceful decision to let the couple visit. “I really couldn’t face talking to them” was Her Maj’s subsequent confession to David Owen.
The tone is never too heavy and the sombre content is leavened. The production can flit from slaughter in which much of Europe became a graveyard to moments that catch the spirit of popular culture. There is even more laughter as – again with video compiled by Zoratti – we see details such as Silvio Berlusconi pedalling soft porn early in his career. A good running gag concerns Timișoara native Francesco Illy who can claim to have invented the coffee machine. Yugoslavia and Italy are prominent, and there is a theme of escaping to Slovenia (and finally Italy) if you can brave the Danube which also features in the filmed sequence.
1978 is part of a twelve-play loosely connected pan-national cycle with characters occasionally crossing between the stories. Other components will be performed in the director’s Slovenian home town of Nova Gorica on the border with Italy. If the piece has a conclusion it is “This was a year that separated things.” Despite the length and the confronting nature of the war content, I have the appetite for more of the same. Wonderful.
