Vienna Festival Weeks

Floods of pain and provocations without a goal

Mother and son in a small apartment in Budapest(Bild: Wiener Festwochen / Nurith Wagner Strauss)

In the play "Parallax", you experience the members of a Hungarian family in the most diverse search for identity. Despite its limitations, it is one of the stronger Festwochen events to date.

When Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó and author Kata Wéber last appeared at the Wiener Festwochen, the audience was thrilled: "Pieces of a Woman", with its almost unbearable live realization of a home birth, showed what theater can be: namely a self-expressive border crossing instead of pretentious post-dramatic political jokes.

Now the two are back with "Parallax" (named after an astronomical perspective), and the result is only partially convincing. The setting is a Hungarian apartment in which two storylines intersect: The expiring Jewish grandmother has survived Auschwitz and cannot escape hell. The gay grandson arrives for the funeral and celebrates a quarter-hour-long orgy in the house of mourning.

"Parallax" at the festival weeks(Bild: Wiener Festwochen / Nurith Wagner Strauss)

At first glance, the connection arouses resistance. Until you remember the deportation of homosexuals to Nazi camps and the anti-Semitic and anti-gay escalation in the Orban democracy. There, the very explicit scene could not be shown, one would easily be arrested or attacked.

Here, however, it does not come across as a demonstration, but as a provocation that misses its target audience due to the lack of an occasion. Nevertheless, there are great moments when the taps in the old woman's apartment of pain detonate and torrents of water fall from the walls and ceiling.

After all, this is one of the better evenings of these modestly successful festival weeks.