Shorter Baton? It Is Your Turn!
The Earthquake Concert by the Austrian ensemble Max Reinhardt Seminar presents three short biographies, three human lives, connected (in addition to their philosophy of life) by the common time in a mental hospital.
The play starts with a common residential panorama – two are playing a table tennis match and a third figure casts an eye over them from time to time while telephoning. With the arrival of a fourth unofficial character, a major plot twist occurs. Although the newcomer appears as a member of technical support staff at the counter, her real role is to investigate human limits of the three patients. The original harmonic idleness turns into a child´s play in an isolated space where the one who tosses the shorter baton takes turn to present his confession.
The original text by George Tabori was adopted, for the purpose of staging, into a version for three characters, impacted by collective madness, exaggerated absorption of freedom and the pseudo-therapeutic effects of music. Music therapy, in this case, is a proven manipulative method examining the animal side of the patients and surfacing their collections of suppressed fears. Their individual monologues after transformation to dogs connect individual existential considerations with biblical motifs, contemporary sins with the ones from the early times of the mankind. The morbid situational humour, or the praiseworthy work with tinfoil, used by the patients to make little props during the play, are skilfully and elaborately linked to the burdensome atmosphere packed with phobias and resonating with classical music. The violin creates emotional tension, while the performing actors present their authentic confessions.
