“Without a free democratic Russia there can be no enduring peace on earth.” (Victor Kravchenko)

The main character of the story is comrade Kravchenko, the first cadre with Ukrainian origin from the first twenty years of the Soviet Union, who through his personal story, through the process of the birth and denial of his own belief, can show the operation of the crippling and chaotic engine of the dictatorship, which is being built up. However, without any doubts he is the main character, (people get their meanings through their relationships to him and in the end his defection is the final stage of a serious and long-lasting personal development), anyway the text is not about him. But it is about the system. The story of the individuum is just some kind of excuse, a necessary reaction on the operation of the Soviet Union, it is the inner frame of the outside world, in spite of which we can feel well that what is small and what is big.

We should not think about anything bad when we hear the expressions of “reading theatre” or “one-man manifesto”. These terms can tell nothing about the performance. Zoltán Balázs is in the place, he is the story teller, the Human being, whose words we can believe without any doubts, and who can tell the story of his life that way, that we want to listen to it till the end. In connection with the actor’s work, not only the remembering of this great amount of text is a big performance, but the fact also, that he can keep the attention for a long time with using almost nothing from his properties, with only a few effective elements, mostly with the dynamic of the text, with eye contacts and credibility, and he cuts the text and puts in more exciting, personal episodes as a present tense dramaturg in an improvised way, by reacting on the fall-off of his viewers’ attentions. In his presence on the stage his complex creative knowledge, talent, attention and routine are condescended.

During the performance the viewers can have that feeling of familiarity many times, that some events can happen the same way today too. This is of course subjectivity, which kind of crosstalk gets to our ears, anyway in a society, which is full of political issues, these associations can arrive easily, and the name of Victor that we can hear many times during the performance can unintentionally help the activization of actual political associations. There are not any concrete references to our present in the performance, but after it we do not have to think a lot about that: How can all these be connected to us, what can indicate the staging of this play today?

The closing act of the performance is rather short, strong and effective, from the point of its content, it is sacral and political, but mostly it can hold obviously understandable and thought-provoking message without connecting it to the present. And because of the fact that the gesture is in perfect harmony with the message of the whole text, it can make the performance authentic and coherent. This authentic nature can become the greatest contrast of the performance in contrast to the unreliable, propagandist, fake systems, which appear in the story and in the reality too.

Máriusz Takács, Kultifilter, 2016

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)