Premiere of the Dance of Fools
The Tamási Áron Theatre is preparing for the premiere of Lev Birinski’s Dance of Fools on Monday, 23rd February. According to director Marcel Bélai, one of the play’s central themes is that a world driven by interests consumes itself.
In the provincial governorate of Ivan Habarovich everything is in order. The Russian Revolution appears merely as a distant shadow, easily ignored by the citizens amid their everyday self-importance, their routine bureaucratic duties, and their private affairs treated as open secrets. After all, their world – just as ours – extends only as far as the eye can see. And in this governorate there is, quite visibly, nothing seriously wrong. In fact, the source of all trouble will be precisely that there is no trouble at all. The lives of Ivan Habarovich and the townspeople are turned upside down when word spreads in the capital that, contrary to the official reports fabricated by the governor and his secretary, there is no revolution in their governorate at all. As they scramble to salvage what can still be saved, it becomes clear that, on a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” basis, everyone has contributed to the machinery of social deception – even those revolutionary youths who, in the very interest of the revolution, refrain from actually starting one.
Lev Birinski’s comic-satirical work, first published in 1912 – only seven years after the Russian Revolution of 1905 – speaks not only of the futility of those living under the spell of lofty ideals, but also offers a diagnosis of humankind’s perpetual exploitation of one another. The adaptation by Marcel Bélai and Krisztián Kiliti, while preserving the spirit of the original drama, sharpens the text’s ironic and witty turns and refreshes Birinski’s incisive, still relevant story, rich in bittersweet humour.
Lev Birinski (1884–1951) was a playwright and screenwriter who grew up in Bukovina, in the Kiev Governorate. He moved first to Vienna, then to Germany, and in 1927 he emigrated to the United States. He was a popular playwright in the Monarchy, and in Germany he began writing screenplays, continuing this activity in America. His plays were performed on Broadway, and several American films are associated with his name. The Dance of Fools is a social satire written in Germany in 1912, where it was performed in ten theatres at once, translated into several languages almost immediately, and staged in Poland, Slovenia, Hungary, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, and New York over the next two years.
Marcel Bélai grew up in Budapest but began his theatre career in Transylvania. In 2023, he graduated from the University of Arts in Târgu Mureș with a degree in directing, studying under László Bocsárdi. According to him, the Dance of Fools is about the proliferation of opportunism and the contradictions between appearance and reality, which is one of the most pressing problems of our society today. “The search for truth beats at the heart of the story, but the author presents it through such grotesque, self-contradictory characters that it is difficult to decide whether the picture we see is humorous or rather hopeless,” said director Marcel Bélai about the Dance of Fools.
