Transitions Central Europe: Our Secrets

HUNGARY

Hungary, 1980: Brought together in a ballroom, a group of people see their lives crushed amidst folk songs, blow jobs, alcohol and endless debates over the Iron Curtain...

Featuring songs, this award-winning play by the internationally acclaimed dramaturg, director and actor Béla Pintér (b.1970) is suitable only for adults. Its protagonist, István, is a paedophile. Attempting to avoid arrest, he gives in to blackmail by the Hungarian secret police and becomes an informer. Morbid fiction or a real incident?

Against the backdrop of an enormous tape recorder, Béla Pintér (who also plays Imre, a dancer and a regime opponent), mixes folklore and modernity, sexual perversion and unbearable humanity in this hardcore contemporary drama.

Pintér’s work is not nostalgic for the communist 80s. With raw realism, sarcastic humor, and an underground lyricism, he exposes the collective neuroses and pathologies of Hungary’s recent past: the recruitment of informers by the notorious AVH (the Hungarian Stasi), the functioning of an entire nation according to the logic of secret reports, and the protection of former agents and their identities to this day, to name a few...