absurd play
Scheduled premiere: 10 January 2025
Author Gilles Ségal, who was born in Romania and lived and worked in France, upon completing his play The Puppetmaster of Lodz exclaimed: “I wanted to write something light.” However, his work turned out to be anything but: its protagonist, who embodies the tragedy of the entire human race, is Samuel Finkelbaum, a world-famous puppeteer and a Birkenau survivor living in the divided city of Berlin five years after World War II. Despite numerous efforts to convince him otherwise, he doesn’t believe that the war is over and he no longer needs to hide. Thus, he spends his days locked away in a room with the puppets of his wife, who perished in the concentration camp, and his child who was never born as he prepares for the grand performance of his life, entitled The Tragicomic Life of Samuel Finkelbaum.
The puppeteer’s alternate reality is framed by a classic “theater within the theater” setup, and the arrival of a friend who might finally convince Finkelbaum that the war is indeed over. Or is it? The directorial work of Zoltán Balázs reveals the answer.
Director: Zoltán Balázs
The Budapest premiere is made possible by the Hungarian Jewish Heritage Public Foundation, the Hungarian Government, the Bethlen Gábor Fund and the Ministry of Culture and Innovation as part of the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities Holocaust 80 Memorial Year.
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