Death Is Funny, Death is Lame, Death is Sudden, Death Can Happen to “Anybody”

A bitter-sweet, funny memento mori (and memento vivere, for that matter), Forte Company – Szkéné Theatre’s Anybody (written by Borbély Szilárd, directed by Horváth Csaba) presents the audience with eight apparently unrelated and uncorrelated parabolas of life and death, mistake and intention, generally revolving around the characters’ need of money and inexplicably incorrigible… hope.

Set mainly in the peripheral spaces of society, where nothing works according to a schedule (which, itself, is changing too frequently, anyway…), Anybody makes use of the imagery associated with unfinished construction sites to contour the general scenery of the characters’ lives. Kalászi Zoltán and Kiss Benedek’s set design revolves around bright orange red delimitators, plastic chains, a bench, and a small neon billboard that changes every scene. It creates a general feeling of workplace abandonment and asbestos dust which, alongside the early-morning clues from the text and lighting (Payer Ferenc) separate once again the planes of the staged story and audience: they are taking place at different hours during the day, with the former belonging to more socially secluded categories of people.

Anybody, written by Borbély Szilárd, created by Horváth Csaba, Forte Company – Szkéné Theatre (Hungary), at TESZT 2024.

The characters are homeless people (Pallag Márton), women whose profession in journalism does not match with their clothing, stereotypical for the ladies of the night (Földeáki Nóra), but all of them try their hardest to get around, one way or another. There is one man, however, who seems to break this mould (Widder Kristóf), but his side of the story evolves towards his demasking – he is hunted down by money sharks, due to some questionable business decisions (his character is separated from the “businessmen’s group”, as well…). Everybody is waiting for something (the bus, the bank to open – queuing to win a trip, the train), in a Beckettian wait, although their (grim) Godot comes, eventually. This idea of queuing is progressively accentuated as the narrative advances, with more and more characters being present on stage, sometimes even crammed up in the same square metre.

The scenes are in continuity – the dead body from the previous scene is still there, acting as the catalyst of a conversation on death – portraying death as a continuum, as an omnipresence. The actors subtly shift from life on stage to “death” and, from this “death”, they “resurrect”, forming the supporting characters of the choir or of the passersby. The businessman navigates tension in waves, keeping the audience on the edge, the homeless man from the first scene, turned organ trafficking victim collector, fluctuates from scary and sketchy to philosophical, developing an intricate backstory that ignites interest in the audience members. Entangled in a Pieta-like image, the priest (Krisztik Csaba) and the woman who just had a heart attack caused by the man who took her pills form a comical alive-dead duo: the victim cannot be saved, as this would mean the priest would have to spend the last cents of his phone credit calling the ambulance (which comes slower than the bank guards in case of a robbery, anyway…).

Anybody, written by Borbély Szilárd, created by Horváth Csaba, Forte Company – Szkéné Theatre (Hungary), at TESZT 2024.

In line with the idea of performing parabolas, there is a scene where an accidental death takes place in the theatre. The previous corpse becomes a mere life-size marionette, and it is the stagehand who must face the reality of Acting – acting like it never happened, like he never accidentally shot the janitor, like the real bullets were only props…

The visual stridency of the cones and construction site fences contrasts with the all-black box, environment in which the actions take place. It does, however, align with the red of the tape – hinting the imminence of death before the corpse-contouring is even present. This is, however, contrasted by the scene where the entire eclairage relies on candlelight – strong image in the Christian Romanian space, the trembling flames accompany both the corpse-marionette and the woman who was at the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Acapella choir music hints, once more, the religious aspects revolving around death, being a brief reference to funeral marches. The “cleanness” of the murder scenes also emphasizes a form of antiseptic relation to death: there is barely any blood on stage, with only some red tape representing it. This, alongside the reduced number of props (for the recorder tape, the hand not only holds it, but also is the recorder) highlight how little is needed for a theatrical (per se and not) death, a passing where the only remains of the life spent on earth are a voice tape (with the playback speed exquisitely acted in real time by Földeáki Nóra), quasi useless voice from the Other World, as it does not make any sense to those who find it…

Death is funny, death is lame, death is sudden, death is… happening. Anyone can play the characters depicted on stage, as these parabolas act as slices of life and death, from the so-called margin of society to the post-performance backstage stories, hoping someone will find the “recording” of one’s existence.