Le pieton de l'air

Gábor Tompa, together with the artistic team, transforms the Ionesco's text into a musical score, in which they play physically and vocally with rhythm, choral harmony, dissonances and syncopations, in walks, swings and poetic leaps, bringing back to the forefront a piece that has been unjustly forgotten, just as the characters and implicitly all of us have forgotten how to fly. For who believes in poets today and what are our ideals? The intellectual's pain is precisely that it is only when ideals turn to ashes that the inner combustion of genuine artistic creation ignites, when you are faced with the fear of death, of emptiness, of losing everything you hold dear. With his trademark humour, Ionesco seems to ask us even today, when the play is more topical than ever, with Russian and Ukrainian bullets and missiles so close, with the planet so bloody and ecologically threatened: why do people pretend not to see anything, why do they not want to understand what is happening? The answer is perhaps not so far removed from the biblical one: 'they have eyes to see, and see not; they have ears to hear, and hear not'.

Ștefana Pop-Curșeu, artistic director of the National Theatre of Cluj

Photos by Nicu Cherciu