Yvonne

There’s nothing worse than pity. Treacherous, aggressive pity. A pity that leaves visible and invisible bruises. That tears people up. That eliminates the distance between victim and perpetrator. Poignant pity. Double-edged pity.

The characters: a waggish King with bipolar inclinations, a romantic, pseudo-poet Queen, a whimsical, dandy-wannabe Prince, a suite of servile and dense aides.

The target: Yvonne, an introverted young woman, the embodiment of purity and naturalness - the embodiment of what we could call the perfect victim.

The pretext: The son of a king can do anything. Anytime. With anyone. Even get married out of a whim (pity, pardon!) to the most introverted woman.

The dilemma: What to do when ugliness or pathological shyness does not go hand in hand with social trends? When you can’t properly bow to Their Majesties? When you can’t answer properly. When you can’t eat a crucian properly?

The conclusion: A complex show, a tragi-comical text, a cynical metaphor about superficial social rules that surrender to contemporary forms without substance.

When I think about Gombrowicz's text, I remember a childhood scene. While playing hide and seek, I hid under a slide. A black 4X4 stopped nearby, some men came out, jumped over the fence of the playground, and stood there still, smiling. They asked me to climb and then slide down the slide. I asked why. They smiled and replied they wanted to see me slide down. I ran but ever since then, the 4X4 has always been behind me. In “Yvonne”, I speak of an inhumanely utopic world, where humans and humanoids try to survive and fight to stay inside the circle. To remain mid-circle. But this middle of the circle has its own free will, is intangible, a metaphysical phenomenon, unpredictably born out of manipulation and cruelty, today’s basic human “qualities”. For these characters, each moment is a waiting, stand by moment, a moment of continuous carefulness to stay inside the circle. Mid-circle. On the heights of brutality, which we’ve already reached, after the seventh circle of hell, in this infinite universe, with no corners or angles, a continuous space where it's impossible to hide. They will find you and eviscerate you, they will rip out everything you love or you think you can love. This is the irreversible climax of fear, where mothers and fathers only find the paranoia of impossible, naive dreams. A culmination where we’re consumed by one question only: “How will we decompose?” At some point, King Ignatius says that “We first allow ourselves to do certain things and then find we must allow anyone to do the same”. But what do we allow ourselves, beyond our dreams? Kneeling to our traumas, what is it that we allow for ourselves? Botond Nagy, director