“Journey by Moonlight” after Antal Szerb

Authors’ Comment

The psychological novel written by Antal Szerb in 1937 is said to be "perhaps the most movingly sad book" in all of Hungarian literature. "Journey by Moonlight" is the fantastically moving story, sprinkled with dark humor, of a bourgeois businessman torn between duty and desire. The oppressive feeling of nostalgia of the hero pushes him on a journey in memory and analysis of the facts that happened years ago in the desire to search for his own identity.
In this first part of the play, the actors play in front of the iron curtain, on the front stage. A beam of light sometimes enters the hall through the door of the metal curtain, illuminating the chiaroscuro of the stage. With the lifting of the metal curtain, the scene comes to life, the show gains rhythm and requires the participation of the viewer to connect to the rigor of the abstract and intensely geometrized spaces. It is a spectacular space, efficient through its simplicity and rich through the combinations of LED strips placed on the outline of the rectangular metal structure that occupies the entire stage. In line with the modernist spirit of the novel, the Cartesian dynamics of the colored LEDs carve out in the black box of the stage playing spaces where the present and the past coexist. Impressively lit, in iridescent sparkles, in accordance with the scenes and moments of the action, sometimes accompanied by intensely symbolically extrapolated video projections, the visual effects have a decisive role in the suggestiveness of the "inner journey" as they suggestively accompany the introspection in the folds of affective memory.
Our life is like a math sheet. There are our battles for love, death, power. We try to pass from one square to another, we dance, we fall to our knees, we draw impossible diagonals, we are challenged. The lights emitted by the structure dynamically shape the space, the transition from one scene to another being organic and spectacular. A space with an infinity of modeling possibilities. An analogy to life and the multitude of choices we have. What do we choose?
What does the next step look like?