A visionary folklore of sin. Péter Kárpáti’s latest play explores the deep psychological dimensions of The End of Violence. 

Confessing is a communal experience. It’s not just a way for the guilty to unburden their soul — it’s also a way to drag listeners into the swamp of sin. 

During the two weekends of The End of Violence, Péter Kárpáti’s new play Scabby Dog will be performed in various spaces of Trafó (from the Main Hall to the Club and the Studio), enabling the work to be transformed through the different spatial settings.

“Our starting point was the dark and murky world of folktales from Karcsa (collected by Géza Nagy). An ethnographic Galápagos: in this isolated region of Bodrogköz, traditional stories evolved in strange and unfamiliar directions over the centuries.

The world of these tales is visionary and psychologically profound, and every twist and turn has enormous dramatic weight.

I kept only a sentence or two from the originals. Our time and place is today’s worn-down, rural Hungary. We recite fragmented, self-contradictory confessions — stories so horrific that they couldn't possibly have happened as told here. And yet something surely did happen.

Maybe something even more terrible and mundane.”
(Péter Kárpáti)

“A friend of mine said I had a choice — to either go crazy or start running. You have to do something to love yourself again. You run in the rain, the mud splashes, your body aches, you get a bunch of blisters, your nose runs, branches slap into your face, you finally feel alive, your back hurts, your knees sting, it's brutal! Your glutes are splitting, it hurts in places you didn't even know existed. No, I don't believe it! Your body is breaking, one last big rage, and then purification. There is no forgiveness in life, but here, there is!” (Scabby Dog, excerpt)