In Hungarian with English subtitles."Listen, a few years ago I became so depressed by politics that I decided to leave the country. It affected day-to-day life and was really awful. Even the greengrocer looked at me like I was carrying a machine gun whenever I entered the store. Everyone was so uptight that it became unbearable. No prospects whatsoever."
"In the past years Árpád Schilling became one of the most prominent and furious critics of cultural policy in Hungary. Since his early years as a director of Krétakör Theater he took part in shaping the independent performing arts policies and structure, not without result: not only the general success of his company, but also his personal lobbying (always together with his manager Máté Gáspár) created a certain stability of the performing arts field until 2010. Since then this stability is heavily shaken, the whole independent scene being often being under siege. Schilling is the few ones to stand up and speak – sometimes radically – without fear of the consequences of his statements. In the spring of 2014 he made a final statement: after the ministry cut his organization’s grant without any explanation, he made a video in which he tears up the contract with the ministry and announces that he is not going to accept any public money in Hungary. The video made in front of the ministry became virulent on the Facebook.
But Schilling as an artist in the past few years had a hard time to combine his radical and critical political activity with artistic expression, his personal political statements made as a cultural operator being most of the time stronger than his artistic ones. He was not willing to continue his earlier aesthetics, an art form basically closed in his own created world and in that sense traditional, but also unable to find new strategies of integrating politics into the representation, or politicizing the representation itself. The question of Schilling’s recent artistic activity was how can one “come back” to creating theater keeping his integrity as a radical political activist.
Finally, his recent The Loser finds a possible way to combine the political standpoint and the artistic expression by showing off the intersection of the two – staging a character named Árpád Schilling, leader of Krétakör independent performing arts organization. Schilling brings to the stage himself, politicizing himself, his past and present, personal and artistic, and also (radically for himself personally, but in accordance with his earlier shows) his body. This is unusual, almost radical gesture in contemporary Hungarian theater." - Andrea Tompa (Theater Heute)
With: Levente BOROS, Imre BOZOKI LICHTENBERGER, Eszter BÁNFALVI, Ádám CZITROM, Marcell GÁNYI, Annamária LÁNG, Tamás ÖRDÖG, Lilla SÁROSDI, Árpád SCHILLING, Sándor TERHES, Krisztián VRANIK, LAWRENCE Williams
Written by: Árpád SCHILLING, Éva ZABEZSINSZKIJ and the performers
Director: Árpád SCHILLING
Music: Imre BOZSÓKI LICHTENBERGER, Krisztián VRANIK, Lawrence WILLIAMS
Technical director: András ÉLTETŐ
Sound technician: Zsigmond SZILÁGYI
Set design: Sosa JURISTOVSZKY
Production manager: Edina SCHŐN
Producer: Márton GULYÁS
Co-produced by: Trafó Kortárs Művészetek Háza Budapest, Magyarország; Theatre National de Bordeaux Aquitaine, France; Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels, Belgium; Steirischer Herbst, Graz, Austria
