What happens when obedience stops being a strategy and becomes the only possible response? The Tót family lives somewhere in the Banat. Their only son is at the front, in the middle of World War II. At the boy’s suggestion, a major suffering a nervous breakdown comes to the family’s home to recover. The parents and the sister receive the officer as if their son’s fate depended solely on their hospitality: they tiptoe, they bend to his every whim, even though it is no longer even certain that the son and the major are still fighting on the same side.

In Horváth Hunor’s staging for the «Csiky Gergely» Hungarian State Theatre of Timișoara (2026), the action shifts from the small mountain village of Örkény István’s original text to the Banat, a border territory where the language of power no longer matches that of the community. The major speaks Romanian; the family, Hungarian. This linguistic fracture amplifies the tension between submission and dignity, between the intimate and the institutional.

The show unfolds as a total event: four hours in which electronic music and folklore, live video art, butoh choreography and a set design of cardboard boxes and sand build a universe where the absurd grows until it devours normality. Butoh here is neither a decorative element nor a movement style: it is the dramaturgy of the body running in parallel to that of the text — a complete physical score that runs through the three acts and makes visible, in the performers’ flesh, what words cannot name. Neither historical drama nor parody: a black-humour memento on how small cracks end up crumbling families, communities and the human condition itself.

PROCESS

My work on Tóték is not limited to a one-off choreography: it is a dramaturgy of the body that runs through the show’s three acts, in collaboration with Baczó Tünde, Melles Endre and Ádám Julcsi.

The whole cast received butoh training as part of the creation process. This training did not aim for the actors to dance butoh, but for them to find in their bodies the register of what happens beneath the characters.

The axis of the score is the son’s body — Gyula, played by Hajas Krisztián — who, over the four hours of the performance, descends centimetre by centimetre along a walkway joining the stage to the back of the auditorium. Ten metres in four hours: a walk outside human time. But this body does not only advance — it decomposes. The choreography is organized in its own chapters running in parallel to the dramatic action: decomposition on the battlefield, where the body’s asymmetry never rests; spasms honouring the forty thousand fallen soldiers; the appearance and disappearance of eyes and mouths like flowers that open for a single night. Each chapter has its own technique, its own intensity, its own relationship to what happens on stage.

Butoh also operates in the scenes created for the camera: images that make visible the venom the oppressive system spreads through the family and its relationships. Hands passing through walls, eyes piercing the characters’ souls, bodies deforming in the wings and appearing projected over the stage.

As the play advances, the major’s abstract and hostile world invades the Tóts’ private life — it enters their house, it enters their relationships. The underworld shown in the videos gradually invades the characters’ reality. The characters lose their humanity: their bodies become more butoh, the destructive energies of oppression roam freely in bodies that no longer belong to themselves. The obsessive manufacture of boxes, the group displacements, the uniformity of submissive gestures — everything grows from a minimal movement until it occupies the entire stage at the end of the show.