The first TAMper2 theatre meeting has started in Transylvania, focusing on two young directors. The organisers have stated that the meeting should not be called a festival; rather it is an event where parallels and counterpoints in the works of two directors are demonstrated to professionals and audiences over four days. Florin Vidamski, who hosts the event as the recently appointed director of the Andrei Muresanu Theatre in Sfantu Gheorghe, said two aesthetics and two different approaches to theatre would be shown. The theatre, where both a Hungarian and a Romanian troupe work throughout the year, will present two plays by each director between September 24 and 27. Schilling has taken his long-running and highly successful adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull alongside his latest work, Hamlet.ws, to the capital city of Covasna country.
After the official opening celebration on Monday afternoon, TAMper2 kicked off with two consecutive performances of Vasily Sigaryev's Plastilin by the Toma Caragiu Theatre from Ploieti. The nearly two-hour play, which has also been performed in Budapest in the past, was selected to create the basic tone for TAMper2. But having seen the two excellent performances that Schilling has taken to Sfantu Gheorghe, it was easy to presume that this would not be an equally matched competition. (The choice of words is justified by the meeting's slogan: Romanian-Hungarian clash in Szekler land.) Even though the Romanian troupe presented a reassuringly high-quality performance on the first evening, it is quite likely that the exciting and inventive world of Schiller, with his seemingly perfect command of actors, will win this match. If not with a knock-out, then at least with a better score.
The simile is just as bleak as the slogan of the meeting, but the concept of the event is indeed clever. More than being an unprecedented initiative, it also offers an opportunity to Hungarian audiences to discover Romanian theatre. Hungarian theatre professionals had known or suspected for some time that this is a scene worthy of attention. And now the location of this rendezvous and also its participants are deservedly first-rate, with Hungary being represented by its world renowned Krétakör Theatre.
