Dementia, or the Day of My Great Happiness
This production by the Hungarian theatre and film director Kornél Mundruczó is based on a true story that happened four years ago in Hungary: the mental institution Lipot in Budapest was bought by an investor who closed it and threw the patients out. Since then, the building has been falling into disrepair, the garden is overgrown by weeds. Mundruczó’s piece «Dementia, or The Day of my Great Happiness» focuses on a couple of dementia patients who have been vegetating on the fourth floor of this clinic. The ill are living in the kingdom of amnesia – for Mundruczó this is a parable for Hungary’s current reality that consists of ignoring or eliminating confounding factors. The way the old and the mentally ill are treated becomes a symbol for the state of this society.
At the very beginning, a doctor explains how through dementia «the brain is eaten up by nothingness – just like in Hungary: no past, no future.»
The piece is a piercing farce, a humoristic and cynical melodrama, a surreal endgame of human life. «Dementia» is the second part of Mundruczó’s trilogy on suicide and moves between a hyperreal world of psychiatry and a bizarre operetta.
In Hungarian with German surtitles.
Guest performance in collaboration with Schauspielhaus Zürich & Gessnerallee Zürich
Credits