András Dömötör

Attila, the Hun, is a bloody beast that destroyed Europe. Being seen in the West as personified evil, Hungarian nationalists consider Attila the ideal king: a hero who held together a huge empire, an avenger for his people, the scourge of God! And now he is coming back to clarify what is East and what is West, who the real enemy is, and who lives rightly at home, here in Europe! Budapest-based director András Dömötör pushes the nationalist- Hungarian utopia of Attila’s return to the extreme.

»I love seeing people come out of darkness.« David Lynch

One can lose any hope very quickly if you look at the current state of the political and cultural Europe. Mephistoland is a horror scenario, a vision and yet a reality. Here the artistic director has been replaced and his successor now represents a »healthy, nationalist« culture. Homophobia and anti Semitism and giant statues of saints are being introduced as confessions of faith for a new era. Schizophrenia spreads, directors go crazy, actors change their beings, and the audience locks itself in cages and goes on hunger strike. A theatre company is in a state of emergency because the groups knows: The time where they just played and acted for the sake of it will be over soon. The feared minister president has put his best friends in the position as the new artistic director of the theatre who thinks that the main goal of theatre should be to enhance the mental and spiritual uprising of the people. The wind is changing and from now on there is no chance to avoid the slump of politics into the area of art. The Hungarian director András Dömötör has created a deeply weird trip through an absurd world in which reality and fiction, horror and grotesque cheerfully pair.