Budapest: The Ring of the Nibelung – Engraved, Please
Top models, CEOs, fire-fighters and Valkyries – the Nibelung, of course
24 August 2013
Richard Wagner is still here after two hundred years. On the composer’s birthday, Wagner is ever-present. The blog My Personal Wagner collects adaptations, interpretations and mutations of the unique work from around the world, for instance the Hungarian disaster play Nibelung Park.
“It is a long, brutal and boring story.” This is the introduction to the 2004 play Nibelung Park by the Hungarian playwright János Térey. That won’t keep genuine Wagnerians away. They are beamed to Worms of the 1930s to witness the power play between three major family-owned corporations: the Gibichung chemical plant, Wälsung steelworks and the Nibelung Bank. A corporate merger results in the Nibelung & Gibichung Group, or G&N. The members of the capitalist families live in Nibelung Park.
They reside there among attorneys, top models, police officers, fire-fighters and radio journalists – in a world at the edge of a precipice. Siegfried and his partner have overthrown Hagen, the youngest child of the ruling dynasty, from the director’s chair of the group, the Valkyrie Brünhilde and her Nibelung girlfriend’s lesbian relationship mocks the male heroes, and Hagen, only a demigod among gods, swears his revenge against the new mighty. Hagen’s plan is diabolical and, like all diabolical plans, it is perfect. He keeps the cosseted citizens in suspense with elaborate acts of terrorism, and browbeats Siegfried, Brünhilde and all the other self-complacent relations.
My Personal Wagner: go to the blog
The world of the park is the world of modern Hungary. Térey’s ingenious verses make even the most profane sentences sound archaic and transform every absurd and carnal scene into mythology. The play’s singular dual character in which modern reality is paired with mythology, slang with demanding verse and Wagner with terrorism, makes it a unique work of Hungarian stage literature.
The legendary theatre performance by Krétakör, one of the most famous ensembles of the independent theatre scene in Hungary, was also turned into a television film by director Kornél Mundruczó (Nibelung lakópark, 2009). The backdrop was the former, infamous psychiatric institute Lipót, dilapidated premises that suited the apocalyptic theme perfectly.
-db-
