Visky András's play Juliet was launched into an international orbit. It was translated into Romanian, staged at the National Radio Theatre, and made into a CD. The play is requested in New York; the Greeks want to play it… Its success is well deserved. It is a sincere confession, conscientiously assumed, about the existence of minorities, about a maintained moral conduct, reinvented and renewed daily in a hostile environment, in extreme physical misery. This moral conduct gives us force and life; thanks to this conduct, a woman has survived the most horrible world, manipulation, totalitarianism; she has endured life's daily blows that withered her body and her soul. It's a letter thrown into the waves from a communist extermination camp in the Romanian Plain, near the lower bank of the Danube, where the heroine was deported together with her under-aged children, because she was the wife of a Reformed minister, a foreigner from Budapest who followed her husband to his parish in Transylvania, and wouldn't leave him, not even when he was imprisoned, because he had preached liberation through faith in his sermons.It's a Transylvanian, Hungarian, Protestant issue. How does the story sound in Romanian, spoken by a Romanian actress, in the Romanian public radio program? It sounds very human.Szilágyi EnikÅ‘, from the Hungarian State Theatre in Cluj, played her part in Romanian, directed by Tompa Gábor. But her body was a giant eye, accusingly staring at us, blaming us, but also a luminous mirror of kindness, of severity and true love, a love for all humankind that is not measured according to race, religion or nationality – she doesn't even apply these concepts to dogs! – she only weighs people's moral conduct...And what does Coca Bloos do in this play, at the National Radio Theatre, directed by Tompa Gábor? She does just the same. She talks to us from her inner world, from the world of her soul, where, whether we like it or not, we're just the same, equal in the face of moral and human justice. The Romanian actress, coming from an Orthodox world, is equally Puritan and Reformed and Hungarian, if she is a real actress – and Coca Bloss is a real actress indeed! How small the world is, or how surprising kindness can be. Under her influence, we forget what breaks us apart, what makes us enemies, what makes us miserable. These things shocked me while listening to Coca Bloos playing Juliet in Visky András's play on the Romanian Cultural Radio show. She gave me back my trust, and I felt that there is still hope left. And I can live this shock – this revelation – and so can others, those who listen to the CD made after this show, Visky András's excellently translated script, by Paul Drumaru, as valuable as the original dramatic poem. And so can everyone who might encounter this text, impeccably translated in any language. It's a good thing that we still have moments such as this.
by István Zsehránszky
