Száva Enikő: Macbeth among the concrete
Száva Enikő: Macbeth among the concrete
Rehearsal notes
There is something absurd about hearing lines like “Widen your eyes, bring grief to the heart / Come like a shadow and depart as one” in a renovated outbuilding of Timișoara’s former textile factory. It isn’t some old playwright haunting the place; a royal drama is taking shape among the concrete walls, in the Csiky Gergely Hungarian State Theatre’s rehearsal room on Arad Street. Next door, the fox terriers of an animal‑abusive dog breeder bark, and further off the iron‑framed windows of an abandoned factory gape empty, every pane smashed. Even murderous intent takes on a rusty hue here, I think as I cycle into the factory yard.
I stumble into a dialogue scene: Gedeon András as Macbeth and Zsófi Tóth D. as Lady Macbeth are convincing from the first moment. A little later comes a crowd scene and sword practice; the company’s fencers are far from clumsy.
Italian director Stefano Tè is the conductor. Timișoara audiences and regular visitors to the TESZT (Timișoara Euroregional Theatre Festival) may know him from his grandiose street‑theatre productions. As the founder of Modena’s Teatro dei Venti he previously brought productions to the Banat that occupied public spaces with huge moving structures, musicians and acrobats, enchanting hundreds of spectators. This time Stefano is approaching theatre‑making from quite another angle. During the rehearsals a deliberately stripped‑back theatrical language is emerging: few props, minimalist visuals. “We probably need to return to the essence – to a theatrical language in which the body and the text are central,” the Italian master says.
He chose Macbeth because he reads it less as a historical tragedy and more as a story about how society and communities work. In a rehearsal break I asked him why Shakespeare, and why this play. Lately he has been preoccupied by the fragility of human beings, he replied, and especially by their relationship to power: “The deeper we dig into this text, the more the relationship between man and power comes into focus. Shakespeare described this with almost mathematical precision, and it’s clear that this relationship hasn’t changed over the centuries.”
He stresses there is no rupture between what he does on the street and what he does indoors: his visually stunning production Moby Dick, which was born from one of his artistic explorations of urban space, also circled the theme of human fragility. With Macbeth, they’re not interested in murderous brutality but in the way power slowly sucks everyone in. “Moby Dick had a chorus too,” adds the production’s dramaturg, Stefano’s long‑time collaborator Vittorio Continelli, referring to their shared concept: by portraying a chorus they want to emphasize that every change of power demands blood and that aggression is an organic part of a functioning society. “On stage the chorus operates like an organism that absorbs people, swallows them and then regurgitates them. We don’t see corpses lying around; everything is swallowed by that gigantic organ made up of the actors’ bodies,” the dramaturg explains. The director continues: “We don’t want to portray violence literally; we’re searching for stylized forms that express our distance from it and thinking through how we can remain consistent with the solutions we’ve found.”
There’s no need to ask how the planned production connects to the season’s theme of “Divergences”: the show begins with a bloody battle – the witches mention this at the start of the play – and ends with one, while human fragility pulses through it all.
They see the work as another experiment, exploring what sort of theatrical language can be valid and viable today when presenting a classic considered part of the world and European heritage. “Through this piece we want to talk about theatre itself,” Stefano says. The two creators keep returning to the same thought: perhaps we need to re‑learn how to make theatre simply – not impoverished or as a compromise, but consciously stripping away everything that has accumulated in recent years. Less technology, less spectacle, more presence. According to the director, the Italian cultural sphere is increasingly struggling: funding disappears, venues vanish, and theatre is forced to rethink how it operates. In this situation, he believes, one can no longer conceive of gigantic productions – and not just for financial reasons; it seems the times do not call for them. Yet this does not mean a puritan, ascetic theatre; quite the opposite. They are searching for ways to create an intense, powerful theatrical experience from minimal means, where the spectacle comes not from scenery or machinery but from bodies and tension. Vittorio thinks Macbeth still resonates today because it exists on several planes at once: it is a political drama, a war story, an examination of power, a disintegration of individual values and a depiction of communal violence, while the text itself still lives – it is not a museum piece.
Perhaps Macbeth works in this semi‑industrial space precisely because all excess has vanished – from the room, from the walls, from the set and even from the text. Something new is emerging from what remains.
Première: 23 May 2026, Theatre Factory – UTT (Calea Aradului 48)
