HAY DOGS
An imaginary documentary play about Sándor Weöres’s cat
Written and directed by: PÁL GÖTTINGER
Performed by: ARTÚR KÁLID
We are told that the great poet’s cat developed cancer—and that after its death Weöres (who had already struggled earlier in life, even in childhood, with thoughts of suicide) stepped in front of a tram. Posterity now knows that this attempt, too, failed—and that we were enriched by those few lines:
“By the way,
if someone raises a mausoleum to a dog,
there’s no point in laughing.
Learn to love to the point of ridicule.”
But what we will play now is this: squinting, we begin to grow suspicious. Everyone knows that cats do not die so easily. They were here before us. They will be here after us. They see everything. They hear everything. The recollections of contemporaries run to thousands of pages, yet neither the great predecessors who discovered the prodigy, nor the contemporaries struck dumb by his talent, nor the posterity eager to pigeonhole everything truly knew what to do with the last Hungarian poet who belongs, without question, to everyone. Whose wisdom calls even the greatest to humility—and whose poems are the first every Hungarian child learns by heart. Whom the age he lived in did not even scratch, though he lived through and wrote through the entire twentieth century. So is this genius dangerous, harmless, naïve, or wise…? Does he stand apart, or above it all? No one knows, even today. We should have asked the cat. It is also true, however, that not everything it says is worth believing.
Admission: 4,000 HUF
