Csáth And His Demons online stream premiere

2021. 02. 10.

Géza Csáth was a writer, a physician, a psychoanalyst, he was a painter, and he also composed music while he was constantly fighting with his demons. On the 13^th of February, on his birthday, you can see a recorded stream about Géza Csáth at VígSTREAMház. This reading theatre performance tries to evoke the genius of the polymath Csáth with original letters, diary entries, literature plays and music of his, who has still an impact on us today.

The life-work of Géza Csáth is disappearing and then returning from time to time to the common knowledge of literature. Due to his complex personality and his writings containing dreamy motives he became an essential figure of the turn of the 19^th and 20^th century. Géza Csáth, born as József Brenner, composed music, painted and wrote already as a teenager. At 14, his first music critic gets published, and he sends a story to Sándor Bródy, the chief editor of the magazine Future. He was raised in Maria-Theresianopel, which started to develop at the turning of the 20^th century, but he was craving for living in Pest. Taking his father’s remonstrance, in order to have a secure income, he studied medicine. Meanwhile attending the University, he was writing insistently, his articles were published in ‘Budapest’s Diary’, and he was a member of the literature magazine ‘The West’. As one of the firsts he was taken up with Freud’s tenets and theories, he used the psychoanalysis during his career as a doctor. In his whole life he was in dread of deadly diseases, which he already had to face at a very young age: he was 5 when his mother, and 16 when his sister passed away. When he was -wrongly- diagnosed with lung-disease, he gave himself the first dose of morphine and his willingly contracted fight with his own demons started. The fight, he soon lost: at a young age, crazed by morphine he shot his wife and ended his own life too.

In this performance premiered through streaming, not only we can learn about Géza Csáth’s life and works, but also about his relationship to creation and the constant fight with morphine and it also portrays, how his environment and his family reacted to his lifestyle. “The title Csáth And His Demons itself refers to fight. We see a struggle of a man, who was talented in too many ways and actually this caused all the difficulties he had to face. We portray a very complex personality on stage, whose modern thoughts about psychiatry are just as important parts of his life-works as his novels, short-stories and diaries. I think Csáth, the writer cannot be separated from Csáth, the patient analyzing and recording himself.” – says Róbert Vörös, the director of the show.

Csáth And His Demons

VígSTREAMház, 13. February 2021 – recorded stream

Tickets: https://eszinhaz.hu/hu/eloadasok/elo/csath-202102131900

Performed by: HORVÁTH SZABOLCS, HIRTLING ISTVÁN, ZOLTÁN ÁRON, CSAPÓ ATTILA, SZILÁGYI CSENGE, BACH KATA, GILICZE MÁRTA
Piano: MESTER DÁVID
Literature Consultant: MOLNÁR ESZTER EDINA
Stage Manager: HÉJJ JÁNOS
Prompter: ZEWDE ESZTER
Assistant of Director: EFSTRATIADU ZOÉ
Editor-Dramaturg: BALASSA ESZTER
Director: VÖRÖS RÓBERT