The Sacrifice of Éva Izsák written by Januaria Piromallo, is a novel that reconstructs the life of the young Hungarian Jew Éva Izsák, who committed suicide in the summer of 1944 in the Great Forest of Debrecen, in Hungary. Eva was a young militant in the Zionist movement Hashomer Hatzair (the Young Guard), a movement of messianic activists, both Jewish and non-Jewish, which transforms the longed-for return to Zion into a factor of identity as much religious as political, amalgamating socialist ideals with Zionist ones in a single creed.
With the wave of anti-Semitism that was unleashed before and during the Second World War, while some sought refuge in neighbouring countries, others took the path of exile to the United States, or the path of suicide, these young people chose to organise themselves, in order to survive and resist, in small groups led by Eastern European intellectuals. It was in the small cell of resistance in Nagyvárad that Eva met one of the most promising of those intellectuals, a future star of modern epistemology, Imre Lakatos, who not only welcomed and protected her, but also decreed the necessity of her suicide.
The Sacrifice of Éva Izsák by Januaria Piromallo first and foremost tells a story that has all the flavour of disenchantment. The great narratives to which modern culture has given birth in order to legitimise its order, meaning and reality, such as the Enlightenment, Idealism and Marxism, have come to an end. In the story of Éva, the principles of morality and justice, those assumptions that are the foundation and guarantee of every social pact established between individuals belonging to the same community, deflagrate. The tale of Eve’s happenings is filled with characters who have completely lost their sense of ethics.
If a community loses its sense of ethics, it irretrievably loses its sense of the tragic. This is the testament that the audience is called upon to keep, becoming the last custodian of a relay of testimonies that have spanned history.
CREDITS
Text: Alessandra Felli from the novel The sacrifice of Éva Izsák by J. Piromallo
Direction: Alessandra Felli
With: Andrea Renzi and Teresa Saponangelo
Music: Francesco De Nigris
Lys: Carmine Pierri
Set and costume: Marta Crisolini Malatesta
Production: Teatro Nazionale di Napoli | Teatro Mercadante
PICTURES
PRESS
Fabrizio Coscia, Thus the Anti-Nazi Philosopher Sacrificed Eva, Young Jewess, Il Mattino 03 December 2017
«Direction and adaptation are effective in the fast-paced development of the story. Excellent performance by Renzi, capable of switching with versatility from the arrogant and egotistical mask of the character to unexpected comic flashes. Saponangelo is also good in giving substance to the determination of those who want to know the truth».
Alessandra Del giudice, The Sacrifice of Éva Izsàk, napoliclick.it, 24 November 2017
«Alessandra Felli reinterprets this true story using a fictional narrative device: she sets the scene in the 1970s in America and imagines a journalist who is also called Eva, a transposition of Januaria Piromallo (played by Teresa Saponangelo) who decides to investigate the story of Eva Izsak by meeting Imre Lipstiz/Lakatos (Andrea Renzi), the brilliant and perverse man who pushed Eva to suicide with subtle psychological violence. The journalist tries to approach the scientist, first with difficulty through the distance of the telephone, then manages to meet him by leveraging his narcissism and puts her own safety at risk because the man sees in her the woman he pushed to death. (…) Eva Izsak thus becomes the third invisible and helpless character of the staging. Eva is beyond the scene; it is the spectator who suffers the same subtle psychological pressure that Eva must have suffered: that put in place by the fascinating and brilliant mind of Lipstiz».
Bizarra 