Sun, silence, the green grass, birds chirping, the blue sky, children playing in the park, ideal conditions for a writer to find inspiration in their comfortable, intimate home... But things are never this simple. The world is not as it seems. A bomb doesn't make a war, just as a sparrow flying by doesn't mean spring is here. And yet? Bérenger, an idealist, an artist who loves life, people, light, suddenly discovers that he can fly – just as he can walk or breathe. In his naivety, he believes his family and everyone else can also fly, just like him, that they can understand, that they can "find the path, the forgotten path"; they only have to remember. But the artist is in fact the only air pedestrian, taking this solitary road, leaning into it gently, for momentum. A privileged position, which nonetheless causes pain and the curse of not being trusted. Because if beauty is accessible to everyone, the sublime and the grotesque are aesthetic experiences which trouble and frighten us. Just like the tragic choir did not believe in Cassandra's dark premonitions, the English people spending their Sunday in the park do not believe in Bérenger's apocalyptic visions, because truth is always an offence in the face of comfort, prudishness, superficiality, prejudice, and facile righteousness. But when "beyond hell... there is nothing", and hell is closing in on us, like the wind, our comfortable world deflates, like an artificial décor, replacing the gardens with the abyss, ice, and flames.
Gábor Tompa, together with his artistic team, transforms Ionesco's text in a musical score, playing both physically and vocally with the rhythm, the choral harmony, dissonance, and syncope, in poetic swings, oscillations, and leaps. The play is thus brought to the fore again, after being unjustly forgotten for so long, just like the characters – and, implicitly, we – have forgotten how to fly. Because who believes in poets anymore? And what are our ideals today? The intellectual's pain comes from the fact that the internal combustion of authentic creativity happens precisely when one's ideals are destroyed, when he is faced with the fear of death, of the abyss, of losing everything he loves. With his specific humor, Ionesco seems to ask us, even today, when the play is more relevant than ever, with Russian and Ukrainian bullets and rockets so close to us, with the planet soaked in blood and ecologically threatened: why do people keep pretending that they don't see anything, why don't they want to understand what is happening? The answer is not that different from the Biblical one: "they have eyes, but do not see, they have ears, but do not hear".

Ștefana Pop-Curșeu