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"Ten years after the death of this excellent playwright and theatre personality, it seems that the theatre of Heiner Müller has lost nothing of its poetic power. Quite the opposite. In his play Quartet, in which the phantoms of Dangerous Liaisons are raging, the shamelessness of the two main characters’ love and sexuality ends up in a genuine civil war, the “battlefield” of mutual human dependence, that only death can dissolve.
The German playwright acuurately titles the set, “a parlor before the French revolution or after the third world war.” The virtuosity of the text demands a special approach from both of the actors. During the play they have to play several characters, changing sexes and roles; moreover, there is the smashing text and its vicious humor. This is Heiner Müller’s first play which treats the problems of his personal life, his own relationship to women, but not in the form of a biographical work. On the contrary: while he dissects the huge human anatomy, he forces the spectators to confront their own pasts, their own sins in a modern purgatory that – in the relation with the catastrophe that is threatening mankind – is also bearing the threat of culture’s and nature’s distinction and where the ruining of the relationship between sexes undoubtedly remains a current theme." Gábor Tompa