Art and craft of survival

Gabor Tompas's face is sallow and stubbled. He looks older than his 42 years, his hair dark and long, his voice velvet and sonorous. The accent places itself somewhere in Eastern Europe, ill-defined if you haven't yet been to the medieval university city of Cluj deep in the mountains of Transylvania, home to the Draculas of our imagination, capital in reality for western Romania's Hungarian minority.

He has come to Belfast's Lyric Theatre to direct Conleth Hill and Sean Campion as Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting For Godot for the Belfast Festival at Queen's. Campion and Hill, he explains, turned up at auditions offering themselves successfully as the double act on the strength of their on-the-boards bonding as the two liggers, one from Antrim, one from Kerry in the hit revival of Marie Jones's Stones in his Pockets, a darkly comic satire on Ireland's on-site love affair with Hollywood.

Their reading of Beckett, Tompa says, changed his mind on the writer. He had always thought the original text in French much superior to the author's own subsequent translation into English, French being the primary western European language taught in Romania. Now he's sure that this is a play written for the music of the Irish voice. No doubts here that Beckett remained an Irish, rather than a truly English or French writer later in life.

Transylvania's provincial capital city of Cluj on the river Somec cut off by a fold of the Carpathian mountains 200 miles west of the capital cti, Bucharest, is, Tompa explains, at the interface between three cultures, Romanian and the German and Hungarian of its two minority ethnic groups. But he acknowledges that for most westerners all it will conjure up are images of Bram Stoker's "horrible vampires".

In Cluj he is the artistic director of its 210-year-old Hungarian Theatre, with a staff of 150 including 40 actors playing six new productions in repertory from September to July. He acknowledges Romania's terrible economic crisis has brought the country to the verge of collapse with actors earning what amounts to one week's wages a month. But the country's moral crisis is for him much worse than its economic one. He returns to it again and again in conversation.

"Before 1990 every theatrical performance was political, each word, each sentence became something about the Ceaucescu regime. Each performance had a brave purpose to raise the spirit of resistance in the people. But they were not all good performances because I think that the more a theatre wishes to fulfil a political role, the more it weakens artistically."

So what happens in theatre now that it no longer serves as people's parliament and church?

"We must show the new realities, but not prostitute ourselves with cheap aspirations."

Yes, he has directed Beckett before, Happy Days for his own theatre and Godot in Germany. But his Belfast production will be quite a different one, though Andrei Both's setting of 1000 pairs of worn-out boots may be more Holocaust than Orange and Green.

"I feel, without being included in the Northern Irish reality, but being an attentive observer of it, that now an Irish production of Godot could be very important. For this play includes that desperate hope we all need, and that people from Northern Ireland need especially. This desperate hope is the thing which makes the play worth doing, because I don't think Beckett is so dark - of course the result is tragic just like our lives - but there is a lot of fun. Those couples in the play can't live one without his other, the servant without his master, the friends without each other."

"We are all so stuck together. We need to find the solutions together. The play is a game of survival - and what else is our life if not games of survival?"

And are there any parallels he'll bring out concerning the relationship between the state and the individual? This is a question his theatre must have asked so many times in past decades as Ceaucescu's regime first attempted to suppress the minority Hungarian culture and later when great actor-directors such as Ion Carimitru used his art to subvert the appalling regime, becoming Minister of Culture after urging ctiBucharest crowds to revolution?

"Between Pozzo (Donnagha Crowley) and Lucky (Ned Dennehy)", Tompa answers carefully but perhaps surprisingly. "It is the servant who needs the master, because otherwise they are lost. Someone or something must put order into the world, even if that order is cruel. There is a beautiful idea in Godot, when Pozzo becomes blind and Lucky, who had previously presented himself as a demolished human being, gains dignity helping Pozzo. The relationship between the individual and society always needs to be reviewed and in the Theatre of Cluj, in the 1970s and 1980s all our performances spoke of the relationship between state power and the individual, who inevitably always loses."

`BECKETT," he continues, "says all his characters are clowns, and clowns know that when God created the Throne he didn't sit in it himself, he put the Holy Spirit in the Throne and those who don't know there is no-one on the throne are always fighting to reach that Throne. These problems of Northern Ireland, this conflict between Catholics and Protestants, as Transylvanians for us it is very strange: my father is Protestant, my mother Catholic and there's no problem, my son is Catholic, my wife is Protestant - there is no problem."

Romania and Northern Ireland have singular artistic ties channelled over 30 years of frequent visits by John Fairleigh of Belfast's Institute of Irish Studies. His liaising with Romania's artists has facilitated visiting art exhibitions, joint poetry ventures, Carimitru directing Opera Northern Ireland productions in the Grand Opera House and the vastness of the Gasworks Klondyke Shed plus Tompa's Theatre of Cluj's memorable production of Ionesco's The Bald Primadonna in Derry. That particular 1993 success is one Fairleigh, Tompa and the Lyric hope to echo with Waiting for Godot.

Lyric Theatre, November 2nd-13th, 8 p.m. No Sunday show.