Grove

Balogh Tibor: Conflagration of memories
Kisvárdai Lapok, 22nd June 2019

“ «We are leaving in vain since we always return.» This is the sentence that directs Bálint Botos’ time-machine. His actors and technical colleagues show vividly the whimsies of memories: inherited past, personal past, the mixed sufferings of adolescence and adulthood makes us realise that there was no future, there is no future and there can’t be one. A Bergmanian, upsetting performance which makes us deepen into ourselves.”

Kovács Bea: Our divergent duties
www.szinhaz.net, 04th June 2019

“This anonymous woman bears on her shoulders the mission of searching her own identity. She tries to define herself by overriding the traumas which she inherited from mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers and other ascendants. Even though we are able to get rid of objects and houses, the invisible legacy of our predecessors – which are proven to be ingrained into us on a molecular level – are harder to eliminate. To burn down the unsaid grievance and the tolerated but suffered repressions: this is what ‘Eszter’ in some sense, undertakes.”

Dömötör Adrienne: Psycho, real, surrealism
www.szinhaz.net, 03th June 2019

“The attractiveness of the performance lies in it’s polyphony also coded into the literary material, which fulfills itself by the working of the director who treats the improvisations of the actors open-mindedly. (…) All this together creates such a special whirlabout, a collection of simultaneous meanings that sometimes we feel that the theatrical form is generated by a world of consciousness and unconsciousness, emotions and passions, dreams and nightmares.”

Vilmos Eszter: Trends, silences and mercury books
Deszkakalauz, 07th April, 2019

“They sing in a pleasant harmony (the music of Magor Bocsárdi), and the show begins. The Grove written/directed by Botos Bálint takes place in a small town and it is about traumas repressed and then expressed, sometimes hereditary throughout generations. (…) The either stylized (standing behind a microphone, talking to the audience), or realistic dialogues are interrupted by melodies with excellently proportioned texts, sung together.”

Ema Onofrei: Her story, everybody’s story
tranzitfeszt.teatruldenord.ro, 06th October, 2018

“However, I was fascinated by the actors’ sincerity and by the sentiment of joy with which they played, as if what they have said would have been their own. They seemed excited to show us the life of the small town they had built up and imagined in front of us. And they worked so well with the imagination of the audience that I could really see the cab, the house, the mug with the ugly flowers… I could even see the emotions they were experiencing.”

Turbuly Lilla: In motion
www.kutszelistilus.hu, 28th March, 2018

„In comparison with the other shows I managed to see from this independent theatre group from Cluj, Grove has a much more transparent tissue, it is much more sentimental (in a good sense) and much finer.”

Eszter Brassai: Worn out lives on a house wall
szigligeti.wordpress.com, 22nd March, 2018

“What would you take with you from your old family home, if you had to sell it? What is that tangible, evaluable thing that can be translated into another dimension? Why do we relate to certain objects and locations? The characters are all chained by the tangible evidence of their past. “