THE HARE’S EARS

Is there anyone who hasn’t heard the story of the cricket and the ant? The ant was busy working like a dog all year long, and by the time winter came around he had used up all his supplies. So he knocked on the cricket’s door to ask for a loan from him… or how does it go again?

Aesop, the world’s first storyteller, is finally coming to visit Hungary and he is going to tell us whatever stories he feels like telling! He’s a free man, you know. A freed slave. He had a hump, but was straight-backed. He had two legs, yet he would stumble. If necessary, he could be a sly fox; if not, a newborn lamb. Either way, he was top dog. A swallow who wasn’t one. And we are needed for that too. If we perk up our ears and refuse to fear our own shadows like the cowardly hare, then perhaps we will understand the moral. Or the lack of it. And by the end of the evening we will all be slightly freer slaves.

Beastly good fun embedded in ancient stand-up comedy on the subject of human frailty. An evening of didactic dance and song, in enchanting quotation marks. Come ruminate over these questions with the ruminants. Two acts in unusually fine feather.

The Örkény Theatre’s company have undertaken the considerable task of rethinking Aesop’s fables – which have lost none of their validity over the course of three thousand years – in the context of a musical revue.