May 2005

Morality is on the side of the professional murderer. Knowledge is on the side of the illiterate. And the truth, which everyone is preaching about, is no more than a dream. It’s 1794. Paris is in ruins. The people mill on the streets and jubilantly look on as the heads of the lords, who were in power only yesterday, continue to fall. The first major Hungarian work to be produced in America in almost three decades, Headsman’s Holiday follows Roch, an executioner, as he roams Paris and stumbles into cruelly comic adventures that transform all that he previously thought of the world and its values. Only twelve actors play all 52 roles, bringing to life the crowds, the Parisian bureaucracy, Napoleon and revolutionary France as a whole.