Premiere of Incognito at Pesti Theatre

2022. 10. 18.

A thrilling time-travel story that starts with the theft of Albert Einstein's brain. On 22 October at Pesti Theatre, Artur Szőcs will present for the first time in Hungary Nick Payne's contemporary drama Incognito, about the mysteries of the human brain and the importance of memory in the way we see ourselves. The brain-like play is a unique adventure not only for the audience, but also for the actors, as the nearly 20 characters are played by four of them, Patrícia Kovács, Luca Márkus, Szabolcs Horváth and Ervin Nagy.

Whose brain is better suited to research than that of Albert Einstein, perhaps the greatest genius of the 20th century, which disappeared from the autopsy table in 1955 and went on a bizarre journey... The story of Incognito, although it raises serious scientific and philosophical issues, is not a boring thesis drama, but an exciting time-travel story with great human drama. All it needs is four actors playing a myriad of interesting characters and three interwoven, highly intriguing stories. It also needs the viewer's brain to do its job, and to be stimulated to piece together a tale of the workings and nature of the human brain from fragments.

“Incognito is no ordinary performance. When I read the synopsis, I was immediately struck by the fact that it was not just an entertaining story, but also a scientific and educational one. And unravelling the threads is an adventure not only for the audience, but also for the actors and for me as director. It makes our brains work. You have to pay a lot of attention, especially in the first 10 minutes, and then you can get on the wave of this drama and start a very enjoyable journey", says Artur Szőcs, director. "I would venture to say that it was one of the biggest challenges of all four of our professional lives to rehearse this play because of the many characters and the emotional and temporal jumps in the play. There's something exhilarating about the fact that while we're making a play about the workings of the brain, our own brains have also had a serious concentration challenge during this rehearsal process. And together with director Artur Szőcs, we became a real team," adds Patrícia Kovács, one of the characters in the play.

And what are the three parallel stories? Let's start with the real starting point. In 1955, when Albert Einstein died in Princeton, the pathologist who dissected him, Thomas Stolz Harvey, simply stole the world-famous scientist's brain to unlock the secret of his genius, for research purposes and without asking the family's consent. He cut the brain into thin slices and studied the sections for years in his basement. In the meantime, he lost his wife, his job, his scientific reputation, and finally died without having made any discoveries or published a single paper. In The Incognito Story, Nick Payne explores a special segment of human brain function, the relationship between memory and the image of the self. In other words, how our memories determine our identity. According to Martha Murphy, the clinical neuropsychologist in the play, the human brain is in fact a "storytelling machine". Unable to perceive or comprehend the world as a whole, our memories are even more fragmented. In order to make sense of phenomena, our brains have to fill in the missing pieces, so they have to build a story, a narrative, by putting them together. Of course, about ourselves too. So we know ourselves through our memories. Those who have no memories lose themselves, like Henry Maison, the famous neuropsychological case, one of the amnesiac characters in the play, who remembers nothing except that he is waiting for surgery and loves his girlfriend...

The Hungarian premiere of Incognito will take place on 22 October at the Pesti Theatre. This year the show will be shown on 26 and 30 October, 19 and 30 November, 3 and 11 December.

More information, tickets:  www.vigszinhaz.hu/Inkognito