Karaoke Europe Festival | PanoDrama: Slaves of Justice

A musical cabaret based on a real court case with more than 1.200 pages of court reports and more than a hundred hours of testimony. A jury of Czech volunteers will be created for he Prague performance, who together with the PanoDrama team will stage one sole performance at the Archa Theatre.

PanoDrama’s third verbatim production, Slaves of Justice investigates the justice system with particular focus on minorities and how the hate crimes statute is turned against the very minorities it is supposed to protect.

As the time of the racist murders of Roma one day in 2009 about thirty cars filled with the members of the Neonazi paramilitary Hungarian Guard arrived to the Gypsy settlement to provoke the terrorized Roma. The Gypsies viciously attacked one of the cars with axes, scythes, forks and all possible tools, shredding its roof and windows. Miraculously the three inside got out without as much as a scar. The attackers were arrested and charged for the felony, but they were also charged with committing a hate crime against “Hungarian”, to which group of course they also belong. Nine men were recently sentenced to forty years altogether, including one innocent Gypsy, whom only a policeman claimed to have recognized from behind wearing a hood, one who later withdrew his statement. Everyone else in the village (Gypsies and white people alike) said he couldn’t have been there.

PanoDrama got hold of the 1200 page-long court protocol and its creative team and cast conducted over a hundred interviews in the village and elsewhere. The show follows the structure of the real trial interspersed with monologues, dialogues, scenes and choir-pieces of the the real life characters – all the time strictly adhering to the tenets of verbatim theatre.

The show ends with a jury of 12 laypeople as an acting jury, who deliberate about the case they heard for the first time that night and in case of agreement bring back a verdict. Members of the original juries trained with PanoDrama’s two drama teachers over a period of three months at weekends and were selected following a research all over the country. In the present version the jury consists Czech laypeople PanoDrama and Archa Theatre have worked with in preparation for the Karaoke version of the play.
 

Director: Anna Lengyel

From the reviews:

“In the theatrical, social an civic sense PanoDrama’s work is excellent, significant and of considerable weight.”
Bálint Kovács, egyfelvonas.hu (a leading theatre blog)

"In a text of  literary sociological accuracy the dramaturgs find poetry: words and idioms that draw a strong picture of each character and each situation.”
Lilla Proics, szinhaz.net (the leading theatre critic website)

We could easily say this is the “theatre of hope”, which lures us with the option to face our mistakes and by opposing end them, or at least learn from them.
Judit Csáki, Magyar Narancs – a leading weekly