Actors in the crossfire

“A writer escapes the critic,” wrote András Forgách about Pályi’s first small collection of theatre essays, published nearly two decades ago. He saw the merit of this collection not in the fact that Pályi had discovered something that others had not, but in the fact that “with unheard-of care and honesty, with the vulnerable openness of a writer, he sought to define what happened to him and what happened to us.” The current collection of the writer, who worked primarily as a theatre magazine editor and theatre critic in the seventies and eighties, also testifies that from the very beginning he was preoccupied with the obvious, yet ultimately inexplicable symbiosis of theatre and life, that his creative curiosity searched for human destinies every evening in the actor who gave himself up in the limelight as a one-off act. His writings can be read as a report on the changing, controversial theatrical life of the era, but they offer much more than that. After saying goodbye to the practice of criticism, he returns again and again to the true mystery of theater, to the creative form of existence honored with passionate devotion.