Igor Šimeg

Slovakia, on the eve of the outbreak of World War II. The family of the young Jewish Martin Friedmann gathers to celebrate his bar mitzvah and make a solemn promise that they will all meet again a year later around the same table; but the storms of war and anti-Semitic fanaticism will lead each of them down very different paths.

This two-part production follows the lives of three generations of women from the Jablonczay family at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The first part begins in 1882 and focuses on the two older generations. The eldest, Maria (Emília Vášáryová), lives in a dead relationship with her husband Kálmán (Milan Kněžko). She is the mother of a son and three daughters, each of whom tries to cope with her despotic nature in different ways. In the second part, the youngest, third generation of characters enters the scene. Lenka (Zuzana Vačková) is first educated in a convent with the kind approach of the mother superior (Magda Vášáryová) and slowly gets to know the real world outside the convent and her strict family environment. The play is based on the novel by Hungarian prose writer Magda Szabó, originally titled "An Old-Fashioned Story," in which the author describes the family life of her own ancestors.