Bereczky Erzsébet (szerk.): Imre Madách: The Tragedy of Man. Essays about the ideas and the directing of the Drama (Budapest, 1985)

dr. Ferenc Kerényi: A Dramatic Poem from Hungary to the Theaters of the World

the early decades of its existence, the Hungarian theatre went in search of the audience itself, sending strolling players to small, faraway places. In the course of such wanderings, the terms and circumstances of the daily performances changed almost from one evening to the next. The only fixed point, the guarantee of a large audience and a good performance, was the actor himself. So, even in the second part of the 19th century, the performance was built around great actors. In this respect, Paulay was fortunate to have assembled a company whose members had received regular and systematic professional training, which had first been introduced in 1865. Paulay’s company exhibited a uniformly high standard of elocution and of general familiarity with the dramatic arts.

Another, and by no means unimportant, reason for Paulay’s own variant of Meiningenism was one bom of necessity: the National Theatre was very poor. Though the 1875 reconstruction did provide a back stage to accelerate the change of scenes and though in 1883, the year of the Tragedy’s debut, electric lighting was introduced in the theatre, the fact still remains that the building was constructed in 1837 was intended to serve as a purely temporary abode for Thalia. Besides, again for financial reasons, existing scenery, props and costumes had to be used and reused as often as possible in all new productions. This practice is clearly illustrated by the director’s copy in which Paulay’s new scenery designs mingle with clearly distinguishable old elements adapted from former plays. All these particularities and differences became very conspicuous in 1888, when the Meiningen company, again gave guest performances in Budapest. Mr Cronegk, the manager of the company, saw a performance of the Tragedy, which already had a glorious past of five years, but at the end abandoned the idea of staging it. Madách’s vision of history, the relatively short scenes and the partly historical, partly fictious characters were not in agreement with the orthodox views of Meiningenism.

Paulay’s staging of the Tragedy was in keeping with the two aims of his theatrical policy. He searched, with the true director’s and dramaturge’ s passion, for „stageable” plays in Hungarian literature, but worked just as consistently on the spectacular staging of the great dramatic poems of world literature. In 1887 the Tra-20