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
both appearance and age. In Lucifer he attempted to symbolize the Angel of Death but came close to this aim only in 1938, when the performance was recorded on a record. Both as a director and stage manager, Antal Németh did his best to export the Tragedy, and through it Madách’s humanistic ideas, to bther countries in Europe. He also tried to adapt it to other genres as well, including radio, records and film. The Second World War prevented the realization of these ideas. However, it was with support, that the puppet show version of the Tragedy was produced. The show was first presented in 1937 by Géza Blattner, a Hungarian puppeteer, in the Arc-en-Ciel Theatre in Paris. In 1945, after the end of the Second World War, The Tragedy of Man became enriched with a new, interpretation containing Marxist elements. At that time, however, discordant views flared up around Madách’s spiritual heritage and masterpiece, which at times directly, at times indirectly, touched upon the theatrical world as well. One group of the Marxist interpreters and critics of the work, among them György Lukács, the world-famous philosopher and aesthetician, considered the work to be the official, representative work of Hungarian state policy between the two world wars. They identified the Tragedy with the interpretations forced on it and criticized it not for a lack of aesthetic values but for a lack of philosophical elements. It was in this sense that they spoke disparagingly of the obsoleteness of Madách’s view of the masses, of the pessimism prevalent in his work and — influenced by the mystery play interpretations - of its clericalism. The other group of Marxist interpreters, on the other hand, had emphasized as early as in the fifties the organic presence of the Madách tradition, and the importance of this presence both in the theatre and in literature. Time and the new wave of Madách’s worldwide success have proved the correctness of their view. The Budapest National Theatre revived the Tragedy in 1947 and again in 1955. These productions were characterized by the contradiction between an enriched, better developed interpretation on the one hand and the scenery on the other. A Lucifer of human dimensions established himself for ever as antagonist not only to 30
