Bereczky Erzsébet (szerk.): Imre Madách: The Tragedy of Man. Essays about the ideas and the directing of the Drama (Budapest, 1985)
Sándor Hevesi: The New Tragedy of Man
SÁNDOR HEVESI THE NEW TRAGEDY OF MAN (Excerpts from a director’s notes on staging The Tragedy of Man) The Tragedy of Man was first billed more than forty years ago, in the National Theatre, as adopted to the stage by Ede Paulay. Since then the production, the manner of its staging and performance, has not been substantially altered. What was the essence of this first production, by Paulay? The fact that he produced all the scenes - except for Space — as a sequence of pictures, with the Celestial Prologue the first of them. Heaven itself was a.scene like the others and was set directly downstage, in front of the footlights, and in fact it was not seen again, except at the end of the last scene, as a cut-out in the proscenium curtain, where the Three Archangels appeared again, marking the end of the play. In this way the historical scenes, the pictures of the dream, were tableaus that followed each other with long interruptions in between and did not have anything to do with the Lord and Heaven. The pictures of the dream inevitably presented a historical panorama of great pictorial interest, which however hardly suggested what the drama was really about. The idea that here Lucifer is fighting against the Lord for the possession of Man, was missing. This was a thought that left me no rest for years. It pained me that this magnificently conceived and poetically integrated stageplay remained in these productions only so many scenes and some play on the stage, without the poetic depth and structure of the concept, and I cursed the stage for its failure, feeling that it had served the poet imperfectly, in fact meanly. In the meantime, however, I gave considerable attention to medieval mystery plays, and it occurred to me that there was a completely novel way of putting on The Tragedy of Man, a solution which is good exactly because it is the oldest and reaches down to the very roots of the work. What I had in mind was the following: every medieval mystery 34
