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
play starts with a celestial prologue, very much like in The Tragedy of Man, and the Prologue, there, too, as in the case of Madách, was a struggle between God and Satan, which the Lord resolves by sending his Son to Earth for the redemption of Man, something against which the Devil protests throughout the passion play. This dramatic play — or let us say, this divine comedy — is interpretable for the audiences only if Heaven, that is the presence of God, remains manifest throughout the passion, together with the presence of Satan. That provides unity and dramatic quality for every mystery. Let me raise then the question: why shouldn’t put The Tragedy of Man, a genuien mystery if there ever was, put into a framework which fits its natural structure as the entire composition was built on it? Is there any reason why one should not keep the struggle between the Lord and Lucifer visible throughout - especially as the mystery stage, with its triple division offers itself a solution for this task? Why could we not build on our stage a similar mystery framework — impressive even in its dimensions — which would lend its own monumentality to the poetry, would rid the stage from a lot of unnecessary backdrops and provide space for such mass action and group effects as the earlier sets would have been incapable of accomodating? A Tragedy composed into the framework and structure of a mystery stage is able to accent as needed the entrances of the main characters and of the crowd, moreover on account of its large dimensions separates the protagonists and the masses from each other, and, where necessary, wedges such distance between them as to preserve the illusions of audiences where the earlier stage confused spectators. For instance, earlier, the various groups of the London scene had to be quite wrongly and misleadingly squeezed together, and in Athens Lucia stood so close to the rebellious crowd that she heard and saw everything and her asking enquiry from her son about what was happening outside: My son, let’s see, what is this noise outside? seemed rather senseless. The mystery stage manages all this very naturally, so as to offer full illusion. 35
