Bereczky Erzsébet (szerk.): Imre Madách: The Tragedy of Man. Essays about the ideas and the directing of the Drama (Budapest, 1985)
dr. Antal Németh: A Generation under the Spell of the Tragedy of Man
view that I formed the scenic concept of my direction in 1937. An invitation from abroad provided the unexpected opportunity to try out my ideas. The same Staatliches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg which was the first foreign theatre to present Madách’s verse drama - it did so at the end of the 19th century — invited me to direct the Tragedy. The new production had its premiere there on April 15, 1937 and gave me the chance to test the correctness and effectiveness of my concept. I studied the structure of the work, it became apparent to me that out of the scenes shown as Adam’s dream, every odd one - the first, third and fifth historical scene — was in essence a miniature chamber drama involving just a few people. The Egyptian scene represents the conflict of four people, the ancient Roman dolce vita scene depicts a small party of revellers and the Prague scene is taken up so much by the triangle of infidelity affecting Kepler (Adam), that the stage business between the Emperor Rudolfph and Lucifer acting as Kepler’s famulus is a mere flash. Therefore it always bothered me when I saw a huge stage yawning around the main characters, excess space which then the directors and designers tried to fill with a crowd of illusionspoiling extras or a multitude of side-scenes. Thus, I thought of an expanding and contracting stage space which would be in accord with the rhythm of the drama. To this end, I had a tower sturcture erected by the stage designers - outside of the axis of the disk of the revolving stage. Depending on the position of the revolving disk, the tower stood either close to the footlight, or, in the middle of a radius of the circle, left or right off centre, or backstage, and with sets called down in a matter of moments from the stage-loft, the set could always assume the required form. In London this was the Tower, around which were pitched the tents of the fair - a larger number than suggested by Madách — in front of which Adam and Lucifer stop for a few minutes. In this way the fair scene sprang into life, and instead of the false animation provided by loitexring extras, audiences saw the surging crowd of a fair as the revolving stage was set into motion. This technical notion then provided, a good directorial 38
