Bereczky Erzsébet (szerk.): Imre Madách: The Tragedy of Man. Essays about the ideas and the directing of the Drama (Budapest, 1985)
Tamás Major: An Up-to-Date Tragedy of Man
TAMÁS MAJOR AN UP-TO-DATE TRAGEDY OF MAN In this changing and developing world of ours the theatre is struggling to keep abreast with the taste of people and to give to the most essential questions of life the kinds of answers which really satisfy general interests. Social development is fast today, and it is easy enough to fall behind it by as much as a century. Such falling behind, inevitably goes with old-fashioned ideas, obsolete ideologies, and outdated forms of expression. It is, however, a dangerous think to „bring up to date” only the artistic approach. The resulting mock-modem production will easily fall into the trap that of it appearing to be „modem” but not even attempting to make up for the much wider gap in ideology. If one wants to stay in competition merely with stage effects and other superficial solutions, he may seemingly work off five or ten years of disadvantage, but will still be in arrears by a hundred years. No tricks of mathematics will work in this case. For it cannot be said that having worked off five years of disadvantage, one in only 95 years behind. And yet this is the kind of calculation a good many theatrical productions seem to make! What does it meen then to be really modern? I think it takes effort made in two different directions to get a stimulating new production. The first task is to explore how Imre Madách was modem in his own times. What were his thoughts, what did he want to say to his contemporaries, what were the thoughts and discussions he awakened in his own public. It does in fact take some study and some exploration to find the dramatist who still not „an aspirant to the Academy”, still not a „national value”, but did have some original thoughts which derived from his own life experience, and satisfied the tormenting compulsion to communicate these thoughts with contemporaries. As he himself said, „My play may be good or bad, but I cannot be reconciled to mediocrity.” This means then that the director has to reread the work and read it at greater depth, probing into the material that is part of the author’s experience, and at the same time he has to launch 50
