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
an offensive to tear down the walls of the academic ivory tower raised around the work. In order to find the real thing and to be able to build it up (in this case for the stage), we also have to be able to demolish. Access to the standard works of the classics leads through a barrier of that 19th-century style of criticism with which professors of literature who still believed in art for art’s sake and the universal abstraction of beauty and, of course in their own infallability — used to protect them. To say it in Madách’s words: ....our way is always blocked by such Pretentious tricks which, by their sanctity, Stand to protect the long established power. The „professor” of this view - in qualification often enough barely a grade-school teacher - knows a lot of things, or rather knows about a lot of things and invariably „knows it best”. He knows that Shakespeare’s Macbeth is based on the Holinshed chronicles and is always ready to trace the way backward from Shakespeare to the source, lest he be forced to note how freely the author treated his raw material, how much it was his own experience and his own message that he wanted to convey in the way he used it. The bourgeois critic of The Tragedy of Man knows — or at least had studied about - Egypt, Athens, Constantinople, Prague, and London, and even knows something about socialist ideology, and he wonders why it is these particular scenes Madách has chosen for his Tragedy. Going backward in time, he wisely calls the author to account why he has not developed a truer view of socialism, how is it possible that he has made such a conspicuous error. This type of view results then in the kind of naturalistic production which, indeed, wants to put on the stage Egypt, Athens, Rome and so on, as much in the style of the period as possible, in the form of a „historical show”, and that is why the director gets confused when he has to interpret the Phalanstery scene; that is why the production becomes the presentation of elaborate or less elaborate period pieces lined up in a row, making for a dull and 51
