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
When in my chest, my sacred heirdom’s pain, The soul that man has earned by God’s behest Is still alive and does not let me rest And wants to keep on fighting idle joys -It is this drive for struggle and then the laying down of arms that determines the rhythm of the performance. Adam finds ideals worthy of striving for at the end of the Egyptian scene, the end of the Roman scene, but above all in the French revolution. With his excellent sense for form, Madách spurs on Adam, who thus rushes into the thick of the struggle for the newly discovered ideal of the age, and at such times turns his back on Lucifer. The role of the Pharaoh obviously was not picked by Adam for himself; the scenes of Rome and Prague are again just disillusionment and rest for Adam to strength for London where again he is set on fire and fights for the bourgeois ideal of individual freedom. Then Adam studies the Phalanstery — certainly not as an image of socialism, but as the utopistic yearning of a 19th century philistine for a society „guided by science” — only to present it in its full absurdity. If this struggle stands in the focus of the drama, each historical scene will have a different rhythm and one is not confronted by absurd breaks in the momentum of the play merely because of the effort to depict each historical scene with perfect fidelity. Under this misconception each scene was artificially separated from the next one by the stage darkening, the curtain dropping, and illustrative music filled in the times in-between. An almost comic case in point used to be the fade over from Prague to Paris: I hear, I hear the coming epoch’s song. I found the word, the magic talisman Which makes this aging earth both free and young. This was followed by a few minutes of pause while the setting became transformed into Paris, and then came the rest of the sentence that explained the colon: Freedom, brotherhood, equality! That the Tragedy nedds to be directed of the frills of a 54
