Bereczky Erzsébet (szerk.): Imre Madách: The Tragedy of Man. Essays about the ideas and the directing of the Drama (Budapest, 1985)
György Lengyel: Two Tragedy Production
Neddless to say, both the political mission and the respect for the poet acted as a challenge. But it was the Work itself which more than anything else excited our teen-ager imagination. Our Tragedy production had its premiere on April 3, 1954, in the Small Hall of the Academy of Music, and made quite a stir in the cultural life of the times. The project brought us unforgettable meetings e.g. with Zoltán Kodály, and also with writers, historians of literature and actors. Six additional performances followed. I think it must have been a puritanical representation, romantic in style and built on clear diction. Costumes and wigs had been borrowed from the National Theatre and the Opera House. I myself who directed the play together with one of my school-fellows acted also as Lucifer. The press was enthusiastic, the success unforgettable. We, the students who staged the play in 1954 became participants of an adventure — perhaps the most luminous of our life — which bound us to the Tragedy for ever. Before switching to the production of the dramatic poem in the Madách Theatre in 1981, let me touch upon some aspects of the foregoing era without which the problems involved would be difficult to understand. Prior to that staging, the play had been revived in 1963, directed by Tamás Major in the National Theatre. It ran for nine years in that interpretation, and then came nine years of pause. In that period theatrical art in Hungary underwent several deep, sometimes conflicting changes. On the one hand the global picture of our theatrical life became enriched by new trends, new scenic interpretations and new tendencies in style — first and foremost through the reinterpretation of classical works. On the other hand, all theatres working under unchanged artistic leadership followed their own old formulas. As none of them was interested in the Tragedy, this masterpiece was shelved. This occured despite the fact that several studies on Madách and his Tragedy were published in these years. To my mind, the Tragedy had not been staged either in Budapest or in the provinces during that interval because neither the new nor the old tendencies had representatives able to find the real key for an effective revival. By the seventies the difficulties were 62
