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
the most important ones: casting and interpretation, Adam’s age, character- or type-oriented acting and so on. Preparations of the Madách Theatre’s production started in the spring of 1980, and rehearsels in autumn; performances in next January. In autumn 1982 came the turn of the second cast and by October 11, 1983 the production had 110 performances. Beyond my youthful enthusiasm for the Tragedy, the work attracted me first and foremost as an intellectual drama. The poem which was written „at the meeting point of two eras” clashed now with the third era — the present — and I intended to take up the questions which it had raised and which had new implications and demanded new answers today. For me, the Tragedy is a selftormenting poem, a dream built on the dialectics of doubt and hope, a painstaking chronicle of Hungary’s history, of humanity, politics, human fate, love, and the relationship between man and God, the individual and the masses. I see it as a work with many facets, and I feel that accenting the contradictions is the main task of the stage director. The style should be built on bold changes in tone which reflect the conflicting ideas and mingle elements of irony and the grotesque, as well as the passion of renewed faith. When starting the work of directing I was equally attracted by two different variations of approach. The first: the Tragedy is a series of visions and dreams bom of the Hungarian reality of the 1850s and 1860s; the second: the Tragedy is a ritual, a kind of modem mystery play in which the unity of the Lord, Lucifer and Adam is the dominant idea. My first thought was to build even the scenery on centemporary Hungarian reality and to develop the plot from this point, using the freedom and surrealism of the dream and reflecting Madáchian imagination and dialectics. Conceptually this approach would have connected the world of the drama with the Hungarian contemporaries Vörösmarty’s and Arany’s poetry and to the great dramatic poems of the age: the romantic Polish dramas and Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. The paralellism with Peer Gynt served as a particularly good basis for my work because Ibsen’s drama was one of the decisive events in my stage directing career. Its close connection with the Tragedy revived a new, personal bond I had with the world of ideas on which Ibsen’s work is built. Both Adam and Peer 64
