Király Nina - Török Margit: PQ '95. Magyar színpad - kép - írók (Budapest, 1995)
A változás színháza 1991 - 1995
drawing room, in the company of cultural blue-stockings and literary gigolos but at a place where there is no more trace of bourgeois way of life, as it is called, left behind. More precisely, where only its trace has been left behind. The scene is a rented flat built around the turn of the century, with high ceiling and many doors and central heating which has been probably converted from a larger flat into a minor one at some point in the passing time and in its current condition it looks like a pretty much run down place. Today's Celine holds no literary soirées in this environment that has shed its coating, nor do sociable habitués gather at his place for affected small talk, and high-falutin gossip-mongering, pals simply drop in on him. His flat is no literary boudoir but rather some sort of passage shabbily built up out of a kitchen and a living-room. Instead of books paper plates and coca cola merchandise plastic cups fill up the space. Today's Orante comes from the literary underworld; he has his connections, therefore it is all the same what he is like as a poet. He has come here not to read out his sonnet but to provoke, he is self-assured, he may be calm, unctuous, polite safely; in his head the plot of the libellous sheet we are going to hear about not before the last act is ready. Acaste and Clitandre come from dubious business life, they are followed by the faceless party-making company of pranksters of a carnival or new year's eve. Arsloné must be a business woman, she orders her car to show up on the spot with the driver, soaking in cynical benevolence. Philinte is also a figure of the age: he is undoubtedly a journalist, must be a governing party conformist, in this case his behaviour needs no explanation at all. What can Alceste be in this mediocre company, which has lost its brightness when compared to that of Moliére, than the intellectual who has taken an aversion to public life, as they say. He no longer has a newspaper in his hand, not simply with the intention, Ascher is keen on taking care about, so as not to have anything that can be identified as being from today's Hungary in this, down to its minutest everyday detail, present day environment but presumably because Alceste has already left this day's inn behind and reads nothing else but classical authors. This Alceste is an esoteric spiritual being, a poet, a philosopher or aesthete who has his own professional ivory tower but, as luck would have it, he has fallen in love with a moor flower to whom he is attracted by irrational passion and when 'dropping in' on her, he behaves like a poor devil in an alien environment with all his outdated honest principles of life. What is more, he wishes his lover to move with him out of the weedy, wildly growing, nugatory vegetation she lives in. It seems Moliére, this noted author of world literature, clearly 'saw' at the time of the Kaposvár premiére how the swamplike public life intrudes into our private relations, how everyday life gets infected by the demagogy of slanders, denouncing others, lawsuits, of those who speechify about power forums, of those who arouse public fear as the champions of making justice. The same subject matter is unfolded in The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum directed by Ascher at the Chamber (1992). It is not an epoch-making piece, neither the original Heinrich Boll novel, nor the adaptation by Géza Bereményi but both are well written works in the technical sense and both are passionate and personal in their relation to life that pushes them beyond the level of political journalism of everyday topicalities to a stage of higher aesthetic quality. The director who has revived the performance is similar to those who identify themselves with the poet's frame of mind when reciting his or her poems, one can feel that he got steamed up at seeing the tabloid journalism like public life of constitutionality regulated by laws just like Boll did in the 70's. As it is about much more than morally slandering an innocent person, it is about silent, withdrawn introvert Katharina Blum living an unperceivable life lets a bullet through a vulgar journalist. Katharina Blum is not the only one who gets savaged but, at least with the same emphasis, the former left wing lawyer promoted to the bourgeois élite and his wife with a keen sense of society in her pores as well, who, vexed to the utmost by the prank making campaign launched against them, turn into makeshift and "red Trude" The central character of the third piece of the "Aschertrilogy" (Howard Barker: Scenes form an Execution, Kaposvár, 1994) is Galactia, the Venice woman painter who is commissioned by the doge to paint the battle at Lepanto on a huge canvas in which the Holy League made out of the alliance of the Republic of Venice, Spain and Pope Pius V ultimately overcame the the Turkish fleet that expanded on the Mediterranean Sea. Instead of the ordered allegory of victory, as Galactia is a realist painter, a tableaux is produced that depicts the dismay at massacre. The state patron infuriatedly rejects the artistic attitude that opposes the indisputable ideology, imprisons the artist accusing her of betraying the republic, and has the subject painted by one of the adjusting mediocre painters who happen to be Galactia's lover. But a woman critic, who is close to power circles, explains to the doge that in historic perspective it is Galactia's painting of genius that will represent Venice and it brings no harm in the present either because the audience will, anyway, not see what it is all about. The tableaux becomes displayed, Galactia is released from prison, what is more she is invited to appear in the highest circles. Today's playwright has written a contemporary English drama in Renaissance disguise which, nevertheless, the way performed in Kaposvár reminds us to the current conditions in Hungary. The doge voices with demure intimacy how much he loves art contrary to the cardinal, representing the state ideology, who hates him ex-officio, otherwise he would not make it for the position of adult education under-secretary & chief censor. The question is what can an independent artist, in the given case a painter, do if he or she does not want to paint either compassion (for the Church), nor victory (for the State). The answer is: s/he either becomes unwanted, or proves to be just another brick in the wall. In the grievous finale in Ascher's direction the artist to be purchased knocks back several glasses of drink before walking off to be executed, to the site of becoming a square. Also in Kaposvár János Mohácsi put on stage Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1995) with unusual expressiveness. One of his brave moves is that he has extended the depressing, parochial medieval atmosphere of the basic story, transformed it into a realm beyond history and thus one of timelesness. He does not set out from the barren objectivity of the Miller dramaturgy which could have been easily modernized into merciless, taciturn realism, but just the other way round, he enlarges, theatricalizes, in certain sense, demonizes the story that out of a simple love revenge plot degenerates into mass hysteria, self-intoxicated lynch law and auto-da-fé. In line with this it is the mass that becomes the leading character. The multitude roaring, waving on the narrow stairs between the bleak, gloomy city walls whose threatening publicity composed of individual faces and voices gives birth to and shapes, as some elastic mass, the passions dangerous to the public generated by ideologies dangerous to public. When in the trial scene the spectators instigated to accuse one another knock off the barrier and mingled rush down the tiers, we may be reminded of the 'medieval' ritual of the Heysel Stadium (and all the stadiums in general). It is not simple updating, rather a'slight indicationlike archaism smoothly Interwoven with the language of the performance that there is a protocol typewriter at the court or it is a machine gun Proctor ousts the authorized personnel from his house. Apparently the director focuses on the citizens' defencelessness. It is his greatest merit how he presents the escalation of fanaticism. He considers drama a vital, organic, working material that is able to fill up the widest range of forms. Miller's play stiffened into a mould behaves under his hand like what has been melted: the glowing, seething, substance pouring all over, just like crude iron. There are performances free from politics mobilizing the internal resources of theatre, which are of less importance. The most significant production of the Art Theatre, launched in the autumn of 1993 and since then staggering through a series of crises, is The Uncle's Dream (1994), an adaptation based on Dostoevsky's novel, directed by Anatoli Vassiliev. The long dialogues of Dostoevsky became much more dominating in the adaptation, also made by Vassiliev, absorbed a solid part of the epic material thus providing a tool for the actors for being present in time in an extended way and gradually extending their personalities in the role. The most important category of the performance is internal time: the 'time of being present' ment for existing in the role, handled much looser than usual, that forces the actors to fill up the frame available for possessing the role with their utter individuality. In Vassiliev's direction psychological realism does not work in the traditional sense, there are no cues, there are no relations resolved in motions, movements and actions. The actors are left alone in a certain sense (which does not mean that the director wants nothing of them, quite on the contrary, he is very much aware of what he wants), in turn, they get boundless freedom that they have to use for revving up their intensify, making their presence intimate. Through that présence becomes more abundant, substantial than XIII
