Király Nina - Török Margit: PQ '95. Magyar színpad - kép - írók (Budapest, 1995)
A változás színháza 1991 - 1995
, usual. The actors seemingly lingering in their roles evolve an internal process but do not build up a character, they put their own personalities to the pillory, combine their intuition with the available situation - as if immortalizing their own selves in the role. Vassiliev and Popov, the set designer use a bare stage for the play without any attempt to create the slightest detail of natural surroundings. Unto this stage it is impossible to enter 'cast in a role', in a situation, actors arrive (and leave) after long walking, in civilian manner while stage hands are rearranging the Thonet chairs. The latter become a factor of moment in the performance. The actors pick them up by turns, sometimes breaking the scene with a harsh caesura, and after they have repositioned them to a different spot on the stage, they take a seat on them again. It occurs several times and with a seemingly irrational regularity, although it has a function in organizing the scene and determines the dynamics of the play. Recently it has been the most controversial and desperate performance; so much to the point, so much elutriated, final and uncomfortable like a Thonet chair. After a year's operation the Art Theatre was threatened with being wound up due to management and financial problems. Eventually, what happened was that it could pursue its operation with a new manager and a part of the company. The existence of permanent theatre companies and art theatres, in theory, secures quality. In 1994 another art theatre was established called the New Theatre from the former Arany János Theatre which had partly (and not more than partly) preserved its past of being a youth and children playhouse. The director of the New Theatre is one of the most excellent theatre professionals, Gábor Székely who has not contributed to the Hungarian theatre scene as a director since he left the Katona József Theatre at the end of the 80's. As an academy professor of directing he signed on two of his graduating students to the New Theatre. Both of them have introduced themselves with independent and remarkable productions. Eszter Novák staged the poetic/ philosophic work entitled Csongor and Tünde (1994) of the last century poet, Mihály Vörösmarty deemed hard to play on stage; Iván Hargitai put on stage Kleists Prince of Homburg (1995) Mollére's Don Juan (1995) in Gábor Székely's production, who has returned after the self imposed exile, sums up, partly further elaborates his views on the moral relation to human existence. With a personal touch and dramatic tension similar to his earlier achievements, relieving uneasiness and the fight with the material into theatrical harmony. Don Juan in this production is a tired, tormented, escaping man. He is no longer young, perhaps ill too, sometimes painfully rubs his chest over his heart. Most apparently the symptoms of nervous breakdown can be identified in him. When talking is about faith, he utters the sententia which made the pious souls in Mollére's age and has made them ever since revolt: 'I believe that two times two makes four and four plus four makes eight'. It is the belief of the rationalist and the free thinker which has been the most disgusting sin until quite recently in the eye of public opinion kept at bay by dogmas. Actually there isn't the slightest disdain or cynicism in Don Juan's 'disbelief'. Apparently he is deeply moved by his relation to the transcendental. But he does not want to speak about it. His pale sulking reveals a typical intellectual's hangup. He does not even have time for brooding. Elvira tormented by passion then calmed down, the enchanted peasant girls, the revengeful brothers, the unpaid Monsieur Dimanche, the reproofing father, the Commander in the graveyard and the same evening as a guest for dinner - all that is just like running amok. The essence of Don Juan's life condensed in two days, in the antechamber of death. The setting represents the stage of Don Juan's life in a metaphoric space. The space of life activity of the hero escaping away from his own self is temporariness. Being on the road. A sloping earth road sided by plank doors leads to the forestage, easily shut off by a sliding glass wall, which can generate the spatial experience of being 'indoors' and 'outdoors', that, being juxtaposed to the rundown marble hall and the carved choir, indicate Don Juan's double, real and virtual, space of life. The iron scaffolding, which puts the spectacle into a consistent framework, has been eaten away by decay; the wind, as if it were the harbinger of death, rattles the broken window-panes on and off and accompanied by the music of the sullen murmur that anticipates earthquakes it sweeps dry leaves all over the stage. Don Juan writhing in the anteroom of death, is going his own way with frosty passion. A man who has lost his illusions about the world and himself; who has been usurped by eternal chase for something all the time that bears sense and offers explanation. At the end of his journey, a man of small build with faded voice, dressed in bronze arrives on behalf of Heaven. There is no thunderbolt, no sulphureous trapdoor opens up, no pyrotechnics shocks the medieval-like souls. The Commander's statue softly takes the sinner in his arms, and with a determined gesture smashes his brow, and without even lifting his arm, with the hand movement of revenge and forgiveness being both merciless and full of sympathy he closes his eyes. It has been pointed out by many if there is any need for such a great number of art theatres and such a great number of repertory theatre companies. It can be foreseen that those who run theatres will more and more place them under the influence of market conditions. The theatrical map will be quite obviously redrawn in the coming days and it will begin to look like the West European model. Perhaps viable enterprises will be launched with huge capital which are related to both business entities and private persons home and abroad. In itself it is neither good, nor wrong, more precisely new enterprises will be judged by their quality. This process is supposed to be influenced indirectly by the central and local government administration. The time will come, most obviously, when the cultural government will grant tax allowances, priority given to value set forth by law, to the operation of foundations that establish new theatres and support existing theatres. It would be, however, a mistake to come ahead of theatre enterprises, as they are called, and offer, for example, existing theatres to entrepreneurs who promise the cheapest possible operation costs. An American interest group wanted to purchase the building of the Madách heatre or Comedy Theatre in Budapest so that letting the permanent companies which worked there go they would produce musical productions ment for long runs. The management of the said theatres withstood the temptation and they were able to convince the relevant authorities at the local governments to accept their views. They referred to the permanent repertory companies as a value that was not to be given up. The reference was justified, even if not convincing in all cases. Permanent companies provide a secure financial umbrella for the staff that work there and aesthetic shield for the generated artistic value. It is a question, though, if in every case the company is such that creates - continuously and in a reliable way - artistic value. And if not, then is it an artistic interest to provide financial protection for the relevant company? The current structure, which provides relative security, protects the less valuable, as well. At the same time, outside the mainstream productions can be produced only through teeth grinding efforts. However, such productions would be very much needed, and it has been proved by the block busting Midsummer Night's Dream production of a 'volunteer corps' recruited from five-six various theatres, which was given birth to after long delivery, a year's preparation. Its director is a young actor, János Csányi, who was too much restless to queue up and wait for his turn in one of the companies. He has translated Shakespeare's fairy play himself and driven the performance unto the path which had been marked by Jan Kott and Peter Brook. The audience is sitting amidst woods of swings. Ropes dangling down wood scaffoldings, plank seats seesawing at various heights, we are swinging on them, bending discreetly, inhale the space, with our presence stirring and humming and breathing words we create the mysterious nature in which the drama is played. We are trees, we are a forest, we are a shared breath; we are the collective riddle of our good selves. Lovers, fairies, craftsmen are hiding among us; the stage is a space exposed to our enthusiasm. We are part and parcel of the play. It is inside us. The director digging down to the guts, dreams, the depth of senses, creates the substancelike world that complies with a 'score', and extends the theatrical aesthetics of the craftsmen from Brook to his very self. His ideas are not invented 'solutions' but games authenticated by the senses that arise from the co-operation of the brain and the heart. They are both self-abandoned and controlled, comprised in a strict structure and soaring free. Freedom in theatre marked by the borders of imagination. And imagination is endless. It might sound paradoxical but in the last resort it can bridge over the distance which extends from one man to another within an intimate theatre space. During the performance of the aforesaid Midsummer Night's Dream we come to almost body contact with all the actors, we go arm in arm in mind and mutually explode the boundaries of the ) doctrinaire theatre howling our common feeling into the world. We are no longer a minority; we are together the majority. Jointly we may recover the lost mythology of theatre. Tamás Koltai XIV
