Király Nina - Török Margit: PQ '95. Magyar színpad - kép - írók (Budapest, 1995)
A változás színháza 1991 - 1995
THEATRE OF CHANGES (1990-19951 Theatre has an easy task in two kinds of eras: in dictatorships and in consolidated welfare democracies. The theatre of dictatorship is the theatre of metacommunication. Hamlet can always be performed the way Hamlet performs the killing of Gonzago to Claudius: with a provocative edge, metaphorically. In consolidated welfare there is no power that would be worth provoking but it is possible to affect people's moral constitution, instinct to play, the clash between natural desire for freedom and conformism, the self-abandoned aptitude to 'become something else1. The theatre of dictatorship is the theatre of the uncontrollable collective revolt: the theatre of welfare democracy is the possible outlet for performing individual role playing options. In Hungary dictatorship is already out, welfare democracy is not yet in. If we are proceeding from the former to the latter then sometime we are going to have a bourgeois middle class and professional classes suitable for consuming culture both in terms of their mental capacity and financial resources who are able to support theatre intellectually. Currently there is no social ground either for the theatre of exposing current political issues - political theatre is performed today in the actual making of politics - or for the self-abandoned communal instinct to play. Theatre has preserved its position in the last four years much better than expected. This statement sounds a little paradoxical. On the one hand, one should be happy about the hardly believable stability that helped the earlier structure to survive. It is due to that that the system of state subsidies has continued to exist and no theatres have had to be closed down or let whole companies go from one day to another, as it has happened many places elsewhere. On the other hand, it would be proper to ask: what is the theatre - the most sensitive and most explosive art form due to its directness and openness - like which is not shaken by the social changes that have evolved in the last five years? Let us start with operation conditions. The slow erosion of the structure had already started before the system change and proceeded after it with similar pace, that is, we can speak about evolution and not revolution. Among the driving forces that help the process the most paradoxical one is the gradual decrease of funds that has come along with the commercial theatre gaining ground. The structure has been held together by the lack of money since relative economic stability can be achieved through maintaining repertory theatre operation: through adjusting pieces on the bill to market demands. The prerequisite of the repertory theatre is to have a permanent company that is beneficent to demanding work, the spirit of creating in workshops. It is understandable that the major part of the theatre profession, which luckily coincides with the most talented leading artists who are in position, has insisted on maintaining companies and resisted 'capitalizing' attempts. The reasonable reshaping of the support system had to be fought for. The 1989 technocratic government's mechanical financing plan based on normative rules, which made decisions on the basis of seats in the stalls and subsequently did unjust harm to minor theatres, was done away with successfully. The system accepted as a substitute set forth that the support out of the central budget shall be fifty percent in Budapest and sixty percent in the provinces. The rest of the expenses have to be covered from local resources and sponsors' funds and from the profit making operation of theatres themselves. With minor and major hindrances, this system has proved operational. Recently its maintenance has become more and more difficult, which is an ultimate confutation of the theories that alleged that under certain conditions theatres can be self-supportive. It is net by chance that there have been no entrepreneurs who would go into running private playhouses or testing theatre forms other than repertory company operation. Conditions have not ripened for marketing attempts, not even in music theatres; for achieving the relative return of the costs put into implementing productions ticket prices would have to be raised to such an extent that there would be no demand for any of these productions. In the long run one has to expect decreasing of the state subsidy which will necessarily restructure the setup, radically narrow down the circle of theatres that are favoured by the state. The system change had no explosive effect upon the intellectual/artistic output of the theatre. Apart from some rapid, journalism-like productions, which were spellbound by the euphoria of outspokenness, very soon a return took place to metacommunication, the distinguished elaborate of theatre developed during the long years of dictatorship. It came out that there was no sense of using the stage as a political pulpit when pulpits are everywhere from the houses of the parliament to the home politics columns of newspapers. Actually the general interest in theatre has diminished as it ceased to be the place of breathing together without being censored. In the nineties we can no longer expect that implied consensus would build up between players and the audience with regard to the 'unspoken' as in the Kaposvár production of Peter Weiss: Marat/Sade directed by János Ács in 1981. It is also improbable that the incapability of intellectuals, scraping along in such a repressed, low flame way would create such a commonly shared sensual experience as in the famous production played throughout the world of Three Sisters directed by Tamás Ascher. It is worth stopping here for a while. Three Sisters which had its opening night in 1985 had 238 performances. It was last played in February 1994. Some weeks later on the World Theatre Day it was shown on television as well. It was this very production the Katona József Theatre and Hungarian theatrical art called attention to itself with. If we recall the secret of its rare success at home, to play Chekhov in such a long run is quite a rarity, we will understand what has been ended once and for ever. The Hungarian audience in the second half of the eighties perceived that the repressed atmosphere before the storm, which revealed the lack of freedom, the lack of life opportunities behind the idyll and which while proceeding forward in the play ran into the hysterical outburst of tension was all about their own life. Three Sisters, without being directly updated, suggested the unbearable lightness of dictatorship. In our region in recent years theatre has undoubtedly had to revalue itself and its interpretation of its own role taking. But how to carry out this revaluation? Georges Banu, the excellent French critic points out the newly found way back to language values and the related revival of theatrical nationalism. We are one of those who do have experience in this respect. And such that outmatch most of the similar phenomena in Europe. In Ceausescu's Romania in the theatres of the Hungarian minority playing in Hungarian was considered an act of opposition in itself as it is playing in Romanian in the theatres in Moldavia today. Hungarian theatres in Transylvania became the only legal venues of gathering of the suppressed minority deprived of its rights where it was enough to hear Hungarian words to join souls and preserve the feeling of solidarity in the heart. It all had a tragic effect upon theatre as a means of aesthetic phenomenon. Where the sheer voicing of the mother tongue is enough for creating experience, there is no need for refining artistic means. The greatest figure of Transylvanian acting, György Harag, now dead for ten years, had not fought enough against the theatre of pathetic words without any subtlety. He did not live to see the painful proving of his truth. After the turn in Romania when civil movements were transferred to the street, the auditorium of theatres gradually emptied. A young actor who participated in one of the national theatre festivals in Hungary year by year, sadly complained that they played at home for not more than ten-fifteen people in the audience each night. 'We have to start from scratch, from what theatre is for and we have to develop our talents which wasted away when we misunderstood the function of theatre.'
