Kovács Ferenc: Olvasópróba előtt (Skenotheke 1. Budapest, 1996)

Felhasznált irodalom

The play begins with Ella's arrival. After 16 years, she finally makes up her mind to return to her parents' mansion, which she not only owns but runs as well. Although she is the one to bear the financial burdens of housekeeping, she doesn't come to collect. Neither does she want to get even with her twin, her one-time rival, nor to take revenge on her one-time lover, the reclusive, fallen bank manager. She is terminally ill. She would like to persuade her foster son to move back to her place and to stay with her for the rest of her life. However, Gunhild has envisaged a different role for her son, the young Borkman: the restoration of the family's good name and reputation. For many years, Erhart was kept isolated from his disgraced family. He grew up in his aunt's house, surrounded by love, safety and freedom from his parents. At the age of fifteen - following his father's release from prison - he is returned to his parents' care and from that moment his mother does everything in her power to shape the boy to her own image and way of thinking, and, especially, to turn him against his foster mother and his disgraced father. Feeling himself under pressure, Erhart is temporarily willing to feign acquiescence and to make promises. However, he seizes the first opportunity and leaves with Fanny, an emancipated, rich divorcee. Driven by blind hatred toward her husband, Gunhild would mercilessly sentence her own son to unhappiness, and her twin sister to the solitude of the death bed. In Gunhild's eyes her husband has been dead for 16 years. In the end, the old people are left alone. Borkman dies as a result of his first walk in the open air after 16 years, whereas the twins join hands over their dead loved one. CHARACTERS BORKMAN is a shabbily dressed, apparently grey character. Nevertheless, his feverish gestures suggest a once blazing personality. He is an ambitious man full of fantasy and faith in his own mission: a miners son who acquired many experiences in his childhood and through his relationship to his father. To a certain extent, his fantasy 46