Katona Ferencz (szerk.): Állami Déryné Színház 1951 - 1975 (Budapest, 1975)
Az 1974 - 1975-ös színiévad társulati névsora
SUMMARY Before 1945, that is the Liberation of the country, Hungarian villagers had no access whatever to the theatre. Strolling players might on rare occasions perform in a market town, that was the nearest they got to the stage. And those were only out to entertain in a rough way, they could not care less for artistic standards. There had to be changes, a policy was needed which put an end to privilege and placed works of art within reach of everyone who dwelled in the land. That is why the State Deryne Theatre found itself on the road on August 20th 1951, Constitution Day. Eight to ten companies travelled to give 1800 to 2000 performances in all those places which were not even accorded the privilege of „regional performances" by provincial theatres. It was only natural that they should meet a host of troubles, most of them unpredictable. All the problems of being on the road all the time, organising more than 40 000 performances, not to mention the biggest one of the lot: what to perform, and how? The idea was only to perform dramatic literature and entertainments of the highest possible standard, everyone of them of a kind that served the highest objective, facilitating access to culture. This meant, plays like the great Hungarian classics, such as The tragedy of man, Bank ban, and Csongor és Tünde in 100-200 performances each, and the major creations of great dramatists such as Beaumarchais, Chehov, Goldoni, Ibsen, Lope de Vega, Molière — his Tartuffe figured on the repertoire more than 700 times — Ostrovsky, Schiller, Shakespeare and Sophocles. All this was done in villages and hamlets, in circumstances that beggar description, many a time in a class-room, later, when they were built, on the smaller and larger stages of houses of culture. Nor was the 20th century neglected. There was Federico Garcia Lorca and Bernard Shaw, not to mention the works of those outstanding Soviet playwrights Arbuzov, Kataev, Lavreniov and Zorin. What came first of course was living Hungarian dramatic writing. They did not always rest content to repeat items from the repertory of the great theatres, there were times when they took the initiative, such as in the case of Gyula lllyes’s Carnival of Fleas, a folk play. Music was there from the word go. This included not only the ever-green favourites amongst operettas and musical comedies, but even operas that were within the scope of performers and public, principally Donizetti, Smetana, Nicolai, and of course Kodály. Noone could fault the musical standards. Special circumstances demanded a special style of performance, simple, direct, dynamic, with clearly outlined characters. There had to be ideas and experiments, plenty of inventive stage business, and what was done had to be effective in places and with audiences that were new every day. Fantasticly good contacts were established with village folk in a quarter of a century. A half million see performances every year and this often grows into running contacts, by correspondence and in conversation. Perhaps there is no other theatre that knows its public better, and that is what helped it to become such a useful tool in the course of developing and enriching socialist culture.
