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PHILTHER AS A HISTORIOGRAPHIC MODEL
they do not necessarily require linear reading on the homepage. The structure
of Philther creates a network of analyses that, due to its complexity (the blocks
of examination and the several references to each other in them), provides
multilayered reading. It allows individual adventures among the blocks,
theses, key phrases and names of performance reconstructions, provoking
vertical theatre history and offering an appropriate reading strategy for an
audience socialized after the so-called “visual turn” (W.J.T. Mitchell). It is by
no means to be underestimated during the spectacular decline in the power
and effect of the humanities, for Erika Fischer-Lichte’s more than 25-year-old
statement has not lost its validity yet: “the debate on the role and function
of human sciences becomes broader and more vehement as human sciences
necessarily become immersed in narrow-scope research, having no relevance
outside their field of study and university faculties”.”!
Although this book has primary relevance in the field of theatre studies,
I hope that the method of Philther (together with its website) will inspire
some researchers of other human sciences to restructure and represent their
examinations in new ways. This monograph can only give a glimpse of Philther,
but it hopefully illustrates how compact and intertwined its separate analyses
can be, how wide a panorama their micro-stories can open up. Therefore,
I believe that the long forty years of state-socialist theatre in Hungary (1949¬
1989) can be briefly represented in a dozen performance analyses. They focus
on the beginning, the middle and the end of state socialism through the
productions of three theatres. The first four chapters examine four shows of
the Operetta Theatre right after the nationalization of cultural institutions.
The next six chapters deal with six performances of the National Theatre
(produced between 1964 and 1985) during the consolidation of the Kadar
regime and the last two chapters present two productions of the Katona Jézsef
Theatre shortly before the regime change.
The first group of analyses studies the refashioning of a popular genre at
the Operetta Theatre between the nationalization (1949) and the revolution
(1956). They address the question of adaptation: the rewriting of stories and
texts, the rearrangement of music, and the renewal of acting styles according
to new expectations and principles. The first chapter examines Students
of Vienna (1949), a musical play set in the fall of 1848 and affirming the
reevaluation of the 1848-1849 events, carried out in 1948 by officials of the
Hungarian Communist Party, before the centenary of the former bourgeois
revolution was celebrated. In spite of its forced revolutionism, the production
was characterized by the mood of the belle époque, but it could still signal
the beginning of a “new era”. The chapter shows how the first creation of the
2 Erika Fischer-Lichte: Theater als kulturelles Modell. Theatralität und Interdisziplinarität,
in Ludwig Jäger (ed.): Germanistik - disziplinäre Identität und kulturelle Leistung, Aachen,
Beltz Athenaum, 1995, 166.