Oldal 19 [19]
PHILTHER AS A HISTORIOGRAPHIC MODEL
can be interpreted today as an homage to the past, while contemporary
critics cheered it for “opening inspiring vistas to the future”. In a decade of
abortive attempts at “socialism with a human face”, the production tackled
the relationship between man and tyrannical power so cautiously that it had
remained virtually invisible. The director avoided subtexts that would make
possible any allegorizing on the theme of the fall of the old order. Moreover,
it was this performance with which actors and spectators said goodbye to
the old building of the National Theatre, and the memory of the event is still
vivid today. In spite of its somewhat ambivalent innovations in stage design,
the performance became the summary of a bygone era of theatre, with a star
casting.
Then I survey The Death of Marat (1966), which raised the problem of
revolution (abstractly, of course) less than 10 years after 1956, avoiding the
possibility of reference to recent events. However, this was only possible by
the critics’ keeping the range of interpretations under control. The revolution
had to be understood as the one that started in 1789 or at most it could be
associated with 1917, but only as an uprising whose historical consequences
all mankind must face, not as an event the ideals of which were gradually
desecrated in the decades that ensued. Yet Endre Marton’s mise-en-scéne
was not necessarily determined by the complete and clear-cut message
that critics had inferred from the supposed outcome of the debate between
Marat and de Sade, and it advocated the purified myth of socialist revolution.
Hinting at the historical confrontation of intent and achievement, it sought
to restore the pure ideal of revolution without the vehemence of questioning
the consequences of 1917 or 1956. Since The Death of Marat directly leads us
to Chapters on Lenin (1970), I also analyze this production of the National,
which honored the 100" anniversary of Lenin’s birth and made an icon of
the public sphere out of the image that was created with iconoclastic intent
during the sixties by leftist thinkers and non-mainstream theatre workshops.
Läszlö Gyurkö’s play and its former production by the Universitas Egyiittes
(a well-known company of university students) presented an alternative image
of Lenin compared to the one established two decades before, and although it
was not directly oppositional, it was still saturated with dissenting activism.
When the National Theatre’s premiere made this image quasi-official, it
defanged its dissenting nature, and contributed to building a “human-faced
idol”, lessening the subversive power of the iconoclastic gesture.
The next chapter deals with The Government Inspector, staged by Georgy
Tovstonogov at the National Theatre in 1973, as an example of the forced
friendship between the Soviet and the Hungarian people. But the premiere
achieved enormous success and started a dialogue with further mises-en-scéne
of Gogol’s comedy up to the new millennium. The director’s reading broke and
created a tradition at the same time when it tried to discover a certain “plus”
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