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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” + ]7 «+
