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THE FINAL PERFORMANCE OF THE OLD NATIONAL THEATRE in many of his actions” and who almost wanted to be a “monopolist of love”.“” On the one hand, this setting tended towards the humanization of the title character, who had been regarded so far as quasi mythological, putting in the foreground “a human being struggling in the tangled web of thoughts and emotions not unknown to us”.** On the other hand, it flashed (but not more than flashed!) “the tragic sin of absolute power” instead of an emotional transgression.“ The theme of the “despot turned into human” interpretation was taken on by the critics in contrast to Brook’s version, in order to indicate how the Hungarian performance equalizes the one-sidedness of the English one." While, according to Péter Nagy, for Brook the key to the human tragedy shown in the story of Lear was disillusionment (almost a swearword in the age of obligatory optimism), Marton found this key “in the relationship between power and human purity”, so his vision was “perhaps more humanist, in any case more humane” than that of the Brit.*** But the Marxist reading went clearly overboard, when it claimed that in the production of the National Theatre “social reality came forth from behind the family tale”, and the spectator faced “the tragedy of tyranny, the mistakes of arbitrary power”.“*° In a decade of abortive attempts at “socialism with a human face” (to quote the famous phrase of Alexander Dubéek, former First Secretary of Czechoslovakia), Marton and his collaborators tackled the relationship between man and tyrannical power so cautiously that it had remained virtually invisible. The television recording convinces us of the opposite of what Béla Matrai-Betegh suggests: “the Lear legend” is not being released from “the cobweb of emotions” and does not turn into “intellectual and moral drama’”,*”° because, instead of problematizing 443 Péter Nagy: A magyar Lear kirdlyrdl, Elet és Irodalom, Vol. 8, No. 22, 30% May, 1964, 9. 144 d.t.: Lear király a Nemzeti Szinhazban, Esti Hirlap, Vol. 9, No. 132, 6 June, 1964, 2. “45 Béla Mátrai-Betegh: Lear király. Shakespeare tragédiájának felújítása a Nemzeti Színházban, Magyar Nemzet, Vol. 20. No. 120, 248 May, 1964, 13. 446 Marton underlined that “Shakespeare’s Lear [...] was a strong, masculine individual who had become a despot because of power, and it took terrible humiliation and anguish for him to become human again; since he had been a man before power made him a tyrant. That is Shakespeare’s Lear, and that’s what our Lear will be like...” Fencsik: , Lear szerepével", 2. Cf. “Peter Brook staged Lear with increased puritanism almost to the point of inhumanity, creating the drama of disillusionment growing to cosmic proportions. Marton approaches the peaks of the drama in a softer, more lyrical way, without taking anything from the tragic.” Nagy: A magyar Lear királyról, 9. Ibid. — In an interview published a month before the premiere, in Esti Hírlap, Marton made an accurate reference to the fact that Brook’s mise-en-scéne was inspired by Beckett. His “plays are not played here [nor Ionesco’s plays or existential dramas, so] we do not know the tone to which these works have retuned some of the Western theatres, and which has also influenced Peter Brook’s staging.” According to Marton, this is the reason for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production being “so shocking” for us. “We [on the other hand] feel that cruelty and humaneness add up to Shakespeare together, who always saw reality, man in all his/her diversity.” Fencsik: , Lear szerepével", 2. 49 Matrai-Betegh: Lear király, 13. 50 Ibid. 447 448 + 98 +
