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ENDRE MARTON: KING LEAR, 1964.
halberdiers) continually kept encircling the stage constellations. Ihus the
signals of acting did not fit the signals of the set, rendering the latter an
extravagant and eccentric context.*®°
Although the reviews talked of a “spiritual fray”, or “conceptual stage”, the
visual world of this King Lear could not function as a “psycho-plastic space”,**!
responding subtly to the happenings of the performance with its alterations,
following their dynamics, as it happened with the best designs of Svoboda, for
example in the 1963 Romeo and Juliet in Prague, directed by Otomar Krejca,
which had paradigmatic significance in this regard. Historically we can agree
with Géza Fodor, who wrote that “Hungarian stage design was about to break
with naturalism at the time, sometimes more boldly, sometimes timidly,
and made some important steps towards decorative stylization. Svoboda’s
scenery, with its geometric boxes and focused light beams, stood out even
in that modernizing Hungarian context with such sovereignty, freedom,
purity and firmness of scenic thinking and theatrical composition, that it had
a highly productive effect in our theatre culture.”“*? However, the mise-en¬
scene was unable to make this sovereignty productive, and that is why Tamas
Koltai found the stage design unsuccessful on the occasion of the 1974 revival,
saying that “rectangular drain pipes, resembling a coal depot or a grain silo
[...] come into motion smoothly, silently, they come and go, moving up and
down, shedding emptily decorative light beams of futile beauty, creating
sterile, featureless, functionless light and shadow zones”.“*? The costumes of
Nelly Vágó, simply cut, unadorned, with “subdued colors”,*** suggesting heavy
materials, were outright Brook imitations, as a whole, “nondescript, but not
tasteless”.455
180 This eccentricity is explained by Péter Molnar Gal as a conscious awakening of the spectators’
“infantile willingness”. “The experience of movement provided by Endre Marton’s theatre
is closely related to the experience of space. The bronze cubes of King Lear designed by
Svoboda, which theatre people sarcastically called sausage smokers, generated a wide and
airy effect with their massive columns, but the director did not deny himself and his audience
the beauty of elements lifting up and down even in this Shakespearean tragedy. Space and
movement are the main features of Marton’s mises-en-scéne.” Molnar Gal: Rendelkezöpröba,
136.
Cf. Dennis Kennedy: Looking at Shakespeare. A Visual History of Twentieth-Century
Performance, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, 220.
Géza Fodor: Római bóvli, Verdi: Macbeth, Magyar Állami Operaház, Muzsika 45:12 (2002),
20. - Svoboda worked four times in Hungary, and Géza Fodor claimed that his significance
could not be judged by his last work at the Budapest Opera House in 2002. Nevertheless,
Svoboda made a serious impact on set design worldwide, influencing Hungarian set designers
such as Csaba Antal too.
Koltai: Lear király, 7.
Ervin Szombathelyi: Lear király. Bemutató a Nemzeti Színházban, Népszava, Vol. 92, No.
127, 2"" June, 1964, 2.
485 Nadas: Nézétér, 16.
48:
8
48
0
484
* 103 ¬