Oldal 114 [114]
THE DRAMA OF INCOMPLETENESS DECLARED TO BE COMPLETE
would not seek those who had misappropriated the cause of the Fourth
Order in their own rows, but would rather think of the bourgeois distortion
of the revolution (freguently mentioned in Marxist-Leninist seminars) and
on the bourgeoisie that had drowned all change in the “irresponsibility of
satisfaction without any perspectives”.*** In order to block emotional rapture
and the resulting danger, the production rather aimed at reason so that
“the spectators, persuaded to think, should experience their own struggles
and their own doubts as fully as possible, getting to the complex and yet
unambiguous message in that way.”5?°
STAGING
Eliminating grotesque, parodic elements and maximizing the intensity of
expressing thoughts, Endre Marton’s mise-en-scéne was praised for its clear
structure and firm orientation. The nuanced analysis of the drama," which
Marton had become famous for as a college teacher as well, was unanimously
acclaimed and said to result in the production’s following “the only right
line of interpretation with revolutionary content”.®* It did not diminish
the significance of madness, and it did not push it to the fore as much as
Peter Brook’s staging in London either. However, it intensified “sudden turns
to agitation”,*” i.e. those frightening and uplifting moments, when the army
of the inmates, getting rid of the control of their show and the institute that
kept them locked up, appeared on stage as a revolutionary mass and became
recognizable as “a people deprived of freedom”. These moments occurred to
be complete with anger and fury, suspending all grotesqueness,*™ so that the
production would give the opportunity to “draw a palpable conclusion’, i.e.
528 E.L: Két közéleti dráma, 9.
529 Antal: Történelem a színpadon, 25.
530 Cf. Geszti: Charentoni színjáték, 8.
531 Kéry: , Tanuljatok látni", 8.
532 Tbid.
583 Akos Varga: Marat halála. Budapesti színházi levél, Csongrád Megyei Hírlap, Vol. 23, No.
40, 17" February, 1966, 2.
534 Cf, The inmates’ “rebellious outbursts, their cries against Marat, are also made with their
backs to him, turning slightly towards the director of the asylum (the representative of
imperial power), thereby making it clear that they are fighting against bars and cruelty, not
against the idea of revolution. In the perfectly executed second part of the production, the
people, the whining, drooling, twitching, goggling, poor people of the mental hospital sing
the revolutionary choirs with such temper and passion, with so much inexorable fervor, that
the mise-en-scéne interprets the debate of de Sade and Marat, or, to be precise, the writer’s
assumption properly.” Molnar G.: Marat-Sade, 7.
+ 112°