Page 120 [120]
OCR
THE DRAMA OF INCOMPLETENESS DECLARED TO BE COMPLETE STAGE DESIGN AND SOUND The scenography followed Weiss’ scene description, but it was more detailed and allowed for an unconventional association. It also drew the attention of the spectators to the main characters and the ensemble at the same time. After moving out of the old building on Blaha Lujza Square and before moving into the building on Hevesi Sandor Square, the scenery had to be adapted to the cramped stage of the theatre at 22 Nagymez6 Street, a temporary home of the National Theatre. It made the bath hall of the asylum precisely recognizable. The back of the stage was closed by a dark wall stretching high above,°” in front of which a gangway with metal railings was running at a height of about two and a half meters. “Peter Weiss perfectly dictated the set of the play. Marton came up with a corridor for this, where Roux, the revolutionary priest is standing, so that Marat’s truth can always get in the foreground, if necessary, without disrupting the unity of the stage.”°”? Underneath, curtains lined the showers and left the center of the stage empty for mass scenes. Marat’s bath stood on the right and Sade’s armchair on the left. There was a wooden dais for Coulmier and his family behind the chair, and the four singers sometimes retreated in front of the stage platform to show the scenes behind them. The horizontally and vertically detailed stage set, designed by Matyas Varga, not only separated and connected various parts of the stage spectacularly and effectively,°”* but also conjured up the concentration camps, the “gas chambers of Auschwitz camouflaged to be bathrooms”.®*” This is why many people may have come to believe that there were four layers (aspects) of the drama: in addition to the time of the spectacle in Charenton and the time of the revolutionary events recalled there, i.e. 1808 and 1793, written on wooden plates hanging high, the Second World War and problems of “the most contemporary world of today”.°” And that is why a spectator might have mentioned that “in scenes where nurses sadistically jumped on the mentally ill, l think everybody was thinking of Nazi lagers, death factories”.*”” (Among Nelly Vägö’s costumes from the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, the butcher’s aprons of male nurses were the most likely to help this association.) 6” Cf. “For our country, as for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the stage at Berlin’s Schiller Theater was exemplary. The essence of Weiss’ set is a very high wall with tiny tiles, which is both the wall in front of which people are shot in the back ofthe head or the wall ofa gas chamber in Auschwitz and also the wall of a hospital for hydrotherapy. It is the wall of all of us from the 20" century.” Molnar Gal: Rendelkezöpröba, 145. Lelkes: A sokdimenziós színpad, 12. 574 Cf. Gábor: Színházi figyelő, 236. 575 Mihályi: A kegyetlenség színházától, 616. Zsugán: Az egyetlen választás, 2. G. Szabó: Bírál a postás néző, 3. 57. > a 576 577 * 118 +
