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ENDRE MARTON: THE DEATH OF MARAT, 1966
The mass scenes, worked out with a choreographer and sounded in a clearly
understood chorus, were able to change focus and give way to the main
characters and the debate of Marat and de Sade without changing scenery.
Marton “perfected in this production the way in which intimate monologues
or dialogues of one or two actors at the forefront alternated with panoramic
images when the entire huge crew was on stage”.°”®
IMPACT AND POSTERITY
Journalists attributed an interpretation conceived in the spirit ofthe ideology
of the one-party state to Endre Marton’s mise-en-scene, but the production
may not have fully conformed. After Janos Acs’s paradigmatic, truly rebellious
Marat/Sade, it is impossible not to approach the National Theatre’s 1966
production from the 1981 performance in Kaposvar, looking for something in
the former that points towards the latter. Although we find nothing, Marton’s
mise-en-scéne was not necessarily determined by the completeness that critics
had inferred from the supposed outcome of the debate between Marat and de
Sade. According to Marton, “the struggle between a dispersed individualistic
view and pure and true revolutionary humanism”*” have been going on for
centuries and continuing to this day among people. That’s why he made the
Herald say the final word loud, which is part of the stage directions in the play
(“Curtain!”), “with an accent that stresses that we should stop performing
here because there is nothing else, we can do. On stage, the hecatomb of
bodies frozen in the final convulsion, and the ‘Curtain’ indicates that nothing
is definitively over, only this performance tonight." For Marton, who
preferred to connect the beginnings and the endings of his productions,**!
this “incomplete ending” and the prologue with the inmates’ silent actions
were hanging. They displayed what had already begun before the audience
arrived and would continue after their departure — outside the confines of the
performance. If we add the recollection of Péter Léner, referring to Marton’s
“personal message”, his former college teacher’s “trying to protect society
from madness and mania that he felt threatening”,*® it becomes clear that
The Death of Marat does not point towards Acs’s Marat/Sade, but rather to
Chapters of Lenin, produced four years later. It was not mourning 1956,°* but
similarly to the production of Laszlé Gyurko’s play, it advocated the purified
578 Léner: Pista bácsi, Tanár úr, Karcsi, 163.
579 G.P.: Számvetés és előretekintés, 9. (My italics — Á.K.K)
580 Ibid.
581 Cf. Léner: Pista bácsi, 169.
582 [bid., 163.
583 In fact — horribile dictu! —, the production could also be interpreted as the legitimization of
the crushing of 1956. Cf. Varga: Marat halála, 2.
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