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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. + 119 +
