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THE DRAMA OF INCOMPLETENESS DECLARED TO BE COMPLETE
myth of socialist revolution. Hinting at the historical confrontation of intent
and achievement, it sought to restore the pure ideal of revolution without
the vehemence of the questions, “what have you done with 1917?”, “what
happened to 1956?”
However, it did not prove to be a watershed, even though Imre Sinkovits
claimed that “after Marat nothing can be done in the same way at the National
as before it”.°®* The offstage duel, the debate between Major and Marton,
the complete lack of thinking together prevented collective work praised in
The Death of Marat from being made fundamental. Nor did the prophecy of
“the actual establishing of avant-garde theatre” by Marton’s mise-en-scéne
come true,” even if some “synthetic forms of the socialist avant-garde” could
be pointed out in it.5*° The acting techniques used in The Death of Marat
soon seemed mannered and inauthentic for the next generation, and from the
beginning of the 1970s (from their first productions in Szolnok and Kaposvar)
Gabor Székely, Gabor Zsambéki and Tamas Ascher defined the colloquial idea
of Hungarian theatre for about 30 years, just as the narrow circle of Major and
Marton ruled the National Theatre for three decades.**” The “mental theatre”
of The Death of Marat, however, has not been totally forgotten, and it seems
to be a subject of experimentation in several productions since the turn of the
millennium. There is no concrete connection, but there are strong parallels
between, for example, the acting defining the mises-en-scéne by Sandor
Zsöter, especially after his Medea (Radnoti Theatre, 2002) and what Imre
Sinkovits described as: “It is not only underacting, the economy of gestures,
the dramaturgy of immobility that imposes new and even unusual obligations
on us, but also deepened internal concentration with which intellectual power
replaces physical effort. I feel the essence of today’s theatre in this intense [...]
suggestiveness.”’#® If something like this is to be identified nowadays, it is a
striking proof of the unpredictability of Wirkungsgeschichte, similarly to the
resurgence of the highly political nature of performances, obviously not in
the same form.
584 Sas: Tisztázni az ember rendeltetését, 7.
Dersi: Marat győzelme, 7.
Zsugán: Az egyetlen választás, 2.
Cf. “There was a time in the mid-1960s when the same four directors in their 50s and 60s
[Tamas Major, Endre Marton, Béla Both and Istvan Egri] were staging plays for years, as they
had already been doing in the late 1940s. For more than 30 years, the leaders of the National
Theatre had successfully solved the generational problem that is so much talked about today.
There was only one generation here for 30 years.” Speech by Laszlé Vamos at the meeting
of the company of the National Theatre at the beginning of the new season on 23"¢ August,
1982, in Imre-Ring: Szigorúan bizalmas, 400.
588 Sas: Tisztázni az ember rendeltetését, 7.
585
586
587
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