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REMEMBRANCE OF A LANDMARK IN THEATRE HISTORY Ascher’s “furious” mise-en-scéne,*** and together with Gábor Zsämbeki’s The Government Inspector (Katona Jözsef Theatre, 1987), it offers “an allegorical representation of the communism of the 1980s”.°®* After the last performance in 1994, even Ascher said that, “the fury, ferocious desperation and loud pain of our Three Sisters, and the Beckettian anxiety that prevailed in the last act mirrored the 1980s of East-Central Europe". The implicit political nature of the production manifested itself in the diminution of the fantasies about a bright future (characteristic to Vershinin’s and Tuzenbach’s philosophizing); in the powerful suggestion of the feeling that “we cannot live here”; in Chebutykin’s repeating that “it doesn’t matter”, which had become the loathsome ideology of self-deception after the nihilism of drunkenness; and in the astonishingly powerful finale. In this finale, Olga’s hopeful words were completely suppressed by the roaring soldier’s music, and she took turns running with a manic gesture of determination to her sisters crying and shouting on the ground, while an army was marching at the back of the stage. In order to interpret this image, spectators had to notice that the members of the army temporarily stationed in the city were marching in place, so, contrary to the text, they did not leave. While the three sisters were mentioning Moscow all the time, the overriding plainness of the feeling that “we must get away” did not make the audience associate with the center of the colonial empire of socialist countries, familiar to everyone by photos circulated high and low. This highlights the paradox that Ascher and some other directors (mainly Gábor Zsámbéki, Péter Gothár and István Szőke) freguently made hidden criticism about the Kádár regime through Russian dramas that were otherwise preferred by the regime, in this case, through the contemporary social sensibility of Three Sisters. When a reviewer pointed out how “little failures suffered from time to time gnaw at people and destroy what is best in them: creativity, emotional richness, faith in themselves and in others", "6 it shed light on the same social problem as most of the Hungarian dramatic literature at the time did, from Imre Sarkadi’s Simeon Stylites to Istvan Csurka’s Deficit and Mihaly Kornis’s Hallelujah. This, in turn, leads us to the second factor mentioned above, insofar as Three Sisters was the work of a director of a prominent generation that carried out a complex series of experiments with strong commitment to social analysis. They developed a model “in which an alternative way of action, encoded in the plot and particularly important ‘here and now’, is being analyzed in the 883 Peter Kiimmel: Asit a vidék, Stuttgarter Nachrichten, June 22, 1987. Quoted in Anna Veress (ed): Katona 1982-97, Kamra 1991-97, Budapest, Katona József Színház Alapítvány, [1997], 28. 884 Helen Kaye, the critic of Jerusalem Post was quoted in Tamas Koltai: Egy vendégjaték kritikái, Élet és Irodalom, Vol. 35, No. 28, 12" July, 1991, 13. 885 Mészáros: Egy korszakos előadás, 1. 886 Anna Földes: Három nővér - és a többiek, Nők Lapja, Vol. 38, No. 1, 4" January, 1986, 22. «178 +
