Page 181 [181]
TAMÁS ASCHER: THREE SISTERS, 1985
process of performance”.°” "Ihe members of this generation, most notably
Gäbor Zsambeki, Gäbor Szekely, Tamäs Ascher, Jözsef Ruszt, Istvan Paäl,
László Babarczy and János Ács "sought to broaden the boundaries of their
audience’s tolerance by the choice of plays and styles”.*** In this way, “they
were ‘smuggling in’ numerous elements of European theatre, which had
already gone to the school of the avant-garde. However, their fundamental
innovation was the representation of an image without any illusions, an
image of society and personality created in the process of the performance
and different from Hungarian traditions.”**° Consequently, the professional
prehistory of Three Sisters and its extraordinary qualities that “classicized
and synthesized”*” the innovative theatre achievements of the seventies and
eighties are “precisely traceable”.**' According to Ascher, his Three Sisters was
born in contrast to productions, “staged and lived only ‘as if’”,*°? which were
frighteningly increasing their majority on Hungarian stages. Furthermore,
it was produced by a company whose “ethos and ideal of acting and making
theatre had developed in the workshops of Kaposvar and Szolnok in the 1970s”,
then at the National Theatre, led by Gabor ZsAmbéki and Gabor Székely.*”?
So the paradigmatic nature and historical significance of the Katona Jézsef
Theatre’s production was due to its only partially manifested social, political
and theatrical complexity by which it had departed from the age of its birth
in every aspect.°”*
DRAMATIC TEXT, DRAMATURGY
Ascher’s mise-en-scene hardly modified Dezsö Kosztolänyis translation
of Chekhov’s play, but told the story “sharply and relentlessly”.° Neither
the socialist reading of Three Sisters could be pointed out in it (about the
condemned figures of a social class historically doomed to perish), nor the
symbolist interpretation, mainly opposed to the tradition of naturalism (and
87 Gyöngyi Heltai: Rimelések. Adalékok a Csehov-életmü értelmezéséhez, Vilégossäg 28:11
(1987), 723.
588 Ibid.
88° Tbid.
890 Tbid., 719.
891 Mészáros: Egy korszakos előadás, 1.
82 Heltai: Rimelések, 723.
#3 Meszäros: Egy korszakos elöadäs, 1.
That is why the political topicality of the production is simplified by the mere (and rather
cliched) statement about the last scene that “this is how the world has inexorably swept away
the chances of the sisters with its violence". István Sándor L.: Minden eltörölve?, Ellenfény
10:1 (2005), 13.
Renate Klett: Wunder und Wircklichkeit, Theater Heute, No. 8, 1987. Quoted in Katona
1982-97, 29.
894
89
a
+ 179 +