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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 +
