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TAMÁS ASCHER: THREE SISTERS, 1985
world of Chekhov from another era: beyond our receptiveness to neo¬
sentimentalism and nostalgia"."" Staged as a drama of losing hope, Ascher’s
disillusioned Three Sisters almost cruelly revealed from behind the melodrama
“the bleakness of the semblance of life, [...] the overpowering of stupidity and
violence, the fall into the abyss”.* This is why Andras Palyi could recognize
with a keen eye that in spite of all its realism, Ascher’s mise-en-scéne could
also be characterized as “ritual”, since “we continuously feel the presence of
another stage, the ‘Double’ of a theatre, which is like the ‘metaphysics’ for
psychological interpretation, the stage of individual style and presence”.?'°
ACTING
Asa German reviewer pointed out, “acting solved the artistic task of appearing
both as an artistic form and as something self-evident” in the production of
the Katona Jozsef Theatre.*!” Thus the reviewer shed light on the mediality of
psychological realism, i.e. on the paradox that the more authentic and realistic
acting seems to be, the more it draws our attention to its brilliance, its created
nature, its theatrical existence. In other words, it draws our attention to art
as emphatically as to life, and this can be studied in Ascher’s mise-en-scéne
particularly well. Despite the rethinking of the language of acting, none of
its moments overstep the boundaries of this language. They become, at most,
bolder results that slightly or significantly depart from tradition.?'® But, for
example, simultaneous speech is not used at all, though simultaneous actions
frequently occur, and utterances do not overlap or run into each other either.
Therefore, diction is characterized by utterances alternating at a different
pace, and their artistic pronunciation provides emotional content that the
spectator can experience. The performance “requires perfect identification
with the role from all the actors. There is neither indication in acting nor
‘stylized’ demonstration. [...] Every character of the play experiences and
suffers his/her own drama, and the director’s ‘bias’ cannot be felt at all. He
even renounces the occasional possibility of exaggeration.””'? It means that
no one is highlighted, everyone gets the same attention and “exists with the
same mental, neural concentration in the scene.”*”° This intensity is mainly
914
Miklós Almási: Csoportkep bügöcsigäval, Népszabadság, Vol. 43, No. 290, 11 December,
1985, 7.
Barta: Három nővér, 9.
Pályi: Színházi előadások Budapesten, 544.
Peter Burri: Egy asszony, három nővérrel. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. No. 6, 1987.
Quoted in Katona 1982-97, 28.
918 Cf. Földes: Három nővér, 22.
919 Mészáros: , Hát hova tűnt minden", 11.
920 Heltai: Rímelések, 726.
915
916
917
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