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TAMÁS ASCHER: THREE SISTERS, 1985 world of Chekhov from another era: beyond our receptiveness to neosentimentalism 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 + 183 +
