Seite 187 [187]
TAMÁS ASCHER: THREE SISTERS, 1985
Vershinin as an insignificant figure. Sinkó disassembles his texts, "so that
most sentences sound as independent clichés, and his philosophizing is just
a repetition of things heard somewhere else and suitable for telling them
effectively. His guibbling with Tuzenbach about the future becomes obviously
false, since the director makes the actors express the recurring thoughts of
their utterances in such a way that the repetition of sentences with the same
content becomes conspicuously pronounced.” Acting also underscores
certain aspects of the characters through diction, so Tuzenbach becomes “an
unbearable chatterbox and Natalya Ivanovna more amusingly vulgar than
usual”.?”” At other times, as in Vershinin’s overly soldier-like accentuation
and giggling, it discloses some mannerisms. However, contrary to Peter
Stein’s legendary mise-en-scene, a subject of comparison for the production’s
German critics, this mannerism has not prevailed as an essential feature of
the figures, but rather as a result of attempts to conceal confusion and the
defects of the pursuit of unembarrassed behavior. (It is another important
difference that in Ascher’s mise-en-scene acting followed patterns of mainly
present-day gesticulation that made it highly lifelike, but Peter Stein’s 1984
Drei Schwestern followed patterns a hundred year older, so it was much more
formal, and although it seemed familiar, it remained rather strange.)
STAGE DESIGN AND SOUND
On the stage of the Katona Jézsef Theatre, the whitewashed, battered plank
walls of the 1972 Three Sisters of the Vig Iheatre seemed to have “turned
into a more decorative wall paneling"."" István Szláviks set represented a real
location: a drawing room with bright walls, ceiling and wide plank flooring,
a huge dining room at the back, Olga’s desk in the forefront, seating on the
left, a piano behind it, and countless small objects (plants, pictures, etc.).
The structuring of the space largely contributed to “the accurate placement
of the events in the foreground and the background (ensuring continuous
life on stage), and to the creation of the environment of intimacy through
various angles and openings”.*” The third act showed a room half as deep as
before, with carpets on the walls and crowded with a closet, a sofa, a rocking
chair, a screen, etc. In the fourth act, however, the black depth of the stage
was left open between walls of a house on both sides, with bare branches
hanging in an almost empty space. Even in its spaciousness, the stage gave a
sense of being enclosed, and was rightly described by reviewers as “a wooden
6 Nanay: Valtozatok a reménytelenségre, 14.
(Torda): Három nővér, 8.
928 Sándor L.: Minden eltörölve?, 11.
929 Tbid., 10.
927