Oldal 187 [187]
OCR
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
