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TAMÁS ASCHER: THREE SISTERS, 1985 IMPACT AND POSTERITY Three Sisters was in the repertory of the Katona Jézsef Theatre for eight years and two months, running 179 performances in Budapest and 59 abroad. In the season of its opening, it won the Awards for Best Director, Best Actress (Juli Basti as Masha) and Best Costume both at the annual voting of Hungarian theatre critics and at the National Theatre Festival. The long series of guest performances in foreign countries started with a highly successful performance in Stuttgart a year later, and the production even won the BITEF Grand Prix in Belgrade. In fact, “Three Sisters opened the international festivals for the Katona”,”** and largely contributed to the theatre becoming a member of the Union of European Theatres in 1990. Both Hungarian and foreign critics wrote in superlatives about it, describing it as a “cathartic”,”®° “masterful”*” and “extraordinary experience”™ and even “a masterpiece in our recent theatre history”*” already at the time of its birth. Since then, Ascher’s Three Sisters has become one of the most important milestones in Hungarian theatre culture of the 1980s: both a legend and a benchmark for any achievements in the field of playing Chekhov in Hungary. The normativity of the mise-en-scéne was only called into question in the early 2000s, due to the works of a new generation of directors (first Robert Alföldi and Péter Telihay), which incorporated some elements of the 1985 production of the Katona as ironic visual quotations. Negative criticism of Ascher’s mise-en-scène, for example that “we can only understand, but cannot experience or enjoy it”,°“’ were rather scarce and mostly based on superficial reading or misunderstanding. Moreover, they are not justified by watching the televised version of the production either, which came out on DVD two and a half decades after the premiere. 938 Mészáros: Egy korszakos előadás, 1. 939 Mészáros: , Hát hova tűnt minden", 11. 940 Barta: Három nővér, 9. Nánay: Változatok a reménytelenségre, 13. Sándor: Miközben a színházról beszélgetünk, 12. Almási: Csoportkép búgócsigával, 7. 941 942 943 «187 +
