From the very earliest times playwrights have been intrigued by crime. It has been part of classic mythology, as in the story of the Atreids or in Sophocles’ Oedipus. In Shakespeare’s history plays, the crimes committed in the pursuit of power are constituents of history’s “Great Mechanism”. Ibsen’s heroes are burdened by sins committed before his plots unfold. Modern drama is concerned with the psychological or social motivation of criminal acts—suffice to mention works by Sartre, Peter Weiss, Hochhuth or Dürrenmatt, which greatly influenced the theatre of the 50s and 60s.
In recent times, the criminal play has mostly followed commercialised patterns. Courtroom proceedings offer an all to facile opportunity for narration. But to avoid cheap sensationalism, writers have to attain either a level of abstraction or political actuality. Some recent Hungarian plays provide examples of both.
László Darvasi is a young writer best known for his short stories. His Crazy Helga is apparently a simple, straightforward crime story. The night before the plot opens, Koch the baker and his family are murdered. Suspicion falls on two young people. One is Helga, the Kochs’ adopted daughter, generally considered to be mad; the other is a secretive, nameless, young stranger, the girl’s casual lover with whom she had spent the night. The morning after the murder, Helga describes the youth, now in custody, as her fiancé. Later she insists she is expecting his child. The justice in charge of the case falls in love with the girl and wants to save her. His councillors, however, want to cast suspicion upon Helga, all of them fearing the child’s birth, for they all had an affair with the girl. They are all under suspicion anyway for they all owe smaller or larger sums to the murdered baker. Once this is discovered by the justice—though it may well be a bluff—they offer to help the anonymous young man and his fiancée to escape. Eventually the stranger disappears just as mysteriously as he arrived—rumour has it that a certain prince’s men have helped him get away. Helga is in labour, and seeks in vain for the young man in gaol. Still behind bars, she gives birth to a girl and dies. The baby is handed over to the judge whom Helga is said to have named as the father before she died.
The short story on which the play is based sets the plot in 17th-century Bavaria. In the theatrical version, however, no specific place and time are mentioned. Nor are events as unambiguous as they would seem from the above résumé, which is one possible interpretation of the story. Causality is unclear and succeeding events invite more than one solution. There are mystical elements too in the crime story. Helga calls the unknown young man Himmel (“heaven”); the child seems at one time to be the result of physical coupling; at another, reference is made to the Immaculate Conception. It may even be that the child, who was born on the eve of Easter, was fathered by the Devil himself. Though it abounds in surprises and tries to display the mystery of both miracle and dread, the plot remains undeveloped. Helga’s conduct amounts to sacred simplicity, her pregnancy a sign of being one of the chosen people. Hers is a story of heavenly love in which the prize is martyrdom, and also a story of earthly lust which condemns one to a life of sin. It is, in fact, a story about the human condition, in which both are present simultaneously and remain an unsolvable secret.
Darvasi handles the plot in his play so as to shift the emphasis from the person
of the culprit to the nature of crime and the examination of its specific character. The case eventually remains unsolved;
the criminal act itself and its meta-
physical nature continue to be blurred. This dual unsolvability proves far too heavy a test for audiences, just as it does for the cast, as this production of the Csokonai Theatre of Debrecen makes abundantly clear. Of all possible interpretations, director Gábor Czeizel builds his production on the superficial layers of the text. We see a dramatized pseudo crime story performed in costume, which does not offer even a hint of the ontological
and philosophical problems broached by the play.
A more profane and concrete legal case is the subject of the play staged by the The Underpass, the studio theatre of the József Attila Theatre in Budapest. The Fedák Case is a documentary on the court proceedings conducted against the actress Sári Fedák after the Second World War.
A “People’s Court” called her to account for her far right actions during the war, under the German occupation, and gave her a prison sentence. Nearing seventy when released, she never again set foot on the stage.
Our century has had many an actor and actress who were politically committed and dedicated their art to the service of
an ideology or a regime—in some cases
to more than one. They did so out of conviction or because they wanted to perform at any cost. Perhaps the best known among them was Gustaf Gründgens, on whose life Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto was based and hence István Szabó’s Oscar-winning film of the same title. Gründgens was never a believing Nazi; he even protected some who were perse-
cuted. However, unlike some leading
figures in the German arts who refused
to appear in public or went into exile, he lent his name to the Third Reich. Since he had committed no crime, he carried on as a theatre manager in Düsseldorf, then in Hamburg. In the eyes of those, however,
to whom conscience mattered, he had
a “record”, just like Furtwängler, who
carried on working in the years of the Third Reich.
In terms of talent, Sári Fedák does not compare to Gründgens. She was a comedienne whose work was part of the entertainment industry. She was most famous in a breeches role in the musical János vitéz by Pongrác Kacsóh. Based on a narrative poem by the great 19th-century romantic poet, Sándor Petôfi, it is an undemanding evergreen, adapted to unsophisticated tastes. Fedák also appeared in many operettas, and as a critic said of her, “she allowed herself to be drifted in this or that direction most probably under the influence of her particular mood or hormonal urges”. She happened to be too visible during the 133 days of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, so she went into exile for some time. Not that what she did was politically motivated, neither when she married the playwright Ferenc Molnár, of Jewish origin (divorce followed shortly), nor when she kept mouthing anti-Semitic slogans and became a favourite of the far rightist regime. It was probably unnecessary to prosecute her and thus turn her into a martyr and heroine.
The play is a documentary based on the trial, edited and directed by a young actress, Denise Radó. She does no more than highlight the most important parts of the record of court hearings, rounding off the evidence, and various memoirs, into dramatic scenes. Among the witnesses are individuals well known to the Hungarian public—writers, composers, actors, politicians, journalists, lawyers, members of high society. (The parts are played by five actors.) Sári Fedák is played by Erzsi Galambos, who has won acclaim in musicals and operettas. Her opportunities are somewhat limited, since the role is mostly that of a broken old woman sitting in the dock, reduced to passivity. She could have shown the shaded colours of a personality in flashbacks, had the text offered her the chance. However, this would have called for a more fictional vein which goes beyond the documents—in short, for a genuine writer’s approach. However, the undertaking does not—or cannot—cross this borderline, and remains content with illustration, avoiding the taking of sides over an actress who behaved like a chameleon under the various political regimes she found herself.
Insofar as there is a moral judgment, it is to be found in the closing sentence. As though producing a famous quote, a mysterious male voice tells the audience that “An actor can be right only on stage”, thus warning actors of the dangers of making personal statements outside their theatrical roles.

Almost, but not quite, a documentary play, Clemency was written by András Szigethy, a journalist. This too is about a case, a historical one at that, in which a partial judgement has already been passed; however, the final one can only be the result, if it is possible at all, of collating millions and millions of personal opinions. The accused is none other than János Kádár, the communist party leader who for more than thirty years was the leading figure in Hungary’s “goulash communism” and “the merriest barracks in the Gulag”.
Kádár was, of course, never actually brought to trial, as he died on the eve of the political changes. In Szigethy’s play he passes judgment on himself; the intention is one of self-acquittal rather than condemnation. Although several figures appear, the play takes the dramatic form of a single soliloquy, based on his notorious last address to the Central Committee on 12 April 1988. The address is a mixture of self-justification and excuse. On account of its confusion and self-apology, the original is dramatic in itself—so much so that earlier another writer, Mihály Kornis, put it on stage with minimal editing. Szigethy has opted for a more traditional method. He supplements excerpts from the speech—in the narrator’s conscience—with the arguments of those present. He confronts the “comrades” with themselves; comrades, who in the past forty years were one another’s fellow fighters, predecessors, successors, followers and, as the case might be, executioners.
Thus Kádár meets, virtually or in reality, László Rajk, sentenced to death in a show trial and executed in 1949, when Kádár was Minister of the Interior; Mátyás Rákosi, the Stalinist party leader between 1945 and 1956; Imre Mezô, the Budapest party secretary, who was killed during the 1956 Revolution when the party headquarters were besieged by the freedom-fighters; and Imre Nagy, the communist turned revolutionary in 1956, whom Kádár sent to the gallows. This last encounter beyond death is the most disturbing of all. Kádár refers to “that man”, whose very name was banned in Hungary for twenty years, with a bad conscience. He carries on an argument with him to justify himself. A similar polemic takes place with Rajk, based in part on original records of the interrogation (according to the evidence of a secretly recorded tape, Kádár persuaded, even threatened, Rajk to confess to the absurd charges in the interests of the party),* with Rákosi, Mezoý, and the “Soviet connection”, Major General Serov.
All this is rather drab, so the author imports various characters to provide historical perspectives and analogies. From the nostalgic times of the Austro–Hungarian Empire, Francis Joseph appears, who from being the monarch who suppressed and retaliated for the 1848 Revolution, became the Francis “Joe” of the 1867 Compromise. The simple Working Woman even today remembers Kádár as a symbol of a secure and stable life and happy times. The Hero of Our Times is a member of the mass, a man who always adjusts himself to circumstances. And to avoid didacticism, László Vándorfi, who directs this production at the Petôfi Theatre in Veszprém, inserts marches of the working class movement, operetta tunes and video clips. The ghosts of Kádár’s predecessors are seen marching over Kádár’s bed, and so is an exhibition of his personal belongings (very ascetic, as he himself was widely known to be, these were sold at auction after the change of the regime). For the sake of authenticity, torture is occasionally seen on the screen. An element of the grotesque is introduced through Serov, the KGB general, who is shown as a buffoon (a Chinese actor speaking comically broken Hungarian is cast in the role), and by Péter Blaskó’s outstanding imitations of Kádár’s characteristic accent, fit for a stand-up comedy act.
As the director said, producing the play was an act of courage, given a public opinion that is still sensitive to the events of the near past and far from being in agreement over how to interpret them. (This is testified to by the fact that the company received several threats. Nothing out of the order happened either at the first night or after, and the play continues to attract capacity audiences in the tiny theatre.) The director and the lead actor have been invited to participate in the Budapest production in the Pesti Theatre. Yet the secret of the success must be sought in the banality of thought and form. The audience, faced with an easily comprehended and simplified handling of problems, and the technique of the amateur theatre of the 60s, has no difficulty believing that the
party secretary’s humdrum moaning sheds light on the mechanism of communist
dictatorship.

We learn all the more from a similar play, thematically at least. András Jeles’s A Passion Story, took first prize in a contest organized by the Csiky Gergely Theatre of Kaposvár in memory of the 40th anniversary of the 1956 Revolution. (I discussed the runner-up, Körvadászat (The Battue), in No. 147 of The HQ.) A Passion Story was first staged at the Kamra, the small stage of the Katona József Theatre in Budapest. Oddly enough, it was not directed by the author, himself a film director with an international reputation, who often works for the theatre and for a time had his own alternative company. The director of the Budapest production was Gábor Máté, who is an actor member of the company.
The play opens with the actors’ orchestra playing Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, with a difference—in silence, not a single sound is heard. (On 24 October 1956, the day after the uprising began, Hungarian Radio discontinued its regular programmes, and in between the various announcements and statements, this piece, alternating with Liszt’s Piano Concerto in E-flat major, was broadcast all day.) The actors, in evening dresses, go through the motions sound by sound, but the heroic music is stifled in the instruments; we only hear the bows squeak, the wind players breathe and the conductor moan.
Jeles has written a powerful play, which triggers the imagination through its language. This is a visionary piece, something rare among the many flat plays to be
found in the history of Hungarian drama. His aim is to grasp the apocalypse of
the Hungarian communist movement at work—the surreal, crazy, yet systemic logic of cadre elimination, working in concentric circles; the paroxysm of primitiveness, at once appalling and ludicrous; the cannibalism of re-ideologized and unreal nightmares come true. Jeles aspires to and attains much more than the basic level of dramatized pamphlets. He examines the mechanism of the vandalism of the communist and ÁVO (State Security) thugs at work as a movement and as a “conscience”, conjoining this with focus on the breakdown of the system. He uses documents too—some excerpts from the Rajk trial are in the text—but these are twice removed, abstracted as absurd cliches, rather than insipid documents.
The boldest removal is the profane association of the fate of the protagonist, Colonel Ámen of the ÁVO, with Christ’s Passion. The officer first tries out on himself the physical atrocities of interrogation with a perverted curiosity of self-analysis; later he too finds himself accused, a victim of his own comrades, and eventually crucifies himself of his own free will. The process is less psychological than visionary, along the lines of the surrealism of a Breughel or a Bosch. The movement, which “carries its traitors in itself”, is best encapsulated in the anecdote told by one character, of a hooked fish which is found to have other fish in its innards. The picture conjured up is reminiscent of the Flemish vision of the slit monumental fish, out of which fall out smaller fishes one on top of the other, which are hung on trees. Horror and the grotesque go hand in hand, setting the tone of the scenes—the primitive gaolers gobbling up their food; the aggression of the “nursing comrades”; the moronic henchmen; the electric torture; and the test of the ÁVO officer searching for the transcendence of martyrdom, painting his own pseudo-agony in chicken blood; the theatre of preparing the accused in trumped-up trials by making them learn their confessions by heart.
The play requires a large stage, to offer the necessary distancing from the actual situation and to ensure surrealism. That would lend a visionary character, an apocalyptic unreality to the everyday premises of ÁVO offices, the interrogation chamber, villa or apartment. On the tiny stage of the Kamra, closely surrounded by the audience, all these remain overly naturalistic, and secondary elements—torture, or eating an egg—acquire primary emphasis, to the detriment of the nightmarish elements. Yet the director’s interpretation of the play is impeccable and some scenes are directed brilliantly. (One such is the scene in which Comrade Ámen, the interrogator, is sitting on the lavatory, in between stereotyped excerpts from the Rajk trial in an eerie light and to the soft background music of Massenet’s Dream Aria; the actor, who plays an Alsatian dog, with a laryngeal microphone built into the muzzle, is a trouvaille. So too are the nocturnal apocalypse of the ÁVO villa, whose lighting occasionally breaks down and emits a buzzing sound when switched on, the prisoners learning their confessions by heart, the drunken henchmen, the ÁVO gang fantasizing confusedly, the textual montage made up of communist jargon, slogans, idiotic phrases and stunted articulation.) However, we miss here the enlarged, surreal vision of the background. The “passiveness” of Comrade Ámen’s voluntary crucifixion in full view, in this naturalistic, psychoanalytical medium, is utterly in-comprehensible: a distant, symbolic view would suffice. And of course, one misses the author’s closing visions of the resurrection of the crucified ÁVO and the apocalypse of the slaughter of the innocents at Bethlehem.
The actors take no bow at the end of this production, as applause is too profane after such a gut-level confrontation with evil. However, the audience does not dare not to applaud. They dare not allow silence prevail—silence which Peter Brook describes as “another form of recognizing and appreciating a shared experience”. Sadly, forced artificial applause was all too strongly indoctrinated, that moronic rhythmic clapping encoded in communist times. And strangely enough, new generations of Hungarian audiences have more conspicuously retained this than did our neighbours, who lived through much tougher dictatorships.