Zoltán Egressy:
Portugál

György Schwajda:
A rátóti legényanya
(The Boy Mother of Rátót)

Ibusár, Irgács and Rátót: three villages—two of which are fictitious—provide the settings for three new plays in performance. The real one, Rátót, figures in folk-song and in oral tradition as the notorious home of the dim-witted.
Ibusár was first performed in Debrecen some years ago and has received several productions since. A new version by Budapest’s Játékszín gives it a novel twist. The author, Lajos Parti Nagy, once called his play a “musical hussaretta”, neatly combining the most popular theatre genre over the last hundred years and the personification of Hungarian virtues. (Naturally, the hussar figures as the patriotic and chivalrous hero in more than one operetta.) A husaretta then is an operetta concerned with the quintessence of chivalry, patriotism and the Hungarian character. Parti Nagy’s play is a sardonic treatment of the Hungarian mind-set. Its heroine, Jolán Sárbogárdi, is a booking clerk at Ibusár’s railway station, where she daydreams about having an operetta of hers played at the Operetta Threatre in Budapest. Not just daydreaming, for she scribbles away and mails her copious ouput to the editor of a Budapest journal called Magyar Boldog (roughly “The Happy Hungarian”). Her play, naturally about hussars, is performed within the play. Her hussars bear a clear resemblance to the passengers who use the station, and the leading man is very much like Jolán’s boyfriend, who as an amateur musician is expected to set her libretto to music. The station-master, a frustrated admirer of Jolán’s, is identical with the operetta’s villain, a traitor who sells the country to the Russians. (Her piece is set in the 1848 Revolution, crushed a year later by the Habsburgs with Russian help.)
Parti Nagy’s play is built around the confrontation, or rather juxtaposition, of the rose-coloured world of the operetta and the pedestrian reality of Ibusár. Sitting in her booking office all day, with the heroines of nineteenth century romantic fiction whirling in her head, Jolán finds that her choice is between a crude drunkard of a station master and a flighty flautist. Given this, she is happy to imagine herself as a prima donna, a ringletted and crinolined baroness. All previous productions of Ibusár unravelled this fantasy. The operetta hussars parading around in pelisse and flat railwayman’s cap proved to be an unending source of comedy, likewise the Russian spy’s reports transmitted via the station’s telegraph and telephone. The puns and wordplay add to all this: both the “real” and the operetta characters speak an absurd and corrupted language, with enhanced contemporary clichés.
The Játékszín has taken commendable risks in exchanging (or reprogramming) its regular audiences used to straightforward popular entertainment. Within the small space available to him, the director, Sándor Zsótér, makes Ibusár and the operetta world compatible. Unlike previous productions of the play, his does not have them fade in and out of each other, but brings them together in a visual unity. There is some theatrical stylization involved, a portrayal of Jolán’s stage-struck mind. Thus we see marching through her booking-office the hussar mounted on a phallic gun-barrel of a railway engine (an image in keeping with the play’s language) or a group of children as Red Indian hussars. The background is the Parliament—a blown-up picture postcard—as a metaphor for Hungarian Ibusárship provincialism. Jolán’s passionate imagination is brought alive. (The same director pulled this off last year at Szeged, in his Death of a Salesman.) Enikoý Börcsök, who plays Jolán in two incarnations as clerk and prima donna, plays the figure for irony, using her wickerwork chair as a pergola, or as a crinoline, or as a con-fessional box, making “bandages” for the wounded with the spools of rail tickets, using her rubber stamps as binoculars, tapping out the heartbeat. All this she does in the usual pouting sugary operetta style, in which there is still a degree of empathy for a worn and futile life.
The grand finale of her operetta achieves a fevered vision in which railway and patriotic musical play overlap: a railwayman’s badge glitters on the transvestite hero’s evening dress, the waltz is played with passion. This we may indeed laugh off. But what is left if wanderlust has to be suppressed? Only the clack of a railway carriage’s wheels.

Wanderlust is also the theme of Zoltán Egressy’s first play. The setting for Portugal is also a fictitious village, Irgács, and its hostelry. “This is a space in which things happen without any significant magnitude,” the playbill tells us. “Monday is Monday, summer is summer, a bar is a bar and this is going to be so right to the end of days. In other words, the story of Monday is very much like Monday, and the highlight of the summer is the shooting range; freedom is the swimming pool, the bar, beer, football, the paltry versions of repititive conversation… “ The bar is the setting for non-events. There’s the barkeeper, who gathers all the items of
local news, like the theft of a bike left propped up against a wall. His daughter, unlike many other of the village young, has stayed in the village and is being courted by a local boy who wishes to marry her. Among the other regulars is the priest, who pops in between christenings, weddings or giving the last rites, to toss back glass after glass of brandy without any visible effect. A would be wheeler-dealer is another, with several attempts
to get businesses going behind him; he has tried his luck in the capital and will probably do so again, just to get away from his alcoholic wife. Another fixture is a man they call Satan, sunk in alcoholism and willing to do anything for a drink to be sent his way.
An unnamed young man turns up in the bar. We learn that he is usually called by his nickname (becenév in Hungarian), so the barkeeper’s daughter dubs him Bece. He has the air of an intellectual, uses words no-one understands and generally shows off. He claims to be just passing through, on his way to Portugal, with only his rucksack as luggage. Why Irgács, of all places, remains a mystery but he takes a room in a nearby house for a few days. The following day he explains to the barkeeper’s daughter that the attraction of Portugal is that it lies at the edge of Europe, with only the boundless ocean beyond; in the fishing villages, the fishermen finish their day by sitting in front of their houses gazing at the vasty deep. And this is what Bece would like to do.
Alienation from our high-tech and over-intellectualized life, or simply from the everyday, has been the topic of a number of works in various genres. Most famous of all is perhaps Marco Ferreri’s Dillinger is Dead, a film in which the protagonist paints polka-dots on his revolver which is wrapped in a newspaper page devoted to the notorious American gangster; he shoots his neurotic wife and then boards a dreamboat to waft him to the South Seas. Most probably Bece has not murdered anyone—he is simply fed up. Now he has reached Irgács and the comforting curves of the barkeeper’s daughter. Her local swain is none too happy, but we are spared any confrontation between the two with the sudden arrival of Bece’s wife, who has tracked him down after discovering a scrap of paper he left behind accidentally. She is your ubiquitous new Hungarian business type, flaunting her luxury car, her cash and generally behaving obnoxiously. She makes a hysterical scene, which leads to a brawl involving everyone present, before dragging her unresisting husband off home. In the meantime, the village suitor arrives drunk and starts shooting, killing an innocent bystander.
Criticism is as much directed against the hopeless everyday of Irgács as against the abortive wanderlust of intellectuals. The desire to be free within us is acknowledged, but we are seen as cowards whose attempts to break free are merely illusions. This is conveyed through a quiet poetic naturalism despite the occasional dramaturgical hiccup. (The note left behind by Bece is somewhat laboured, and it is not clear whether it was perhaps left behind on purpose, in which case it is surely another sign of Bece’s indecision.) Yet the powerful use of language and the lively dialogue make this a promising start from a young writer.
The production is staged in the Katona József company’s studio theatre and is directed by the actor Andor Lukáts, who approaches it from the role potential the play offers. The tone shifts from naturalism to grotesque comedy, with the cast ringing the changes on intoxication; not so evident is the gentle poetry or the irony of the dreariness of the bar, the hopelessness, the desire to get away. All the same, the production comes off well as it is.

The Boy Mother of Rátót, staged at the Szigligeti Theatre in Szolnok, is also set in a village inn. (The inn seems to have become the agora of contemporary Hungarian drama, where action does or does not take place.) The villagers of Rátót are, by folk tradition, the butt of tales in which they carry ladders crosswise through the woods or dig another hole in which to rid themselves of the soil from their previous hole. They are also said to be fond of their drink, with the inn counting almost as a place of worship. It is here where the villagers congregate when “democracy comes to the village.”
The author, György Schwajda, gives the Christian myth a new and profane twist. Thus, to start with its ending, we find a closing scene in which Christ’s successor is crucified with the assistance of the Holy Family. This victim’s sin is that his name is Józsi (short for József) in a village where all the men bear the name Béla (a name associated now with the dimwitted). Because of his otherness Józsi feels he has a calling. Immaculate, he conceives a child and wishes to give birth to it too. The village has to decide on this, and not only on Józsi (incidentally, twenty years old at his unexpected birth) but on democracy, also unexpected, which they have read about in the papers. In Rátót, everything is upside down and neither faith nor the family, hitherto the best model of human cohabitation, can produce miracles. So it is useless for the Holy Family to have access to the home of Mariska, Józsi’s mother, if the Virgin Mary is no more than your average housewife making her arrangements over her cell-phone, St Joseph henpecked and addicted to Coca-Cola, and the Christchild a gum-chewing surly adolescent. It is also in vain for Béla (Mariska’s husband) to find himself elected as a village councilman in the most democratic way possible—she is the only woman to recognize his naked backside—when, once in power he loses his head—or so he thinks, looking in the mirror. They can only be convinced of the miracle of a male mother by crucifying Józsi, who, at an unguarded moment, whispers to his mother that there will be no resurrection for him.
Schwajda thinks that the rules of human coexistence—as replacements for voided myths—are unable to hold back the erosion of human values. “The causes are well-recognized: rapid technological, social and economic change, the sudden depreciation of ancestral beliefs, and an overwhelming sense of the ground being taken from under our feet,” says his playbill. “All the world’s major religions are in their final agony… Most of Christian theology is already in decay. Our demythicized world can only perceive as real that which can be grasped by the senses; the sensitivity to miracles is dying out. However, myths can only be perceived according to their own internal laws, otherwise the roots of our culture, the erstwhile unified visions of the world, become no more than tall stories.”
This parody of the Christian myth is sure to be offensive to some, given that it comes through an emotionally charged, provocative production. Criticism is mellowed by how the dimwittedness of the Rátót villagers is handled —and of us too, for Rátót is us; the humour is charitable and the disfunctional parliament-in-the-inn is handled with the appropriate dose of self-irony. What the characters say is funny, the dialogue crackles with the wisdom of the folk-tale, silly or cunning, depending on which angle we view it from. There is hardly drama in the conventional sense, but the plot is pushed along through the mischievous absurdity of the dialogue, something we are familiar with from Schwajda’s earlier plays. A pity, then, that the eponymous figure is so featureless, and does not take up the dominant position for the plot to revolve around.
Instead this is assumed by Mari Töroýcsik, a grande dame of the Hungarian stage, who plays Józsi’s mother. And a charming, pious, and talkative busybody she is too, even reeling off for the Virgin Mary the recipe for a traditional potato and pasta dish during the “Last Supper”. Those present for it, in the inn naturally, sit with their backs to the audience—Schwajda the director fully understands the upside down vision of Schwajda the playright. In fact, the production enhances this strain, providing mischievousness and pace, allowing the cast more room to work out the clichés of their characters. The ending is too serene, as if Schwajda stops short of drawing the conclusions from his own premisses and of giving the villagers of Rátót a severer dressing down.
But then any critism of Rátót is to be handled delicately. For we all live in Rátót. Or in Ibusár. Or Irgács.