Clara Györgyey

Lost Dreams, Missed Opportunities

Hungarian Plays:
New Dramas from Hungary.
Selected and introduced by László Upor.
London, Nick Hern Books in association with Visiting Arts, 1996. 242 pp.
£12.99 ISBN 1 85459 2440

With the exception of some widely popular works of Ferenc Molnár and, more recently, on a much more modest scale, the absurdist plays of István Örkény, Hungarian writing for the stage is little known in the English-speaking world. This lack of interest, of course, is not just the fate of Hungarian works; the fate of most plays in other lesser known languages is painfully similar. Thus, this pioneer collection of four contemporary Magyar plays—a long overdue volume indeed—reflects the constantly transitory state of the region (following the “second liberation” of 1989): old forms had became outmoded, new forms have not fully developed yet. The uncertainties primarily manifest themselves in technique and style. Each play, albeit distinctly unique, is similarly surreal in tone, grim in subject matter, chilling in outcome; the often grotesque dialogue is replete with archaic phrases, profes- sional & trade jargon, strange, often distorted idioms, sour humour, political rhetoric, philosophical platitudes, awkward metaphors, uncanny symbolism and a plethora of pointless inventiveness. Yet, through their visual and verbal ingenuity and candour they engage us almost despite of ourselves.
There is no apparent clue to any rationale of selection other than the editor’s (the talented dramaturge of the Budapest Vígszínház, László Upor) preference for a given play or the measure of its success on stage. Thus, this “democratically variegated” choice of tragedies, farces, and postmodern dramatic texts provides an overview of the kaleidoscopic palette of contemporary Hungarian plays.
The playwrights, András Nagy, Andor Szilágyi, Ákos Németh and Péter Kárpáti, are more or less of the same generation (born in the 50’s–60’s, during the Kádár era), the spoiled products of the pseudo liberal goulash-communism, whose modus operandi included an astonishing collective amnesia. The four young authors introduced here—equally brilliant, talented, contumelious, and arrogant—believe neither in old dramatic structures, nor in the Aristotelian unities, nor in any traditional element of stagecraft. Ultimately most of them despise sustained action (plot is frequently supplanted by language, whose rhythms and silences allude to, rather than elucidate, character), conflict or catharsis in the classical sense. Precious little happens in these plays, but there isn’t half a lot of talk! Indeed, verbalism is the order of the day here. Also absent are a genuine exploration of stasis, real metaphysical, moral or ethical themes (although a vague attempt is made in Nagy’s play). Even in Everywoman, where the title connotes a modern version of the Medieval morality play (is it political correctness that prompted the author to feature a female protagonist?), it seems to serve only as supreme irony. The appropriate wherewithal common in these plays seems to be that any old cliché might suffice: at each denouement, the blue bird of happiness flutters away irretrievably as the individual protagonists woefully bury their dreams.
The eldest, and most mature, of the featured dramatists is András Nagy (1956), who was born and grew up in Budapest, worked as an editor and a university lecturer before becoming a full-time writer. Of his background, Nagy admits that, “because of the obligatory national amnesia”, his attention turned to classical literature and historical themes, which proffered a rich storehouse of topics for adaptation. Of his dramatic credo, he says: “my main interest is to find where sensuality of the spirit ends and the spiritualization of the sense starts.” (Whatever that means!)
His first play (1984) presents the plight of the legendary, ill-fated Transylvanian countess Elizabeth Báthory. Up to now he has written fourteen plays, including The “Anna Karerina” Railway Station, an original adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel, Hungarian Three Sisters, based on Chekhov’s masterpiece, and Alma, a one-woman show on Alma Mahler. Nagy has also published three novels, volumes of short stories, essays and screenplays. He participated in the Iowa International Writers’ Program, and shot an impressive documentary in the Himalayas. This collection features his The Seducer’s Diary, whose anti-hero is Soren Kierkegaard’s alter-ego.
The play opened in 1992 in Budapest as the closing event of an International Kierkegaard Conference. Its text is loosely based on the autobiographical writings and diaries of the “mildly eccentric” Danish philosopher. A seemingly religious and public play, while seeking the ancient harmony, contrasts irreconcilable extremities: passionate love versus passionate polemics; action versus thought, freedom of will versus freedom of choice (of doubt), etc. On the surface, the plot in fact appears rather trivial; it meanders about an elaborate, cunning seduction and an equally trite desertion with a cruel tour-de-force at the end. The fervid love affair is designed to resolve the philosopher’s (“clever” Johannes, a theology student in the play) basic doubts about God. The seduction of Cordelia is a game whose conclusion is granting the heroine “the ultimate victory: the return of her freedom” (from the Dane). In effect, our noble hero abandons “the love of his life, his very essence” in the very same way (and for the same reason?) that God has abandoned him. Since his fate is to be “exaggeratedly metaphysical, he is spared the disillusion of fulfilment.” Johannes, true to his Deistic supernaturalism, expounds many a Kierkegaardian existential axiom, and verbosely disseminates his views on truth and reality, and inter-subjectivity. Such constant spillage of existential anguish, the excessive philosophizing taxes the actors; also, the abundance of clever talk arrests the dramatic flow and makes the text complicated and exhausting. At one point, even the lovelorn heroine has had enough; saturated with her suitor’s barrage of paradoxical syllogisms and cynical witticisms, she screams: “No more words! No more talk! Try to feel instead!” In the end another illusion is lost; Johannes refrains from eating the “fruit” of his seduction and the incipient hero gradually becomes a tragicomic, buffoon-like victim of his own manipulations. Despite the overwhelming number of speeches of philosophical intent, more knowledgeable audiences might recognize that the basic dialectics of this twisted love plot have already been written up by the lines of like Molière, Sheridan, Wycherley, Goldsmith, and many more.
Nagy’s dramatic approach is basically ambivalent: he appears to observe the human menagerie with an indiscernibly ironic smile, yet remains an essential true humanist unable to shrink from emotional involvement. According to Nagy/Camus /Johannes/Kierkegaard, the world is a monstrous, calamitous enigma replete with contradictions, to which there must never be a surrender; through deeds man must fight, even if conditions cannot be changed. This mixture of irony and compassion grants his plays a certain glowing warmth as well as a poetic vision, despite the occasional intimidating verbosity and absurdity of both basic premise and theme. András Nagy’s rich tapestry is characterized by an innate decency, veracity, relentless propagation of morality, and a versatile, sardonic style.

Andor Szilágyi was born in Szolnok, a town in the Great Plain, he graduated as a history teacher, before becoming a journalist. After moving to the capital and experiencing the depth of his own roots, he chose radio as his vocation. His first novel came out in 1989, his first play, The Dreadful Mother, was staged in l990, a short story collection appeared three years later, followed by scores of children’s plays, pieces for the puppet theatre, dozens of screen, TV and radio plays. All his writing is strange, grotesque, often sour, and full of irony, the tone is surreal, the style highly original, and most inventive. His funny, enigmatic, poignant Unsent Letters: A Play With Life, is unfortunately a victim of its translation.
This play, or rather the conundrum, does not offer too much in plot development; it is a static, misleading fairy tale about two “angels” (Captain Angelus and Agelina) who meet at a railroad station, fall in love then leave, thinking they will never see each other again. Yet, perpetually seeking one another in every person they encounter, the two actually meet several times but always in changed circumstances, in a different time, in different disguise, and with their ages reversed.
In this elusive, absurd drama (Szilágyi’s most accessible play to date!) the “angels” are in a kind of Beckettian holding pattern. Parallels, connotations and allusions to Waiting for Godot are rampant: two homeless derelicts, endless waiting, preoccupation with shabby, pinching shoes (with notes hidden in them), quoting ditties about the changes of the moon, conjuring up round apples (instead of carrots) and more. The dialogue is studded with pseudo poetry, clichés, archaic phrases, gibberish, the rhetoric of street language, curses, twisted idioms, nonsensical teasing and repetition:

“…God may appear even in the form of an uncomfortable shoe, Sir.
But I am hurt by two shoes, Madam, although God is one and indivisible…”

After a while, the proliferating “heavy” symbolism winds down, sinking speedily into plain mumbo-jumbo: “(I have…) the prosthetic heart, Madam… The prosthetic heart…” “Oh, my Golden Oriole, my Ruby-Red Dove…” “…Man is just a peculiar animal, nothing else…” “…I have always known that captains are great womanizers!”
“Angelus: (wearing black glasses) …my miseries have been associated with passing nothing…” “ Angelus, the consecrated bell-ringer of my heart’s church, my All…”
One has a feeling that such gimmicks are used to express a type of modern romanticism, a rock-version of sentimentality—with no little sweetness, it should be added. Szilágyi’s couple are raucously simple and they can express themselves only through melodrama, at once heart-warming and lachrymose. The “angels” never illuminate their inwardness and this fact also deducts from the play’s assumed complexity. Their “tragedy” may be construed as a portrait of the treacherous gap between what is real and what is imagined and how it relates to the past that is buried and not-so-buried. A couple adrift survey the eroded paths and the ruins of their lives. The message here again is a dirge for missed opportunities. The subtitle (A Play with Life) warns that you can’t play with life or with time, no one can turn back the clock. Ultimately, when absolution approaches, it comes too late to save them—and our play. The play’s
intertextual surrealism seems to have evolved from the playwright’s deliberately downsized literary ambition—or, perhaps, a sort of Örkény-like irony?
Alas, as stated previously, the play’s translation is not just weak but often silly, verbatim mirroring of idiosyncratic Hungarian idioms, for example: “…why are you watering the mice?” stands for: “ Why are you crying?” or “The Golden Swallow of Hope” standing for “the blue bird of hope,” and the like. Examples abound, there is no need to elaborate. This obscure English rendition in this form is not really stageable. Nonetheless, readers are at least are introduced to an unorthodox, promising, daring new playwright.
Ákos Németh, another young master of stagecraft, was 22, in 1986, when he saw his first play, Lili Hofberg (on a Viennese theatre in 1933, and the plight of its company), performed by one of the finest Budapest theatres. This was followed by ten other plays, among them The Last Days of the Heidler Theatre, The Red Ball, Julia and His Lieutenant, each un-veiling the author’s remarkable ear for
the language of theatre people, each exuding fresh political/historical/theatrical commentaries in almost perfect dramatic form. Németh was born not too far from Budapest (Székesfehérvár) in l964, graduated in history and literature at the University of Budapest. “I come from the narcissistic/ self-worshipping generation born in the ‘60s ‘welfare society.’ Ours is a spoiled generation.” Well, he was spoiled indeed; even in “newly-liberated” Hungary, his dazzling dramatic output received enthusiastic accolades.
The volume’s choice, Müller’s Dancers, can be viewed as a bitter-sweet political allegory of the dissolution of the 40-year-old “protective” regime and its dire consequences. On the surface, we simply witness a dance troupe falling apart when its charismatic leader, Müller, for no apparent reason, abandons the company he has founded. Without a leader, the dancers’ careers and their private lives disintegrate. Now they must learn to be independent and stand on their own feet both as persons and as artists: Mama-State and Papa-Müller are no longer there to hold their hands, to ensure their livelihood and provide support. In the chaotic aftermath the dancers are at first confused, frustrated, almost paralysed before they gradually disintegrate, sinking deeper and deeper into a political and economic (and artistic) quagmire: some run away, others unabashedly cheat, steal, rape, even commit murder. Horrified, we witness their sordid
and thwarted love affairs, corrupted ideals, and failed attempts to eke out a living via practicing their art, in short their spasmodic fatal rondo toward self-immolation. Eventually, the whole company is enveloped by contempt and hatred, as they obsessively articulate their leader’s “crime,” and their sense of loss.
Although the political implications are explicit, these worn-out dancers know (or care) precious little about the dictatorship of the proletariat; instead, they still rehearse in earnest, intrigue with gusto, and suffer enormously simply to survive. Social ramifications are also of secondary importance. Németh’s primaly goal again is to present a realistic (and thoroughly authentic) slice of performers’ lives. These forlorn dancers subsist on the alms of feeling (of loyalty, for instance), rather than on the labour of evocation. Thus the play, in a way, is all spokes, it has no hub because Müller, who is supposed to be that hub, no longer exists.
Alas, the translation of this work is similarly unfortunate: oversimplified (“You’re very rude indeed!” instead of “Did anybody tell you that you’re a cheeky bastard?”), artificial (“It puts me to the blush.”), forced (“You can boss your trollop about but not me”), forcefully “British-Anglicized”, at parts completely nonsensical (“You go into a nervous pant at the thought of it”), misunderstood (“I have a case of the hairline crack”), even misspelled (loose instead of lose), and so forth.
Inadequate translation, of course, is not the fault of the playwright. Németh’s models, Georg Büchner and the Hungarian Milán Füst, have taught him the dexterous handling of dialogue and dramatic situations. Although no philosophical dramatist, Németh produces the darkest mood in his plays as he lines up all the elements of the myth of a lost generation: drugs, murder, AIDS, lesbianism, partner-swapping, etc. In total, he has a unique flair for the stage and his topical and linguistic inventiveness puts him in the vanguard of new Hungarian playwrights.

Péter Kárpáti was born in 1961 in Budapest, and he formally studied drama at the Academy of Theatre and Cinematography. In his late twenties he saw the staging of his plays in the leading theatres of the capital (Singapore, Terminus; The Unknown Soldier; The River at the End of the Road, and the much-awarded The Golden Orb). Juxtaposing playful, witty, comic scenes with heart-wrenching tragedy, utter squalor, bloody horror and total physical and mental devastation with poetry, irony and affection, Kárpáti achieves maximum effects onstage. He smoothly incorporates Gypsy folk-tales, soldiers’ slang, the tricks of fairy tales and puppet theatre, and even Gypsy folk-music into his texts. Of the authors here present, he is the most accomplished and celebrated.
Everywoman, first performed in 1993, is a free adaptation of the medieval morality play, this time with a female protagonist. Set in today’s Budapest, it delineates in meticulous detail the last day in the life of the simple, middle-aged, lower middle-class Emma, who is dying of cancer. She is desperately trying to make her arrangements with everyone and everything before dying. During this preparation for the end, the whole history of her tragic relationships and ruined life is laid out. We watch the countless missed opportunities evoked in her pathetic final moments.
This is a spiritual play, moral as well as ethical—probing questions about the purpose of life, challenging, like Job, men’s (women’s) incessant struggle and suffering. Religion is omnipresent, and the implications are explicit: in addition to the presence of Death as a character, there are direct references to God, Heaven, Hell, redemption, pilgrimage—a compendium of intrinsic Christian concepts.
Yet the play is not religious in the strict sense of the term; according to Kárpáti, the play’s “themes are quite universal and its aesthetics is profoundly Hungarian; the social fabric of life in Budapest causes Emma’s spiritual crisis.” In other words, this poor woman is so overworked, underpaid, and harassed that only now has she time to take stock of her life—readying for “the final loss of all small dreams while preparing for the long, eternal one.” Thus, in a totally secular Hungarian ambience, despite being flanked by Our Maker, Lord Jesus, Heavenly Father, et al., all through the text, Emma is undertaking a bona fide pilgrim’s journey toward salvation and forgiveness. This hybrid morality play has a heart-tugging, twisty plot full of “situations” that could have appealed, say, to a Victorian dramatist, except that no Victorian could (or would) have used the device that is the springboard of the action here. The play’s other fascinating aspect is how it persistently sentimentalizes anger: every person around Emma’s orbit is angry; the play is a specter of anger. In any event, it is not the impending demise but the bathetic order-making, the final heavy-footed moralistic sauntering in search of redemption that provides the thematic structure. Allegories and parables, if they are to work, need some ballast—hence the excess of ugliness, the physical evidence of social deterioration. By the same token, Kárpáti occasionally allows a note of comedy to creep in to break the solemnity and enhance vitality.
Unencumbered by her bad luck, Emma, the prototype of a simple woman in any epoch, is moving forward into the void at such a fervid pace that it is difficult to do justice to the subtlety of the dialogue. We concentrate merely on the theme, painfully watching this afflicted, disillusioned creature leaving behind a multitude of unfulfilled desires and as many half-burned candles. Hers is the fate of Everywoman of every age.
Kárpáti is rapidly becoming a fine stylist; his voice is authentic, his linguistic inventiveness is remarkable, both dialogue and the frequent long soliloquies are cleverly manipulated. In addition, he is fortunate to have been well served by his translators (Jack Bradley, verse passages by Tony Curtis), making the piece highly playable in this English rendition. On the other hand, it is regrettable that in most of his works he still fails to employ the necessary structural control. Kárpáti’s plays, with their grim overtones, keep remonstrating on universal traumas, clearly adhering to their basic premise even when the stakes are high and not remunerative. To his credit, he never resorts to escapism, and avoids solutions that cloud our vision, nor does he avoid the playwright’s social responsibility.
In these experimental dramas of vibrant, nervous energy, the measuring of reality by the absurd and the absurd by reality illuminates the East-Central European experience in the most chaotic decade of our century. Hungarian Plays, New Drama from Hungary fills an important gap. László Upor’s selection is a happy one. The volume also includes an informative, erudite introduction by the editor, providing a brief history of Hungarian drama in general and an overview of the most notable modern playwrights in particular. In addition, Upor provides a concise biographical and textual introduction for each play. All in all, it is a useful volume, all the more welcome for further disseminating Hungarian drama in the West. ß

Clara Györgyey
is a writer, critic, translator, and Director of the Humanities in Medicine Program at Yale University. She publishes in both English and Hungarian.
Her book, Ferenc Molnár (Boston, Twayne Pub.) appeared in 1980, her latest volume, a collection of criticism, appeared in Budapest in Hungarian in 1998.


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