Larger than Life

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Entertainment-oriented theatre with a creative fancy has also made the most of English sources. Two new Hungarian musicals have recently reached the stage, both based on classic fiction. The writer Pál Békés and the composer László Dés have put together a musical from The Jungle Book. The production in the Pesti Theatre (directed by Géza D. Hegedüs) has preserved a great deal of the novel, and even more of its spirit. Above all the original fierceness, hardness and brutality of the story, in which the social laws of the jungle are determined by the laws of nature. The anthropomorphic depiction of the pack instinct is particularly successful, with no sign of sugary platitudes or sentimentality, not even in the thin thread of a love story woven into the plot. There also appears a certain grim cruelty free of illusions in mortality (as in Kipling as well), for instance the dethronement and obsequies of the superannuated wolf Akela is expressly staggering, indeed philosophically agonizing.

Dickens's Christmas Carol was drawn on by Péter Müller and László Tolcsvay for their musical, which was directed in the Madách Theatre by Viktor Nagy. The Hungarian title is Isten pénze (God's Money). There is some piquancy in the fact that the production - the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, the classic moneybag - was financed by a large Hungarian bank. True, at the end the curmudgeon mends his ways and scatters banknotes among the people. We could even interpret the story as praise of charitable activity, which, let us admit, is not bad as a PR campaign idea either.

Scrooge is undoubtedly a topical hero. Here in Hungary, after some understandable delay, the basic accumulation of capital is just getting underway, and so it does not hurt to bring the image of the banker, at least within the frames of a fairy-tale metaphor, closer to our hearts. The theatre has put kind-heartedness on a pedestal. The obdurate Scrooge, who is visited by the ghost of Marley, his late partner, to lead him as an otherwordly cicerone through his past and show him his dreary future, turns over a new leaf in time, barely more than halfway through his life, understood how much he has lost emotionally in paving the way for his career. Now he pays for the medical treatment of a mortally ill child abroad. While the viewer is wiping away tears, he can contemplate on how easy it is to compensate before God all the smaller and greater sins committed against children. However, the director has some sense of reality as well: at the end of the play the mob is jostling and fighting over the charitably scattered banknotes. The curtain call has "God's money" thrown into the audience as well. Perhaps they will come to have a better liking for that capitalism which Dickens so utterly detested.