Millecentenary Escapades

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With Hitler's appearance, from the 1930s onward, their room for manoeuvre was restricted, and several opted for emigration, like the most famous of them, Ferenc Molnár, or Menyhért Lengyel, who was also successful in Hollywood. Lengyel actually wrote To Be or Not To Be for Hollywood. The script is about the Nazis in Poland, and in 1942 Ernst Lubitsch used it for a film. (It was filmed again.) Based on the film-script, a German writer, Jürgen Hofmann, later wrote a play, and it is this play that Géza Bodolay has translated and staged in the National, under the original title of To Be or Not To Be.

Melchior Lengyel is remembered as a writer of pleasant, entertaining plays and film scripts, as Ernst Lubitsch's scriptwriter, no less. The fact that he gave us a few plays of lasting value and that he wrote the libretto for Bartók's The Miraculous Mandarin is less widely known. To Be or Not To Be, which Lubitsch turned into a classic film comedy, is closest to farce, albeit the subject does not really suggest one. The story, set in Poland at the outbreak of the Second World War, concerns how the actors, using the sets of an anti-German play and its Gestapo costumes, liquidate a traitorous professor who is about to hand over important documents to the Nazis. The play includes burlesque misunderstandings, a Hitler caricature, Gestapo jokes, flirtation, love, jealousy, a Hamlet parody, an insider's knowledge of the theatre, and musical interludes which are a mixture of contemporary hit tunes and Polish resistance songs - doled out a bit music-hall-like, a bit prolet-cult-like and a bit Brecht-like.

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Everyday reality makes a drastic appearance in the grotesque poetry of Lajos Parti Nagy's new work. The setting for Mauzóleum (Mausoleum) is the outside corridor, a long open balcony hanging over and running along the courtyard-side of old Budapest tenements. Parti Nagy is not the first to use this outside corridor as a metaphor for a certain lifestyle. The shabby and untidy courtyard in Mausoleum has many precedents, from Ferenc Molnár to György Spiró, but Parti Nagy is the first to present it as a Dantesque limbo. The inferno itself is in a deeper circle, in the basement behind an iron door where as the play opens, a corpse is about to be incinerated in the oven of the cake-shop which the building houses. The deceased, who can only be "identified" by a Russian (Ukrainian?) name, has presumably been turned into biscuits by the confectioner's friend, who runs a security guard service. The courtyard is enveloped in smoke and stench, those responsible for the (presumed) crime must detain the tenants at home lest they notify the fire brigade. Only for the duration of a night until "the theme is burnt out".

This could develop into anything - a comedy, a crime story, a burlesque, a thriller, a farce, naturalist horror. However, what it develops into is a piteously guffawing socio-poetic-metaphoric grotesque about the world under our feet. It is a lyrical absurdity about sub-existence existence. Because the tenants, as the play puts it, are "all nervous wrecks" - lumpen elements, of course. "Cases of multiple deprivation." Small wonder if "there are as many nervous wrecks as stars in the sky". The play cannot really be translated, so closely is it linked to current Hungarian mythology, crowded with distorted literary quotations and street idiom. As language it is lacerated and reduced but not at all denaturated. It is a retouched literary version of a deterioration of the language. The protozoans of the outside corridor use the bizarrely colloquial, hodgepodge phrases of the street with the resourcefulness of asphalt poetry: a slang farrago, subcultural grammatical flotsam condensed into metaphor.

The dramatic tension in Mausoleum springs from the contrast between a carefully described reality and the off key situation. There is nowhere to go from the courtyard with its outside corridor, although by the end it turns out that the door was not even locked. By dawn it becomes clear that "we all are each other's hostages", as the confectioner prince of the slum has said, a conclusion the audience may rest content with.

Gábor Máté, who directed this for the Katona József Company in its Chamber Theatre, treats the play in an exemplary manner. Of the possibilities offered he selects a style which maintains a delicate equilibrium between recreating a realistic situation and a verbal concerto scored for twelve voices. The stalls are surrounded by the horseshoe-shaped corridor, with its iron banister and the doors of the flats. We are sitting in the courtyard or in the corridor and see through the cracks under our feet as "the theme is burnt out." This is not to say that Máté goes in for naturalistic details: he does not give us oil-stained faces, and throws no prole binge, but formulates lyrically and metaphorically, with understanding, despite the excessive grotesque. He does not put the characters in the pillory, nor does he act superior to them. What he shows is an emphatic compassion. While not refraining from laughing in his embarrasment.

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