Tamás Koltai
Intellectual Impulses
József Katona: Bánk bán * György Spiró: Dobardan; Vircsaft * Shakespeare: Measure for Measure • Georg Kaiser: David und Goliath • Friedrich Dürrenmatt: Der Mitmacher
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Spíró is a major contemporary novelist and playwright, several of whose plays have been staged in Hungary and abroad. Two of his plays were performed recently, one, Dobardan by the Vígszínház, the other, Vircsaft, by the József Attila Theatre. At first sight they differsharply. In tone, dramaturgy and style they are indeed very different but their spiritual background, mentality and underlying experience is very much the same. Dobardan is an impassioned "ego drama", if a drama at all, not the rambling reflections of an agitated intellect to the insults suffered by homo sapiens in recent years: to Bosnia, the new Holocaust, to modern racism, the waves of violence created by ethnic and national conflicts, the Balkanization of the less fortunate half of the uniting Europe, and so on and so forth. Vircsaft, on the other hand, steps out of the ego, dissolves the inner pain with hearty laughter, and observes the wild offshoots of our own parochial, bazaar capitalism - primitivism, gangsterism, the money-lifting techniques of local Mafias and local politicians and the sell-out of all values - from outside and with deep irony. Dobardan, Good Day! in Serbian, is, in fact, an expression of the indignation of an overcharged mind over the absurdity of the state of affairs of the world, or more closely, of the part called Europe. The topic is the war in former Yugoslavia. The play, though, is not about Bosnia nor even about the attempts of a Hungarian intellectual to adopt an orphaned child from there, which all fail because of bureaucratic hurdles. All that is merely the plot. The war in Bosnia will long be taught in history classes but the kind of thinking that blames power politics for all the consequences, for the flare-up of nationalistic passions, and the divisions between peoples and nationalities - for genocide - will still be valid. The "inserts," about the ridiculous diplomatic efforts taking place during the war, about the sameness and differences between languages or about the mentality of the big powers pulsate through the play. In a way, the whole play consists of such inserts. Spiró divides the productions of his agitated mind between the characters, at times driving them to frightening logical extremes. In the meantime, he is even able to motivate the self-angering logic and maniacal adoption compulsion of the protagonist by marked neurosis and by the frustrations of his private life. Nevertheless, as a text, Dobardan is unlikely to become a classic. Its significance lies in the unconditional acceptance of what the author regards as a categorical imperative.
The director of this studio production, István Horvai, had the audience sit inside the living space of the characters. This is provoking work, even if at times he is too theatrical, which runs against the grain of the text. The back-projected scenes of war, the documents strewn about in a theatrical manner, or the scene when the protagonist, rendered impotent and left finally to himself, sits down to play Tetris on his computer in his empty apartment are all the director's redundant comments attached to the author's sparse and direct manner. In the refugee camp scene the director separates the characters from the audience with bars but there are bars also behind the audience: we ourselves are captive to the situation, too.
Vircsaft is a satirical Zeitstück. The German original of the term Wirtschaft simply means the economy, the Hungarian slang term derived from it means the economy - or many other things - in a corrupt, incompetent mess. It is about the things people are talking about in the streets today. It treats it all as farce, making use of the entire inventory of the genre, the classical stereotypes combined with the vocabulary of our own day. With Feydau adulterous couples, in Spiró's play the would-be victims of debt collectors are being mistaken for others. The comical prototype of our times in Hungary is not the narrow-minded bourgeois, but the gorilla employed by security companies. Muscle-bound and pea-brained, he watches Tom and Jerry in his leisure, otherwise he is harmless. They are played for laughs by actors with outsize shoulder pads. The play is full of similar social types all too familiar in the recent past and the present. The name of Mayakovsky rings a bell to the ex-policeman turned small businessman who, otherwise, is so used to quoting six-digit figures all over the place that he calls a million (Hungarian forints) by its form "mila". The Mafia chief is elegant, unctuous and merciless, and is called "Padre" by everyone. Profit-making, as the great unifying force, does away with all kinds of ethnic or national conflict: a Gypsy politician runs a successful business, East and West take an equal share in privatization, and the well-bred English gentleman and a former Soviet Party secretary, at present a Ukrainian Godfather "stationed temporarily in Hungary", embrace as old friends.
The main subject of the play is corruption, a particularly lurid example of which was blazoned from the headlines just when it was premiered. Everybody is corrupt in Spiró's play: the mayor, the manager of the factory about to be privatized and the barkeeper in whose establishment the corrupt deals are concluded. Only one man is untouched by corruption: a secondary school teacher who is mistaken for somebody else and beaten up. The only loser in the play is the intellectual unwilling to turn from a student of Pushkin into a Mafia interpreter and a businessman, unlike the young linguist in the play.
The director, Pál Mácsai, did an outstanding job. Social comedies are rarely taken so seriously. The acting has an extraordinary attention to detail and abounds in profound humour. The music linking the scenes, distorted from folk and national motifs, operettas and operas, provides a perfect background to the "small Hungarian muddle" in which the play is set.
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Tamás Koltai,
Editor of Színház, a theatre monthly, is The Hungarian Quarterly's regular theatre reviewer.
