Tamás Koltai
Molnár and Anti-Molnár
Ferenc Molnár: A jó tündér (The Good Fairy) • Az üvegcipõ (The Glass Slipper) • Liliom
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The protagonist in The Glass Slipper (written six years before The Good Fairy) is Irma, who calls herself a maid servant fairy, another in the long line of Molnár's whimsical and potty servant girls, a "literary fairy" attracted to Shakespeare who goes to "have fun" in the National Theatre where Shakespeare has such a wonderful name, Cycle. By day she cooks, waits on, washes and cleans for Mr Sipos, the lodger. He is a cabinet-maker, a middle-aged bachelor and the lover of Adél, the landlady. Irma is also in love with the man she calls "Angry" to herself. She is more or less content with this state of affairs until the aging Adél decides to marry Sipos, once she recognizes that her affair with Pali, another lodger and much younger, has no future. Difficult as he is to get out of the rut, Sipos is easily duped. Not so the amorous servant maid who takes to the field to win her "Angry" back and manages to create a rumpus at the wedding party. In Act Three, after an encounter with the police, the odd couple set out on their way, hand in hand.
An alloy of urban folklore and virtuoso stage technique, The Glass Slipper is one of Molnár's prime works. Life is presented in a tearful and smiling lyrical vein, just as affectated and mannered as theatre-going urbanites like to see the life of "folks" somewhat alien to them. It calls for firm intentions on the part of the director. He has to decide on the exact proportions of reality and theatricality, of the conventional saccharine to be left in the play and the no-nonsense reality to be admitted.
The Csiky Gergely Theatre of Kaposvár is a guarantee for the success of the modern, pithy theatrical style which is closer to our day. For about twenty-five years now, Kaposvár has been a centre of the theatre of disillusionment and realism. It was the cradle of the reform of the Hungarian theatre. The Glass Slipper is directed by one of the leading actors of the company, Zoltán Bezerédi. His direction is in the spirit of his earlier work, displaying a feeling for the easy and natural and lifelike detail. The originality of the production unfolds from Act Two onwards. In Act One the director is still busy scraping off the sugar coating, to show Irma "la Douce" as a facetious slovenly hoyden instead of the bewitching maid. After the first intermission the Gesamtkunstwerk of the company starts to get going. The wedding party takes place on two planes. The "second" on the laid table backstage, with non-stop wining and dining, music, singing and dancing, taking of snapshots, highlights as it were the "close-up" of the trio of protagonists. When the scandal culminates, it starts raining on-stage, the electric wires flash and Irma, soaked through, suffers grave atrocities. Act Three takes place at the police station and is more turbulent than envisaged by the author. Iron bars of prison cells rattle, those arraigned are taken to be interrogated upstairs by lift, and a Gypsy fop - brought in for God knows what reason - is escorted to detention by a bunch of wailing Gypsy girls. Molnár's storyland is expanded and soaks up the nurturing juices of our everyday reality. Without abandoning the lyric quality of a transparent and light comedy, the production shows up timelier truths in the play.
The most famous of Molnár plays set among "poor people" is Liliom, written in 1909. The story of the little maid servant and the fun fair barker first had the floss stripped off it in Kaposvár, in a László Babarczy production fifteen years ago. This tale is easily told with a measure of syrup. Juli follows Liliom at his first word, the "showman nobleman" born free, adored by both the customers and the lady owner of the merry-go-round. The owner of the merry-go-round sacks her former lover. Liliom is too proud to take on the job of a caretaker. He would rather not work at all, and takes out his bad conscience by beating his wife. When he learns she is pregnant he decides to go to America because there is "manufacturing industry" there with jobs available. To raise money he turns to robbery, on the advice of a thuggish crony. The robbery is a fiasco, and Liliom turns his knife on himself before he is arrested. After death Liliom is taken before the magistrate in Heaven, as all suicides are, who condemns him to Purgatory and bids him to return to Earth for a day on his daughter's sixteenth birthday. Liliom brings a star as a gift, but when she is obstinate he hits her on the hand. However, it does not hurt - simple, good-willed souls, especially when dead and pure of heart, can't hurt people. And this is how Liliom is remembered by Juli who brings up their daughter in decency.
Babarczy hit upon the idea of exchanging two scenes in his production, putting the famous scene in Heaven as a "flash forward", a vision Liliom has before his death. The carousel barker was taken to the Heavenly police on a roller-coaster, looking exactly as how an uneducated showman would imagine it. Molnár's "legend from the outskirts" met with the more pithy poetry of the modern age.
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Tamás Koltai,
Editor of Színház, a theatre monthly, is The Hungarian Quarterly's regular theatre reviewer.
