Tamás Koltai
Waiting for a Conflict
László Garaczi: Prédales (Preywatch) * István Tasnádi: Kokainfutár
(The Cocaine Courier) * Péter Nádas: Találkozás (Encounter) *
László Kamondi: Médeia-variációk (Medea Variations)..
A recent festival of contemporary Hun garian drama presented a selection of Hungarian plays written in the last two years. The audiences included some fifty theatre professionals from twenty countries and the plays were selected by the editors of the journal Színház (Theatre). The event involved workshops, play readings in English and German and discussions, all of this with an expressly “stock exchange” tenor. We tried to “sell” the plays which may draw interest abroad well. Thus among the guests were translators and festival managers alongside directors, actors, dramaturges and critics. Among the visitors were Bernard Faivre d’Arcier, director of the Avignon Festival, and the playwright Tankred Dorst, director of the Bonn Biennial, who made no secret of their intention to attract authors and stage workshops into international programmes sponsored by themselves. Accordingly, events were not just centred around the relevant texts but also on the creative teams that had brought about the productions. In other words, the selection was motivated by the theatrical qualities of the works.
[...]
The fifty-five year old Péter Nádas’s Encounter is from the outset close to an oratorio, or in any case a musical composition. This is not a new play, being the central piece of a trilogy written in the 1980s, which received several performances. It is a work which created its own style and dramatic structure, practically a “classic”, presumably the reason why it was included in the festival programme.
Nádas, who is primarily a novelist, indeed, an internationally acclaimed one, once wrote about his intentions as a playwright: “I have tried to rely on the musicality of the language to create a subtle linguistic medium in which the actor is compelled to speak with his whole body, with the inner aspects of his body. To relate in the idiom of the body that which I have indicated with the musical information of the text. My starting point therefore was - and this again is a most primitive thing - that the theatre is not literature, but it is not life either. The theatre is in fact most theatrical! Well, then let it be theatrical!”
The plot of Encounter is not easy to set down. Maria, a woman preparing for her death, receives the son of her former lover and tells him about his father. For many years Maria had cherished these memories in an unheated room. In this middle-aged woman, dressed in black festive clothes, the young man at last is confronted with his dead father’s mistress, whom he had often pictured to himself, and with the true story of his father. The story of Maria’s life unfolds in fragments. She was born into an aristocratic family, she married a Jewish capitalist, and after the death of her husband in the fifties, she was arrested and deprived of all her property and belongings. After her release she found happiness in a short, passionate relationship. Every morning the same man came towards her in the square. These mute encounters went on for several months, until the man finally led her into a room where they finally consummated this passion, still without knowing anything about each other. One day Maria was arrested again, beaten up and dragged in for questioning - in front of the man who was her lover. He gave back the case, and Maria was then condemned. After her second release, the man came towards her every morning in the square just as before, until the morning he took out a pistol and blew out his brains before her. The young man lives and suffers through every thread of this story. Finally Maria undresses and washes him with ritual deliberation and puts him to bed. Then she brings the story to its end by pouring out some poisoned wine for herself and leaving the room. The Boy is left on his own.
A political and a sacral story are here superimposed, turning into the personal fates of the two characters. The performance is anti-naturalistic and ceremonious, and structured by the music composed, according to the author’s intentions, by László Vidovszky, and played on three instruments. Music here plays a completely equal part, which counterpoints, supplements and furthers verbal communication. As a result the staging of Encounter poses difficulties for the director. History and myth, the everyday world and the sacral, past and present, are intermingled in the play. The story gives place to happening, and this cannot be directly related but only conveyed, placed into a situation that has a simultaneously unique and archetypical effect. Contrasts can only be dissolved in the ritual: the encounter between Maria and the Boy, the Father incarnated in the Boy, a Father who crossed the same square as Maria day after day, the silent passion between the two, which only twice found fulfilment (in a room which is a copy of the room where Maria and the Boy are now meeting), the third encounter of Maria, twice imprisoned and beaten up, with the man in his capacity as prosecutor, and after her release, the man’s suicide in the square, the Father’s late absolution in the Boy, the purgation of the crime through the washing of his body, Maria’s suicide with the poisoned sacrificial wine, the bequeathing of the “story” to the Boy - all this calls for acting that differs qualitatively from conventional psychological realism.
Tamás Koltai,
Editor of Színház, a theatre monthly, is The Hungarian Quarterly’s regular theatre reviewer.
