Tamás Koltai
György Spiró: Kvartett (Quartet)
[...]
Known both as an outstanding novelist and a playwright, György
Spiró is one whose intent is to clear up obscurities, rather than
create them. His new play, a four-handed Quartet, went on in the Harmadik
Színház (The Third Theatre) in Pécs--a small studio.
The Woman is the daughter of the Old Man and the Wife. The Old Man had
saved the Guest's life in 1957, that is, after the suppression of the 1956
Revolution. They had spent their boyhood playing football, and at one time
the Old Man had just told the Guest to get away. He knew that in 1956 the
Guest had stood guard at the factory gate, with a gun in his hand, that
the authorities were rounding up all those on their lists, the Guest included.
He got to Vienna and from there to the US. Now he is back to show his gratitude
to the Old Man.
The formula is simple--four persons confined in a small kitchen, trying
to sort out a situation which is none too simple. Yet this is exactly what
proves to be impossible. The Guest is searching for childhood memories--the
house in an outer suburb that has been pulled down, traces of his parents
who died without his seeing them again. He wants to quit the bustle of
the West and his alienated family, to use his savings to build a new home
just like the old one, with a courtyard, human-sized, suited to a quiet
life--and to find a new family in the Old Man's family. The Old Man, his
"saviour", remembers nothing about the Guest nor his own good
deed. He had been a trade unionist and head of a personnel department up
to 1989 and thinks that currently the country is being stolen and sold
out to the capitalists. He believes that the Guest must also have been
sent by them to keep an eye on him, for they know the Idea will be resurrected
in a purer form. He either sits and watches a TV sports channel or sits
in the library copying out old newspapers in an exercise-book before "they"
make away with the past. The Wife's coordinates are the stove, the sink,
chicken paprika and pasta. In the end the Woman, a tired and worn-out mother
of a 17-year-old girl, is maddened by the credit card the Guest has offered
as well as an expensive car as a gift; lured by the prospect of wealth,
she desperately tries to tie the frustrated do-gooder to her through business
and family bonds.
The four of them obviously speak different languages. Though apparently
all express themselves in the mother-tongue, they have different obsessions;
they have been ruined in four different ways by the world's madness. Four
distorted minds are disgorging thoughts in words that have no chance of
ever meeting. Four pathetic prayermills keep reiterating things, and the
more grotesque and tragicomic the situation, the more we sense that they
are far from stupid. It is the world that fails them, for it is no longer
livable in and has turned the survivors into distorted self-deceivers going
through the motions of living.
Spiró's violent, coarse, "unliterary" play is shaped
according to the classical unities of time, space and action, and is staged
very successfully by director János Vincze. He reduces the stage
to a 6x7 square metre kitchen, reducing also the auditorium to give the
audience the feel of being in a small panel-built estate flat. Even though
the sound of the television in the adjoining room is heard all the time,
true to the author's instructions, the acting never deteriorates into mere
naturalism. The actors don the costumes that Spiró offers them with
ease--for some time now he has not bothered to give individual features
to his heroes, here he omits even to give them names, thereby entrusting
his characters, who are differentiated stylistically, to the imagination
of the audience--and they do fill them up as best they can, using their
bodily warmth and mental capacities to the maximum.
This cacophonic Quartet is the music of our day, a sort of Zeitstück
really topical at the time of its première. Sadly it will remain
so for quite some time.
Tamás Koltai,
Editor of Színház, a theatre monthly, is The Hungarian
Quarterly's regular theatre reviewer.
