Tamás Koltai
Tales from the Stage
[...] * Ferenc Molnár: Az üvegcipõ (The Glass
Slipper) * Dezsõ Kosztolányi: Édes Anna (Anna Édes)
* [...]
[...]
Ferenc Molnár was the great theatrical storyteller of the beginning
of the century. The play of his most frequently performed recently has
been Az üvegcipõ (The Glass Slippers). A fairy-tale set in
the outskirts of the capital, it is about a servant girl who learns her
poetry sitting up in the gallery of the National Theatre, who sees the
Prince Charming of her dreams in the form of a respectable cabinet-maker
in his fifties. Sipos, the cabinet-maker, however, is the longtime lover
of the landlady of a boarding house who decides that the time has come
to tie the knot--especially as another lover of hers, much younger than
Sipos, is about to marry someone else. But Irma, the servant girl, will
not have her "sweet'n'mad" Prince deceived and, at the marriage
feast, emboldened by a glass or two, comes clean about the love life of
his new spouse. After the scandal she is ready to start up as a "street-walker"--even
though it is not quite clear to her what the word means--were it not for
good fortune bringing together her and the honest, though grumpy Prince
of her dreams.
This latest production is directed by János Ács at the Új
Színház, fully aware that the sugar-coated squeamishness
of productions thirty or so years ago is now ob solete. He experiments
with genuine dra matic content, with vital, harsh colours and the grotesque
lyricism these produce.
[...]
Now for another story of a servant girl on stage, and this one is much
more gripping. The time and place is just about the same--Budapest just
after the First World War. The author is Dezsõ Kosztolányi,
poet, writer of fiction, trans-lator of poetry, journalist and, last but
not least, theatre critic--equally brilliant in each of his guises. Although
he never tried his hand at a play, his novel Édes Anna (Anna Édes,
1926) has been adapted for the stage several times (also filmed a few years
ago), and now most recently at the Madách Chamber Theatre, Budapest.
The story is simple. One day early in the morning, Anna Édes, a
maid in the upper middle-class Budapest home of the Vizys, kills both her
master and mistress with a knife. Her motives are unclear. She was not
really maltreated; the husband was amicably neutral towards her; true,
the wife was at times kind-hearted and caring, at other timess hysterical,
querulous and mean. True, too, that a reckless young relative of the couple
has seduced her, only to abandon her. Everyone is aghast at her terrible
deed--yes, this is all you can expect from people like these, you treat
them well and look what they offer you in return. The novel reflects the
state of Hungarian society after the 1919 Red Revolution, the brief "Commune",
through its finely depicted political and sociological tensions.
One is in fact puzzled at the choice of play by the Madách Theatre
where Cooney père et fils are regularly performed. The adaptation
is not necessarily topical and was made by a young modernist author, István
Tasnádi who, as a dramaturge, has safe hands and is absolutely professional.
He delivers and delivers well. The structure is all right, the scenes are
nicely wound up, the dialogue works. The story starts on a note of relief
over the collapse of the Hun garian Soviet Republic--this is a novelty;
ten years ago it would have been simply unthinkable. The performance is
impeccable, even though the title role, as was only to be expected, allows
only for a passive, undramatic personality.
The stage is too small for an upper- middle-class drawing-room. So the
set is arranged diagonally. A kitchen is squeezed in, entered from a tiny
lobby, and there is an access to the backstairs. There are backstairs,
but no servant's room. This is bad--a middle-class home in a Budapest apartment
house between the two wars was almost unimaginable without a servant's
room. So, at night Anna Édes pulls out an iron folding-bed from
the closet, makes her bed in front of the kitchen range, says her prayers
and goes to bed. This does not work. In a play about a servant, you cannot
do without a servant's room, for it is much more than just a bedroom--it
is a shelter. For Anna Édes, it equals the world. It is her empire
which bears the stamp of her personality. The kitchen, on the other hand,
is her mistresses's, Mrs Vizy's territory. Seduc tion cannot happen in
the kitchen as far as Anna is concerned, despite modern soft porn's liking
for it. The young master stealing into a kitchen is out of style.
And Kosztolányi calls for style. How did nice upper middle-class
people behave in the early years of the century? What did they wear? How
did they arrange their meals? What were their social conventions? What
was a party like with a cabinet minister as a guest? The replies the production
gives to these questions are random. The guests are noisy and vulgar, almost
caricatures. Yet they are not; they simply do not understand the norms
of natural behaviour on the stage. It is a simple truth that the ambiguous
is always more interesting on the stage. If Mrs Vizy is rambunctiously
mean and hysterical, a straightforward bitch, there is no play. It would
have been much more exciting to reveal the real faces behind the surface,
the hidden meanness, the inner core of the characters. When Anna gives
notice, this Mrs Vizy responds in a venomous temper, reproaching her for
her "disloyalty" with an air of superiority and contempt. Yet
her speech also contains the desperate sincerity of someone who feels she
has been offended. Here, tearful incredulity, hysterical self-pity and
indignation over the disloyalty of a maid she feels was treated well in
her home, would have been more rewarding. The young director, András
Léner, how ever, has not been able to get his cast to abandon its
routine solutions and clichés.
[...]
Tamás Koltai,
editor of Színház, a theatre monthly, is
The Hungarian Quarterly' regular theatre reviewer.
