Tamás Koltai
Kings, Dukes, and Counts
Milán Füst: Negyedik Henrik király (King Henry the Fourth) • Attila Lőrinczy: Balta a fejbe (Hatchet into the Head) • Imre (Emerich) Kálmán: Csárdáskirálynő (The Czardas Princess) • Albert Szirmai: Mágnás Miska (Mishka the Magnate)
There is every reason to describe Milán Füst’s King Henry the Fourth as a historical play. (Füst himself gave the number in letters rather then numerals). The subject is the Holy Roman Emperor excommunicated by the Pope, who went to Canossa and who, according to historians, was an incalculable, whimsical fellow who acted on incomprehensible impulse. This is how we see him in the play too, although Füst hardly overdid the homework. The actions and the character of the eponymous hero correspond to fact; yet the setting of the play is not really historical but rather the stage of the author’s psyche. That expression—"the stage of my psyche"—was a favourite formula of this great individualist, who created equally significant work as a poet, novelist, aesthete, or as Shakespeare translator, and who, in the twilight years of his long life, thundered at the world in prophetic rage about life and literature, both in his solitude at home and in his university lectures.
Füst still is one of the great non-understood. In his younger days he besieged the theatres with his plays; the theatre managers, whose goal was to entertain—even at the Hungarian National Theatre—rejected these plays glowing with dark dramatic passion. He lived long enough to see, in the early sixties, two of his works on stage. The Hungarian theatrical world remembers the 1964 premičre of King Henry the Fourth as legendary. When the curtain came down, a trembling hand, caught in a spotlight, reached out of the proscenium box to acknowledge the audience’s rapture. Then a greying, King Lear-like head showed up and finally the entire man sitting, as on a throne, in the well-upholstered easy chair of the box. The title role was played then by Miklós Gábor, one of the finest actors of his time, who was almost eighty when he died last year.
Written in iambic verse, King Henry
the Fourth was naturally inspired by Shakespeare whom Füst admired, but it
also formulates within the trappings of a historical play a typical middle-class conflict: the soul of the "lyric ego" at war
with both itself and the world, showing strength in its weakness, struggling between extremes in its lost state. The key to Henry’s character is the deliberate clowning, the cutting mockery and self-irony, the suddenness of turning from cruelty into doing penance and then back again. In a word, the exaggeration of the individual. The character has no "key," in the same way that there is no key to Hamlet’s procrastination, or to the open villainy of Richard III, or to the sudden jealousy of Leontes. Or, if there is one, it is no more than a rough compensation for covering up the inner sensibility. Henry does not take his kingship seriously: he womanizes, humiliates his wife, and when he is treated like a naughty child, he unexpectedly promises to mend his ways. After regaining his throne he takes vengeance for the wrongs he has suffered, he mocks the high aristocracy, he alienates his sons, who worship their mother, and stages orgies for which the Pope curses him. True, after his penitential journey to Canossa he again strengthens his power, but his grown-up sons ultimately treat him as he had treated them. They depose and incarcerate him. At the end of the several decades the play covers, the care of a kind-hearted nun lightens the days of the broken old man.
The National Theatre of Győr has revived Füst’s play, which has not been seen too often on stage, even in the last quarter of a century. An interesting point about this production is the fact that it has been directed by Géza Tordy, once a leading actor of Budapest’s Vígszínház, and has a member of the present Vígszínház company, Attila Kaszás, in the title role. Today the Vígszínház, which can seat more than a thousand people, would not dare to take on Füst’s play, not expecting a public response sufficient to justify keeping it in the repertory over several seasons. The box-office now rules. (The last premiere at the Vígszínház was Ben Elton’s Popcorn, a commercial success in London.)
The Győr theatre has Hungary’s largest stage—a problem to directors—and the huge spaces are put to work splendidly by Róbert Menczel, the designer. The trap-door, revolving stage and lighting produce an impressive visual image which suggests the historical perspective, yet costumes and behaviour are closer to the present day. Kaszás is more powerful in portraying Henry in his old age, so the play culminates splendidly. In the last scene, the deposed king deftly handling his wheelchair, for all the world a typical inmate of an old people’s home, flips at his nurse the pits of bottled sour cherries given to him as a gift. A bitterly sardonic bourgeois ending to a drama about a king.
It would probably be grotesque to call
Attila Lőrinczy’s play Hatchet into the Head a historical play, even though here too the actors speak, love, and murder in Shakespearian pentameter. But the characters are present-day nouveaux riches, big shots, small-scale gangsters, girls of easy virtue, heavies, and ghosts returning from the beyond. Right in the first scene, the playboy Richárd, who comes from a good family, happens to say as he is lying in his blood, after being tossed out of a suburban bar: "I surely was not born to play, / For, even when I win, I don’t care a monkey’s fuck…" Later, over the urn containing the ashes of his uncle, killed in a yachting accident for which Richárd must bear some responsibility, he assaults his freshly widowed aunt Anna. The ghost of his father strengthens the intentions of this alienated young man and he decides to have his entire family—except for his mother—murdered by two contract killers. The plan misfires and Richárd comes to a bad end.
Clearly the author, in his first play, is diluting the essence of Richard III and of Hamlet into a contemporary drama. This has already worked several times in reverse, with numerous maffioso-Richards and bungled schoolboy-Hamlets. Lőrinczy is trying to find out whether Shakespearean language and dramaturgy can produce a Shakespearean conflict in today’s circumstances. Or something similar. After all, by now even the interpretations of Shakespeare have become devalued; if one can make a parallel between the two ages at all, then the Renaissance age is savage, raw, and has format, while ours is savage, raw, and petty. It is not Lőrinczy who waters things down, but the life pattern at his disposal, which is devoid of meaning and thin. This is the medium in which our Hamlet-Richárd, who does not decide to become a villain but is driven to escape into villainy by what his loathed family did in the past, must suggest both ethos and fatal depravity.
No mean task either for the hero or for the author. The lecherous, swanky, unbearable family is a sufficient motive for bitterness. On the other hand, a new development is that the father’s ghost provides him with no alternative—except for an instruction to recover his stolen Rolex; indeed, Richárd interprets his high-toned terseness as encouraging the unscrupulous deed. In the end it is a senile grandfather keeping vigil over his son’s urn who prevents the murder of the entire family by the hired killers, one of whom even bites the dust, while the other finishes off the commissioner of the deed with choice tortures.
The piece switches back and forth between grand guignol and buffoonery, between pamphlet and tragedy, and the whole is kept together by Shakespearean blank verse embedded in a style which I would call, for want of a better word, rhetorical argot. It is language that plays first fiddle in Lőrinczy, by raising the underworld cant to the "poetic," or by parodying archaism, or by caricaturing conversational snobbery, or by being an ironic intarsia of quotations. It is the language that meshes the horrible and the risible, the grotesque and the tragic, the majestic and the petty as, for example, in a pathetic monologue by one of the killers in which he nostalgically laments on his childhood while, switching into drastically abusive language, he is slicing up his still living victim. This blasphemous eloquence, which has several variations, works splendidly in the play. What it cannot do, however, is portray in greater depth. The speech of Lőrinczy’s figures characterizes manner, not character. Thus the hired heavies easily change into buffooners in the murder scene and the ghost-father, to make up
for his ghost face, appears in the company of "heavenly prostitutes." Even the protagonist Richárd remains a commonplace character without the flowery fabric of speech. This much can be held against an author who otherwise exhibits a powerful dramatic (mainly theatrical) talent.
Gábor Máté, who directed this production by the studio of the Katona József Theatre, could have turned the piece into a simple parody of Shakespeare. He succeeded in avoiding this pitfall and took the play for what it is, a new Hungarian drama. The most important element in his stylization is a set suggesting the theatrical framework and signing places and objects, distancing them from reality. Costume, lighting and musical effects are also used to this end. Although I could imagine the play produced in a more realistic manner (the more natural the medium in which blank verse is heard, the more frivolous the contrast between the subject and the tone), Máté’s perception of the play has a consistent style.
In the last scene Richárd and his father’s ghost (transcendental in a transparent raincoat) are looking at his own funeral. Father and son, stepping beyond this tavern of today (as once the poet Attila József described breaking out of a petty existence) stand phlegmatically side by side; all they have to say to each other concerns the result of the weekend football game. Meanwhile, the women digging the grave disinter a cat’s skull. "Alas, poor cat" they say. Hommage ŕ Shakespeare, we can say, sensing the change in the times.
An inexhaustible store for our relation-
ship to the kings, princes, or, at least, counts of the past is the Hungarian operetta. (It is actually Viennese, but in Hungary nobody takes this claim seriously since, after all several of the great names, above all Ferenc (Franz) Lehár and Imre (Emerich) Kálmán, were Hungarians.) The most famous work is Kálmán’s The Czardas Princess. No theatrical season goes by without its being performed somewhere. The most important revival of the nineties was that at Kaposvár, whose director altered the text. (Nothing new in this, as the "Hungarian variant," now classic, was prepared in the fifties for the legendary prima donna Hanna Honthy, creating the principal role out of a minor one.) At Kaposvár it was something else: they put the melodramatic love story into quotation marks. The young Habsburg archduke does, of course, win the hand of the cabaret singer and it turns out that his aristocratic mother had also been fished out of the cabaret. The Kaposvár director, however, went beyond caricaturing the sentimental "three cheers for love!" cliché (which, by the way, was the original title of Kálmán’s operetta) to choreograph the grotesque dance macabre of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Thus he postdated the story by a few years to the end of the First World War and, in a rewritten third act he has the entire cast march, to the sweet strains of a waltz, onto the cruiser Novara moored in Fiume, which then duly and leisurely sinks.
Although the production by the Katona József Theatre of Kecskemét does not go that far, it offers pleasant entertainment. The comic dancer, for example, steps out of a shell made up of the cabaret girls, like Botticelli’s Venus. As he dances, his cuff twists to a length of several metres. Prince Lippert-Weilersheim, the romantic lead, behaves like a defiant democrat stepping beyond the bounds of his social class. On the other hand, the cabaret singer advancing to the rank of a princess, Szilvia Vereczky, does not become the patriotic girl donning the Hungarian national colours as is usual in traditional performances. (In the original play this character is a Romanian, Sylva Varescu.) If there is anything provocative in István Verebes’ direction, it is in his not falling in with the traditional rose-coloured idyll. Toward the end, a footman carries a gramophone with a funnel across the scene, from which issues the voice of the famous diva, Hanna Honthy. This, too, is a kind of hommage.
At Kaposvár, where there is a long-standing tradition of poking fun at operettas, the director of a famous production of The Czardas Princess, János Mohácsi, staged another popular operetta, Mishka, the Magnate, by Albert Szirmai. This too is a story about the "class war". István Baracs, a civil engineer working near a count’s château, meets the young comptesse Rolla Korláth and, naturally, they fall in love. The noble family, just as naturally, would not dream of a mésalliance, whereupon the engineer takes vengeance: he dresses up his stableboy as a count, and "Count Mishka" enjoys himself by cheeking the aristocracy present at a ball. The director also puts the clock forward by a few years, so that this 1916 piece takes place after the First World War and after the hundred days of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. At the very beginning, Count Korláth makes frequent and threatening reference to leading figures in the defeated Communist dictatorship to the recalcitrant workers building the railroad. (They, of course, do not figure in the original.) This operetta count is friendly with the commander of a white-terror squad, holds racist views, and makes contemptuous statements about Blacks, Asians and (naturally) the Gypsies, as well as about organized workers. And he asks Baracs, the engineer replacing his arrested predecessor: "Are you a Serb?" This becomes a kind of ceterum censeo: every time Baracs indignantly mentions that he had been looked down upon as a Serb, everyone asks "Are you really a Serb?"
In a play which even in its original form is about the vengeance taken by a technocrat against the aristocracy by means of a stableboy passed off as a count, and in which the insulted young comptesse retorts by dressing up the kitchen maid as
a countess, the addition of a pinch of racism, nationalism, and irredentism to the class-struggle hoax is only icing on the cake. If everybody speaks contemptuously of the Gypsies anyway, even the stableboy playing the title role, then why could the butler of the count not be a Scotsman, especially if, according to an interpolation, "being Scotch means the same to the English as being a Gypsy means to us?" And if the principal guest expected throughout the play, the eccentric count shooting in Africa, marries the daughter of a tribal chief (this is in the original play), then why could the black beauty not appear as a perfect Parisian lady of fashion to embarrass the racist host?
All Mohácsi does is to thoroughly examine the consequences of the basic situation, from the morganatic marriage
to the unsaleable wheat crop. For the
original background conflict of Mishka,
the Magnate is a railroad swindle. Count Korláth wants the branch line to be built to his granary, and the stubborn engineer Baracs gives in—the price of his marrying into the family. Mohácsi’s scornful gesture is that even the main helper of love breaking down class barriers, the Grandmother in the count’s family, takes the side of self-sacrifice: in the name of her old flame, then a notary’s clerk and now holding a top official post, she even holds out the hope to the subborned engineer that he would be "given the title of a count."
"I beg you, in Africa conditions are, so to speak, Asiatic" says the civilized elephant shooter to the boorish count. This, at any rate, is grotesque. (Asian was long the disparaging term used by Hungarian snobs considering themselves to be the centre of Europe.)
Thus the play continues being written, the daft jokes acquire a malicious social semiotics, and that not only by verbal additions but also on the classic arena of operetta, the ritually enlarged ball ensemble. The mimicry of the aristocracy in the second act, stepped up to the point of being absurd, is pure pleasure. The guests, provoked into imitating what they believe is fashionable, initially Mishka’s modish dress (he has rolled up the lapels of Baracs’s dinner jacket which was too large for him), but later they also get round to smacking bottoms and his particular way of holding his female partners. The guttural r of the kitchen maid/countess starts an epidemic of spitting, and so on. Mohácsi unleashes the well-organized mayhem in which the first-class Kaposvár company participates with its usual discipline and individuality. A significant role is given to the exotic aquarium of the ballroom, all kinds of fishy creatures turn up in undignified positions, the galaxy of guests takes turns in the swimming pool, on the banquet tables, and on the chandelier; in the course of a duel with pistols and swords a column falls over, the conductor’s baton catches fire, the musical instruments come up from the orchestra pit and so on as the action escalates. This operetta blown up out of proportion and taken to its own idiotic extreme is truly great fun.
It is a pity that some of the actors cannot manage operetta with their voices, so that it is chiefly the libretto which remains memorable in this musical piece.
Tamás Koltai,
editor of Színház, a theatre monthly, is
The Hungarian Quarterly’s regular theatre reviewer.
