Hungarian drawings-room plays struggled to be born in the opening years of the 20th century. Of its best practitioners, the theatre critic Judit Szántó writes: "They belonged to the intellectual vanguard of the Hungarian middle-class; as it happened, but not by chance, to the bourgeois intelligentsia of Jewish parentage, who experienced the most sensitively and the most consciously the contradictions in the awkward rise of bourgeoisie in Hungary. They attempted to create a bourgeois theatre of a European standard, without having a suitable social basis or theatre-going public or theatre structure; they had the illusion that the Hungarian bourgeoisie was or could be the class which represented the interests of the entire nation, providing its tone. At the same time, each of them went on a way determined by his own significant individual talent and tried to battle against the contradiction, only occasionally and temporarily resolvable, of how much the writer should sacrifice of himself to gain the publicity all-important for a playwright and at least a necessary measure of success."

Once the years have passed, grateful (or ungrateful) posterity resolves this contradiction simply and unambiguously: it either puts on the works born in the period or consigns them to oblivion.

Among the writers in question, Ferenc Molnár was the most successful, the only one to achieve international fame in the theatre and to retain it, even up to this day. Although his success in Hungary has not been unequivocal (not so much by audiences as by historians of literature) and despite Communist attempts to ignore him, Molnár's plays, except during the darkest years of Stalinism, have never been off the stage. The most popular are staged somewhere almost annually; Liliom (1909), which has been so succesful abroad that it even inspired a Broadway musical, Carousel, is a case in point.

The most recent production here has been at the Academy for Theatre and Cinematography in Budapest, by Árpád Schilling, who is studying direction there. (Before entering the Academy he had made a name for himself with significant work in the alternative theatre.) His treatment of the play, usually conceived as the "legend of the City Park" shows him to be unprejudiced. What we have here is a sentimental tale about a fairground barker, who breaks the hearts of servant girls. His nemesis is also a housemaid, Julika, who falls in love with the good-for-nothing. Liliom, the çi-devant aristo of the City Park, lives in sullen silence with Julika, after the swing-boat proprietress, another ex-lover, has thrown him out. When Julika becomes pregnant, he tries an unsuccesssful armed robbery and, to escape arrest, he commits suicide. In Heaven he is sentenced to purgatory, from where, after sixteen years, he may visit Earth for a day, to see his daughter.

The somewhat sugary-sweet story unfurls on a bare stage with a raw and poetic force. The director created a beginning-of-the-century atmosphere and, indeed, a social authenticity, through using period hit tunes and back-projecting period photographs. Laconism banishes sentimentality. Gone from the eponymous hero is the gift of the gab of a slum rowdy (a somewhat pseudo-literariness on the part of Molnár, who was more at home with the middle-class); what he has, instead, is the passive strength of the gangling dolt. Liliom is not willing to do penance like other conformists sent to purgatory. But Heaven, in this production, looks more like an insane asylum whose patients are subjected to the water cure—perhaps to wash individuality out of them. In Liliom's case this does not succeed. Even after sixteen years in Purgatory he remains what he has been. Or, rather, he tries to remain true to himself with the stubbornness of those who contemplate the ways of the world without understanding them. In this way, the old legend remains like the photographs projected onto the backwall: unretouched.

A similarly significant figure in the Hungarian theatre at the beginning of the century was Dezső Szomory, who never achieved the international success Molnár did. One reason is that the stylized language in his plays, growing tendrils in Art Nouveau style, flaming ecstatically, and forming arias in prose is practically untranslatable. Szomory is an author for the middle-classes just like Molnár, but with the difference that he realizes himself, and organizes his life, as a modern author keeping a certain supercilious distance. Molnár participated in the working days of society and of his profession (he frequently directed his plays himself), Szomory—in between his travels around Europe—locked himself into his room under the eaves in the inner city and received his visitors in extravagant poses, sometimes in theatrical surroundings, in astonishing costumes—he turned his life into a theatre.

Bella (1913), is one of his early plays. It shows in a typical manner the angle from which he observes the bourgeois with irony and self-irony. Bella herself is a simple middle-class girl whose lover is a count; he also has the ambitious young lady taught to sing, since he happens to be the intendant of the opera house. The relationship is blessed with a child; the unpleasant consequences are smoothed over by a marriage concluded in time with a lame dentist across the street. From then on, there is a parallel maturing of Bella's career as an opera singer and of her disappointment in the men who treat her as their prey. Ultimately she wreaks noble vengeance on her lovers and admirers, one of whom is Giacomo Puccini on a visit to Budapest. After a triumphant performance in Tosca, with which she conquers the entire male society wolf pack, she decides to give herself only to her impoverished husband, the lame dentist.

This Hungarian Lulu, unlike Wedekind's femme fatale, does not kill but simply tramples over hearts, and in Szomory's play she dresses herself in the peacock colours of Art Nouveau. In the first act of the Csiky Gergely Theatre's production in Kaposvár, she appears barefoot, soft, long hair undone, in a white nightshirt, trying to hide her pregnancy in girlish confusion and yet bearing it voluptuously, having just rid herself of the middle-class wrapper of good manners and, as if opened up like a ripe piece of fruit, she resembles nothing so much as a painting by Gustav Klimt. In Bella there is the challenging female, but she is warmed by the inner jubilation of a body programmed for motherhood. She loves the count who not only makes an operatic diva out of her but remakes her completely into a woman, a lover, everything; this feeling is fulfilment drowned in tears. Of course, at this point one cannot know yet that the count will "approve" of this motherhood only if he is not expected to legalize it. And Bella has enough of an instinct for life to draw the attention of her quite unsuspecting husband-designate to keeping distance as future spouses, already before matters actually come to light.

Director Zoltán Bezerédi juggles with Szomory's moods, convoluted text and tragi-pathetic grotesque adroitly enough. Unfortunately, after the first act it doesn't work so well, although the spirit and the aim-to-please quality of the production are still there. You cannot fault his analysis of the play. His stylistic sense functions well and there are, at most, casting problems.

A delicate point is the count-intendant. Certain patterns of speech, behaviour, and gestures are appropriate given aristocratic haughteur, operatic manners, and a senior post in the ministry of education, even if they appear ironized in some situations. It is entirely possible that an intendant who is a count is a boorish male, but even then an audience has to believe that he speaks three languages and is capable of getting a Puccini under contract. If, instead of a lecherous aristocrat, a gay faun pursues Bella in his underwear, that is not the same as casting off voluptuous elegance and bringing out the comic in panting. Bella too has difficulty in making it credible that the bourgeois girl is in conflict with the artist and that her contemptuous throwing of herself into everybody's arms is still motivated by disappointment in love. During her triumph in Tosca, with the musical world at her feet, this Bella is much more of a bourgeois girl than at any time before. There is no sense in her of the intoxication and the nausea, the conquering dramatic soprano (and at the same time down and out, all her illusions lost). She should really twist her dagger into everybody who visits her dressing room, to claim them for her own and cast them to her footstool, whether little boy or prince of the guards, government commissioner or maestro, tenor or critic. This should be a great, lustful, and guffawing orgy with the music of Tosca and the delusive stupor of the operatic entourage in the background. The director provides no Callas playback, allowing only orchestral parts to filter through the dressing-room door. Even if we can twice glimpse the performance from backstage, it is not effective enough. The voice would be more effective, even if we knew that it does not come from the actress. Floria throwing herself from the Castle of Saint Angelo directly into the arms of a dentist bearing a flowerpot dressed in the national colours—now that would be an ending more ironic than Puccini's finale.

The life and thinking of Lajos Bíró were diametrically different to Szomory's. He came to the theatre from journalism, and he put the stress, instead of stylistic romanticism and elaborate writing, onto the dry militancy of facts and onto unmasking the lies of a hypocritical world. He could have become a Hungarian Ibsen, if the Hungarian disease had not struck him and if he had not sacrificed his critical ardour on the altar of success. (Which was often merely for the sake of being performed.)

At the age of forty, he left the country to achieve international success in films. He was a pioneering scriptwriter of sound movies: his name will be remembered for classic scripts such as that for Korda's The Private Life of Henry VIII. Even in the nineteen-forties, he was still writing one-act plays in English and these were performed in England long after his death.

Yellow Lily is probably his best play. It is set in a large provincial town whose peace is disturbed almost every day by the pranks of an Archduke serving in the garrison. This twenty-year-old royal highness is wild and sentimental, already fed up with actresses and ballet dancers of easy virtue and, out of boredom, he and his fellow officers provoke scandals. One of their drunken revels in a restaurant is stopped from getting completely out of control by Jenő Peredy, a doctor designated by the townspeople to be the leader of the Radical Party just then being formed. The Archduke takes a fancy to the younger sister of the doctor, the beautiful and sensitive Judith and lays siege to her with nocturnal serenades under her window. In the meantime, the town's chief of police warns the founders of the party of the consequences of politicking, but the warning is given short thrift by these nouveau entrepreneurs, leaseholders, wholesalers. One night the Archduke tricks Peredy away from his apartment and, while he is gone, breaks in on Judit. The girl rejects his advances, and on his return her brother shoots and wounds the Prince. The doctor is arrested and is offered a deal by the reigning family in an effort to cover up the affair. Peredy, however, refuses even their most enticing offers of high posts with the firm intention of bringing ignominy to light. Not even the threat of prison or an insane asylum deters him, and he appeals to the political group under his leadership. But his former backers leave him in the lurch; indeed, he is truly alone, because Judith declares that she and the Archduke are actually in love with each other. The moral of the story is that the royal sower of wild oats has started on the road to redemption. The possibility of a morganatic marriage looms in the distance and the lone hero collapses.

Without the mendacious and compromising happy ending, the play could be in the tradition of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. Here, too, a maniacal seeker after truth tries to fight corruption and those who intrude on the peace of his family. It is not mere chance that the work has been resurrected after forty years: The Yellow Lily has become timely thanks to the behaviour of today's new bourgeoisie, to the political labyrinth of unexpected democracy, and by the intertwining of enterprise and corruption. The Budapest Chamber Theatre only partly gets this over. The production does not arouse any great excitement; the play looks more of a banal love story than a stirring social drama. The greatest problem is that director Péter Balázs could not turn the false happy ending inside out with the help of irony and sarcasm: we have to take seriously the redeeming love of the Grand Duke and the former convent schoolgirl. The mechanism for reassuring the public functions in the same way today as it did ninety years ago.

Ferenc Herczeg was a master on a larger scale, more cynical in serving the public. He came from a distinguished German burgher family, not speaking a word of Hungarian until he was ten. If Szomory felt himself to be the ruling prince of his own, autonomous, theatrical world—one of his visitors told a story about him playing the organ in his home wearing a crown —Herczeg was, in the period between the two world wars, indeed symbolically crowned as the prince of Hungarian writers by a Hungarian bourgeoisie under the spell of a noble past and of officialdom. Herczeg was enormously popular with this social class that entertained a pseudo-nostalgia to the "genteel" life, even if his novels and plays at times, mildly and with smiling irony, criticize its behaviour.

This is what he does in Monkey Theatre (1926). One critic today describes the play: "The author caricatures human society in the light of the monkey life. Man is worse than animals, says every turn of the story. All human civilization is but senseless lies. Otherwise the story is very human. A practical-minded scion of a declassé family wishes to solve his problems through a marriage of convenience, wishing to acquire the forest of monkeys as a dowry. He wants to marry the silly girl monkey, who is good at tennis, and he promises the other monkeys membership of the directorate of the enterprise to be founded. He succeeds in dividing the monkeys, who up to this point have kept their intellectual abilities a secret: those of the party of evolution become temporarily victorious, they fall for the trick for a while, and they visit the humans for a soirée. There, however, they corner their hosts, they prove that everything that human civilization can offer them makes no sense, and they return to the forest, where the girl monkey who has caused all this trouble finds herself a monkey mate.

Poking fun at general human traits (greed, adultery, title-hunting) found a response in audiences seeking amusement in its time, just as it does today. The allusions to paying taxes or to the detrimental effects of working too hard are also always up to date. István Iglódi, who directed the performance at the National Theatre probably also felt that the dramatic material was rather shallow; for this reason, he decided to use it as a libretto and had lyrics and music written for it. Herczeg's play became, on account of the banal rhymes and weightless music, much like an operetta or, with a little good will, a musical—for children. The actors in monkey costumes make a noise, they scratch themselves, and tumble around on trail-ing vines, much as they used to do in children's matinées forty years ago. Unfortunately, the production sums up the present National Theatre.

A peculiarly Budapest (in local parlance: "Pest") world is depicted by the plays of the journalist, poet, and newspaper editor Béla Zsolt. Octagon (1932) takes its name from the octagonal place in the heart of Pest, where it is set in two apartments opposite each other and in one of the cafés on the square. Its characters are the typical petit bourgeois of Pest: a dentist up to his ears in debt; a dental technician establishing his business; a mother of a marriageable daughter, scraping together her dowry; a nubile girl; a café freeloader; and a dubious individual who gets by arranging marriages. (The plot can be worked out from this list of characters.) At the end of the play man and woman, money and self-interest, find each other. That is all right, since neither innocence nor true love enter into it. But here, too, the tradition of making everything look nicer continues: the middle-class girl, now pregnant, and the dental technician accepting her and her dowry, even though she is "maculate," believe that they love each other.

Béla Zsolt's play was directed by Gábor Berényi in the Budapest Chamber Theatre, with the simplicity it needs. This is the type of production, harbouring no surprises, that offers one the joy of recognizing things one has always known. The whole is like an old-fashioned soap opera: it has a workaday authenticity and can be continued anywhere, to any lengths.

It was probably nostalgia that brought Magda Szabó's An Old-fashioned Story on stage again. The title itself indicates its spirit and style. However, it sticks out here that it was written not in the first decades of the century but in the 1970s. Magda Szabó, novelist and playwright, is the universally esteemed as the grande dame of Hungarian literature, and she has brought to the stage the "family novel" of her own youth. Set in a quiet country house, in a large market-town, at county balls, and in a school run by nuns is a soap opera, unfolding over a long period of time and involving several generations—in two tightly-tailored parts. Its characteristics are pithy literary dialogue, close scenic division, and economy of structure. Magda Szabó did not flatten the action by drawing it out long like strudel dough, as TV series do; she has concentrated upon the dramatic points, she has condensed and stressed the essential. It could indeed have been the plethora of TV soap operas that helped put An Old-fashioned Story onto the stage again. Audiences likes stories which can be easily seen through and empathized with fairy tales, the struggle of human destinies, and exemplary characters bearing the blows of fate. Now that theatre has in part become postmodern, audiences perhaps like these stories even more, finding in them their own concerns. Thus they can see how the strong mater familias Mária Rickl tries to keep the family together and how it falls apart anyway, although there is her granddaughter Lenke Jablonczay who preserves what is valuable in her own, different, way. The action encompasses fifteen years, during which we experience the lifestyle of the old noble families, Catholic and Calvinist traditions and hostilities, business deals, family and marital conflicts, love, hate, jealousy, disappointment, illness, and death—just as in proper old-fashioned stories.

The National Theatre has for once managed to stage an appropriate and balanced production. Their guest director, János Meczner, did not force either a theatricality alien to its character or a naturalist leisureliness onto it; instead, he attempted to walk through the story from start to finish as simply as possible. Here the sets provided useful help. Downstage Mária Rickl's living room attests to her ascetic practicality—struck only once for the ballroom scene, when the entire space is needed—and behind this, scene by scene, are the locations of the outside world. The sight is sober, but not boring; the play is made to function by the text, by articulateness.

The old-fashioned can have very novel effects at times. Especially if we are aware that we can learn much about the awkward development of the bourgeoisie from the drama we call bourgeois.