Whenever there are new plays of good quality in reasonable quantity, and whenever these are well produced, we can relax in the belief that the theatre is keeping abreast of literature. Yet this does not mean that it does so with life: the received wisdom is that for reality to be faithfully reproduced, original plays with contemporary themes are needed. But what happens when the writers do not write new plays about present concerns? What happens when they present what they have to say about today in a Shakespearean mode?

That is the time when the "ready-made" has to be recut. Writers and directors work on the material their customers bring them, just as bespoke’s tailors used to in the Hungary of yore.

Géza Bereményi, for example, has borrowed from the screen his own story which he filmed as the highly successful Eldorado, and turned it into a stage play at Zalaegerszeg. Bereményi is a phenomenon on the literary scene, originally establishing himself with his short stories and novels, who came to fame with biting, intellectually and politically charged songs, arranged in cycles, that for years now have been performed and recorded by Tamás Cseh on stage at the Katona József Theatre. Still later Bereményi, who in his early days had made a living by writing dubbing-scripts for foreign films (in the 1960s and 70s most foreign films were shown here dubbed, on a smaller scale they still are) suddenly appeared as a movie director. He had no film-school training, he simply learned on the job as an assistant director, and he enjoyed considerable success already with his first film, not only at home but also abroad. Since then he has had several prize-winning films to his credit, while continuing to write, both fiction and drama. One of his plays he directed himself. For the past eighteen months he has been the artistic director at the Hevesi Sándor Theatre of Zalaegerszeg; so he must have decided that he would have an easier time of it by making his debut with "tried and proven material" and naturally enough, undertook personally the tasks both of adapting the film Eldorado to the stage and of directing the performance.

The Price of Gold is about money, a topic that has not been untimely since Phoenician times. It is also about power bought with money. And about how money cannot make people happy. It is also about wasted lives, about the vicissitudes of history, about riding out the storm.

Commonplaces from first to last.

But that is beside the point. Bereményi tells a tale. For the past twenty years he has followed the tracks of a man. The same story. For the past twenty years he has been showing the same scene: a flea market at the outskirts of the city where nothing ever changes, while the whole world is being turned upside down. In Hungary, the last writer to have had the courage to do this was Endre Fejes in his novel Rozsdatemető (Junkyard) at the beginning of the 1960s. Ever since everybody has kept clear of epic material in the theatre. Of the story. It has been curtains for stories since then. There are no tales anymore. Only "textual substratum".

Dialogue, yes. Human condition, yes. Language, yes.

Ironically, The Price of Gold is an out-and-out avant-garde play. Its characters are amazingly alive and recognizable, its scenes unbearably life-like. The attitudes of the characters, and their speech, are provocatively quotidian. The dramatic structure is unashamedly three-part, if only to allow time for changing the sets during the intermissions.

This stirring "modernism" actually has a message. The low angle. The one used in Eldorado, when the little boy suffering from diphtheria goes from stall to stall choking on his cough, with a low-angled camera staggering after him. Bereményi’s viewpoint is the low-angle camera position. The market level. The level of everyday life. The horizon of the stall-holder "Uncle Sanyi", who is willing to do business with anybody: with the Germans and the Russians, the Communists and foreigners, with thieves, informers, body guards, party officials and the re-emerging capitalists—so that he can acquire possessions. Not only material goods. Influence. Power. Future. He buys his grandson off his son-in-law. He buys the life of his grandson from death (by not letting the ambulance men take the sick boy to a hospice for the dying, then paying an inexperienced doctor a gold bar to perform an operation). He would equally like to buy the boy’s love, to make sure that someone would take his place. But that is beyond his reach. The ideology of money goes up in smoke just as that other, similar delusion, Soviet-type socialism, which kept the characters of the Fejes novel down at the level of room and kitchen accomodation.

The Price of Gold spans the same two decades as Junkyard. We should be able to extend both stories in time right up to the present. We would find many similarities. Only politicians try to measure life in changes of regimes or the cycles of parliaments. From this low-angle camera position the whole thing looks like a simple case of swapping ideologies. The frog’s perspective continues to be low. That is the message of Bereményi’s play.

As a director, Bereményi has given a great impetus to the Zalaegerszeg company. The performance is team-work par excellence. There are no stars, but even the smallest episode makes an impact. The dialogue is simple and uncomplicated, as the mosaic-like structure could not carry an over-abundance of details. A sentence or a gesture always pushes forward the story. Close-ups require such "simple techniques"; Bereményi was able to transplant from his cinematic experience the sociographical power of the actors’ presence. Watching the main character in the third part, selling roasted pumpkin seeds at the flea market from two small sacks, with his eyes set on the timeless horizon and shouting out roughly, we see the emblematic substance of the character. A kind of Golem frozen in infinity, completely emptied and having come to terms with everything, ready to embark on the last journey.

Bereményi usually resolves each scene and each act in a musical mood; with vile emotional effects piling up, the performance ends in a Grand Guignol tableau vivant, while the flea market is being torn apart by a demolition gang in a film-like take. If there had been a camera, it would have slowly been raised high at this point, before the words "The End" appear, just as in movies made in the sixties.

For emblematic stories one has to turn to the classics. Heinrich von Kleist’s story Michael Kohlhaas was adapted to the Hungarian stage back in the seventies in a version by the Transylvanian writer András Sütő, under the title Egy lócsiszár virágvasárnapja (A Horse Coper’s Palm Sunday), being performed even as late as the 1980s.

The story draws its power from the moral outrage generated by a feeling of helplessness in the face of the law: the horse coper, who rebels because of the illegal seizing of his horses, is turned into "a robber and a murderer by his sense of rectitude", in Kleist’s words. So when we morally endorse the violent acts that he commits in order to serve justice—and this we cannot help doing—we actually let our moral principles and common-sense notions of justice triumph over the administration of justice expropriated by authority. In other words, we are moralizing, and this is the only, possibly quite useless and self-destructive, weapon in our hands against the authorities who have the sole right to interpret the law.

When István Tasnádi made the two seized horses the main characters of his own adaptation of Kleist’s story, Közellenség (Public Enemy), he emphazised this moral—or "moralizing" if you wish—view. Rather than telling the story from the viewpoint of the horses, he shifts the emphasis from the social sphere to the private sphere. This can serve two purposes. On the one hand, Kohlhaas’ story can lose some of its pathos, which audiences today would hardly be able to put up with (we shall see how the basic story is turned into a grotesque play in the Katona József Theatre’s remarkable version), and on the other hand, lyrical love can replace the idyllic family life sacrificed on the altar of a maniacal search for justice, in the form of the anthropomorphic behaviour of the narrators, the stallion and the mare.

Naturally, the actors do not play as horses, they are rather people showing the behavioural attributes of horses. Crude imitation, neighing and the clatter of hooves are out of the question. There are no horse tails and bridle bits, only iron heels. And posture. A somewhat cocksure posture, hands in pockets, is the stallion’s distinguishing mark, while the mare’s are an erect carriage, head held high, proud smile. The stallion watches Kohlhaas’ adventures silently and with an inner approval, although the mare sometimes utters her doubts also. Dressed in an elegant, formal attire, they cut a fine figure as long as they are still in prime condition. Worked to death and soaking wet, they become begrimed on the sand-covered floor. At the beginning and the end of the play, constituting the narrative framework, dressed in underwear and torn socks, they show signs of physical abuse and humiliation.

A love story unfolds on stage, one that abounds with teasing, irony, humour and tragedy. The stallion off-handedly accepts the mare’s approaches—he is a professional stud who only inseminates as a public service. By the time they have found each other amidst troubles, they are separated by force and the stallion goes to his destiny: he is gelded. (A touching moment in the production is when the ex-stallion turns to the audience asking them if anyone would be kind enough to stand in for him, and the mare defiantly shakes her head at the audience: she wants no one else’s colt.

In sharp contrast with the human dimension of the horses, the "background story" is presented as the mad grotesque of an inhuman world. The gentle horse coper is made into a public enemy by monstrous and odious characters, gnomish princes and guileful courtiers. The actor in the title role, a man apparently endowed with remarkable physical qualities, has to tackle a miniature track of obstacles with ditches and draw-bridges, stocks and iron chains, which are eventually used to hang him by the leg, like a butchered animal. The self-destructive heroism in his pursuit of the law becomes a series of action-man escapades. Physically identified with the role of the manic seeker of justice, Kohlhaas chops wood—accompanied by fierce martial tunes—as if he was chopping up his enemies. Burnt and looted towns are symbolized by four burning torches in the four corners of the stage. A horse race is simulated by the actors sitting in basins and propelling themselves forward with their hands. A miniature guillotine crushes a green apple. This well-ordered stylization and the emotive and mimetic skills of the actors produce a unique combination. The epitome of motherhood, the wife Lisbeth, spends most of her time sitting on a plank suspended from the ceiling, with her two babies under her arms. (She continues to sit there even after her death, avidly watching events.) The lawless baron is a champion wrestler, the dwarf prince is the symbol of deformed power. Martin Luther, the champion of ideological reconciliation, is busy coping with his flatulence.

From time to time the demonstrative yet crudely life-like story is interrupted by musical effects. The tragic end of the horses provides the epilogue: beaten and fated to die, they waltz into the knackers’-yard in each other’s arms. "This is how we ended up here", the gelding finishes the story. The mare turns to the audience: "How about you?"

Chalk Circle is a production by the Móricz Zsigmond Theatre of Nyíregyháza that more or less follows the story line of Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, without actually using the author’s text. Apart from a few sentences by Brecht, the text is by István Mohácsi and János Mohácsi, the latter also directing. (The lyrics to the songs were also written by the brothers, and not even the music is "original": it was composed by Béla Faragó.)

It would perhaps be helpful to describe a typical scene to give some idea about the nature of the adaptation. Using a piece of chalk, Judge Adcak draws a small circle on a fireplace, the appointed pulpit. That is where the two sides can place their bribes. The judge occasionally slips into the role of counsel for the defence, and he and his assistant often change their clients, switching between prosecuting and defending. Finally Adcak rules that the child should stay with the foster mother, rather than the real mother, himself admitting that "he could not explain why". In fact, the Mohácsi brothers did precisely what Brecht had done, reshape the parable in harmony with the spirit of the age, just as Brecht had adapted the Chinese cautionary tale to his own purposes.

The time has come for the world to be ruled by moral order, Brecht claims. In troubled class societies, where political coups succeed each other, the resourceful son of the people turned official temporarily assumes the task of restoring moral order, but he finds it better to disappear before people find out that he acted to protect the "mother-hearted" have-nots and also to line his own pocket. In the new world no such tricks are needed, Brecht is proud to declare. The soil belongs to the kolkhoz that cultivates it. In a similar manner, the child belongs to the mother who has raised him. It is the people’s artist, the Singer bearing the State’s laurels, who presses home this message by relating this morality tale.

The world is still lacking a moral order, István and János Mohácsi claim. The world is still ruled by infatuation with power and lack of scruples. We should not go on pretending that we have no idea what has been going on in the world since the time Brecht wrote his lofty parable. Nor should we believe in the Artist’s ability to serve justice. Not only are children abandoned and persecuted in the Mohácsis’ Chalk Circle, they are killed too, and the moral fable of self-sacrifice fails to restore the just order of the world. More than twenty years ago, the director Tamás Ascher looked on the patronizing manners of the Singer, who arrived as a poet laureate, with nothing more than mild irony. For the Mohácsis, the allegorical playacting of the kolkhoz members cuts no ice, nor do the presentation and arguments, which are not known to affect the narrow brain of the deputy; the brutality of the authorities erases all this with a single gesture. The commandos dropping in by parachute find a "practical" solution to the "land problem": they herd the quarrelling bunch into a container and ship them all off to Siberia. So much for the power of art.

The Nyíregyháza performance is nothing if not sarcastic. The text itself abounds with phrases attempting to parody people’s hackneyed thinking by using and turning upside down some of the stupidest clichés. The soldiers are looking for "a weapon resembling an object", and the expert comrade warns—by turning a saying upside down—that we "must not throw the bath-water out with the baby". János Mohácsi’s directions usually produce a firework of textual frolics, with the carefully orchestrated body of individual comments issuing from the crowd constituting an aesthetic version of street commotion, residents’ meetings and the public outrage displayed just for the cameras. Similarly revealing are the familiar clichés uttered by public figures. Just minutes into a debate, the participants devour all the cheese samples offered merely as a demonstration. While taking flight, the dethroned head of state carries off the strong box with the state treasures. While delivering his election speech, the shrewd son of the people parodies the commonplaces of racist and nationalist demagogy, dangerously reminiscent of the genuine stuff frequently heard in parliament. Mohácsi reacts to the manifest signs of our cultural backwardness, without ever slipping into the role of a moralizing preacher cracking the whip. His bitter humour and irony save him from that.

The performance is not without some extreme and bizarre elements. The putschist prince jovially ponders on the age limit below which all babies have to be put to death in order to make sure that the fugitive heir to the throne cannot escape. Then we see a soldier picking up and cuddling the baby before squeezing it to death in front of the mother. The rampage of killing that follows extends the biblical Massacre of the Innocents to the ethnic cleansings of the present. In her attempt to rescue the baby, the girl swings across a gorge using an iron cable; this fairy-tale element contrasts with the next scene, where workers cordon off the area where the cable broke with tape in the manner of the police at the scene of road accidents.

The set equally refers to a "Georgian" village and a place "pacified" in war. The costumes are masterpieces of stylizing: home-made clothes incorporating pieces of baskets and carpets imperceptibly change into timeless folk costume. The story is occasionally interrupted by songs, and as the play approaches its climax (after violating the four-hour time limit against the explicit warning of the "expert comrade": party officials and the like can hardly be asked to concentrate longer than this), we are slowly submerged in the tragicomic whirlpool of our age. For a farewell we are told what fate the undeservingly rescued baby came to as an emperor, and how history has buried the deserving heroes of the fable. The performance fades out with the babies’ shrieks of horror, a perennial emblem of history.

De-Brechtified Brecht has thus given birth to a new Hungarian drama. The performance received the first prize of the Hungarian Theatrical Festival and was also voted best performance of 1998/99.