A New National

Imre Madách: Az ember tragédiája (The Tragedy of Man)
William Shakespeare: A vihar (The Tempest)

 

This March 15, the new National Theatre in Budapest opened its first season with Imre Madách's The Tragedy of Man. That alone should have made anyone who cares for Hungarian theatre happy. But the construction, the building itself and the formal opening did not meet with unmitigated approval and we have to turn to the past to seek out the reasons for this.
The first National Theatre was completed in 1837. At the time the only permanent theatre in this Hungarian capital within the Habsburg Empire was German-speaking, the Hungarian companies being ad hoc and ineffectual. A movement towards a distinct national identity had started at the beginning of the 19th century closely linked with the promotion of the Hungarian language and of an independent Hungarian theatre. Though the National Assembly discussed the issue as early as 1807, it was not until the 1830s, the beginning of the Reform Era, that actual progress was made. The great reform statesman Count István Széchenyi, who worked for modernisation in many areas of life (he wrote economic treatises, built the Chain Bridge, the first permanent bridge across the Danube, and drafted an industrial and scientific development plan), advocated such a theatre. Intrigue and economic difficulties were the obstacles. Széchenyi wanted a grand building reflecting the importance of the cause to be erected on the elegant Danube bank, even if this should cause delays. But the politics of Pest county favoured the instant solution of a less prestigious site on the "outskirts" (where a bank and office building now stands, in what has become the heart of the city). Construction took two years, the necessary funds-eventually six times the amount forecast-were provided by the counties and individual patriots. The theatre opened its doors in August 1837. After a few decades of vicissitudes, this modest building was declared a fire hazard and pulled down. In 1908 the large and grand Népszínház (People's Theatre), built in 1875, and further down the same main thoroughfare, was rented for the National Theatre company, and remained their home until 1964. That year, for reasons still obscure, cultural policy-makers decided to demolish the building. (It was claimed to be in the way of the new underground station.) Architecturally the building was in good condition, though it was certainly no longer appropriate for a modern theatre with its size, the galleried baroque-style stage and the huge stalls area. The National company continued to exist, making its home in a number of temporary abodes.
When the National's first home was demolished, a competition was arranged in 1912 for plans for a new theatre on the old site. A winner was declared, then came the First World War to frustrate any action. A second competition was announced after the 1965 demolition, a third in 1989, a fourth in 1997; no building ever followed any of these. (In the last case, construction actually began but was halted.) A total of 228 plans were judged in these four competitions, prizes were awarded and the plans presented in exhibitions-but the theatre was never built. "The political constellation of the country does not need a National Theatre," said Hilda Gobbi, a legendary member of the National Theatre company. In an interview in the late eighties, shortly before her death, she claimed that those in power had deliberately subverted the expressed will of the theatre profession and individual donors to construct a permanent home for the National. She actually initiated a collection of funds from the public for its construction: from the seventies on thousands bought what were called "brick coupons". (This money was supposedly kept in escrow, but there were rumours that an expatriate Hungarian, who years afterwards asked about his donation, was not given a satisfactory response.) The clue to the politicians' procrastination here, according to Gobbi, was "the fright of the vice-apparatchiks." She was convinced that the only thing that interested politicians about the theatre was politics; in this she was certainly close to the truth. (One reason for the fiasco of the 1960's competition was that the site chosen was in the City Park-close to where the huge statue of Stalin used to stand, gleefully pulled down by the revolutionaries of 1956, and right on the route taken by military parades and May 1 processions. Added to this the Theatre was to have a balcony from which party leaders could wave to the marching masses on such occasions. As a result of protests, the authorities cancelled not just this idea but the whole project as well.)
Politicians tried to appropriate the National for their purposes right from the beginning. One of the more attractive examples of this was on March 15, 1848, the day the revolution against the Habsburgs broke out, when the audience came out from a performance of Bánk bán, to free the liberal journalist Mihály Táncsics from a prison in Buda Castle. In the first half of the twentieth century what was new in the arts was condemned by both the right-wing governments and by the leftist press. The managers of the National Theatre were favourite targets for attacks of various sorts. Members of parliament considered it their duty to question the minister on matters pertaining to the arts. Conservative papers waged a virulent campaign against stylistic innovation under the slogan of "national tradition"; the most reactionary denunciations could thus be voiced in a patriotic guise. Things changed little during the Communist era, the National Theatre was just as much beset by intrigue as before; despite this, it had some great periods and some important achievements. The golden age in the past quarter of a century lasted from 1978 to 1982 when, thanks to pressure from the profession, two young and talented directors, Gábor Székely and Gábor Zsámbéki, were appointed to run the theatre. Currently the former is rector of the University of Theatre and Film Arts; the latter manages the Katona József Theatre, which has an international reputation, and he is also the president of the European Theatre Union. They were, of course, forced to resign, after which the quality of the National Theatre steadily declined. This decline did not stop with the 1989 transition. The first new democratic government appointed a dilettante as manager-the entire artistic council, made up of theatre professionals and critics, resigned -then forced through an extension of his mandate. (This happened shortly before the 1994 elections.) The National Theatre sank into artistic irrelevance.
In the wake of the 1994 elections, a liberal minister took over the cultural portfolio. A year later he was replaced by another Free Democrat, Bálint Magyar. For him the theatre was in the blood, his father having once been director of the famous Budapest Vígszínház in the middle of the fifties and his mother a dramaturge. A new competition for designing the National Theatre's building was held in 1997. (The delay later proved to be fatal:
if the arrangements had been made two years earlier, the history of the new National Theatre would be completely different.) Only Hungarian architects were eligible; politicians took to heart Széchenyi's failure: an over-ambitious, over-expensive and too international project would jeopardise a quick success. Seventy-three designs were entered, of which the international jury adjudged-with only one dissent-Ferenc Bán's design as by far the best. (He had earned second prize in the previous, 1989, competition.) The site was designated after a preliminary competition, and was to be in the heart of the city, in Erzsébet Square. The plan was for a modern, airy, transparent building, with an adjustable main and a studio stage. An open house, with all kinds of activities going on in it and ready to receive visitors throughout the day.
The minister appointed the winner of another competition, the actor-manager of the Radnóti Theatre, András Bálint, to the post of manager of the National Theatre; he was charged with organising the company and carrying out, with his colleagues, professional supervision over necessary changes in the plan. Work started, the foundation stone was laid in the presence of the then President Árpád Göncz, the Prime Minister and notables from the theatre world. It was to be opened on October 23, 2000, the anniversary of the 1956 Revolution.
After the 1998 general elections, bringing a change of government, the National Theatre again became a political issue. The manager had been appointed amid re-criminations from the opposition, which claimed the government wanted to present its successor with a fait accompli. In vain did those in the profession assert that managing the National was a professional, not a political, issue and that construction should be supervised by those who were going to work in the building: the plea went unheeded. The elections were won by the Young Democrats (FIDESZ), and their especial dislike of the liberal Free Democrats accounted for much of what was to happen. Hungary is not Great Britain, where none of several changes of government interfered with the prolonged work on the National Theatre on London's South Bank. The new Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, ordered work on the site to be halted in the early autumn of 1998, by which time 1,500 million forints had already been spent. (The underground parking lot, conference centre and park, of which only the park has been complet-ed yet, are possibly the most perfectly and expensively sound-proofed facility of their kind in the whole world; the sound-proofing would have been necessary for the theatre since the site is above the city's main underground interchange station.)
The official explanation was that the plan sanctioned by the Socialist-Liberal coalition of 1994-1998 would have been far too expensive. The argument in fact concerned no more than 2,000 million forints; during its four-year term in office the new government devoted several times as much to e.g. Hungarian football, the young prime minister being a registered and active player. Legitimisation for the termination of construction was provided by the playwright György Schwajda, manager of the Szigligeti Theatre in Szolnok, who had already aggressively submitted his plans for the National Theratre to the previous government. He immediately (even before the decision) offered his services. (András Bálint, the appointee of the previous government, had by then of course resigned.) With the backing of politician friends-one of whom, the former mayor of Szolnok, had meanwhile become the Political Undersecretary of the Ministry of Culture-he was soon appointed ministerial and then governmental commissioner, and CEO of the future National Theatre Ltd. Operation New Building started. Political battles made even its location problematical. Budapest had reelected its liberal Free Democrat mayor in the 1998 municipal elections, and the governing Young Democrats started a punitive campaign by withholding subsidies; thus the new site could not possibly be metropolitan property. The solution came with the selling of a large undeveloped area on the left bank of the Danube, in south Pest, which had been designated to house the ill-fated Budapest World Expo and was consequently in state ownership. The buyer was TriGránit Ltd., Canadian owned, whose president is Sándor Demján, a Hungarian. Although their offer had been rejected twice, once the idea of the new National Theatre being built there had come up, the price went down by 1,000 million forints. The government envisioned a cultural centre on what had been an industrial wasteland (the immediate surroundings consist of century-old factory buildings) with museums, concert halls, residential housing, a conference centre. This whole concept is still on the drawing boards, except for the National Theatre, which had to be finished in a rush. The public procurement tender for the construction of the theatre was won-obviously by chance-by Arcadom Ltd., another of Demján's interests. They offered to finance the construction, and the state was to pay only after the building was finished. The actual sum has not been made public the deal being between a private company and a state-owned court-registered organisation (National Theatre Ltd.), so it is designated a business secret in Hungarian law.
At first no design competition was announced, then eventually one was, only to be declared void by György Schwajda, who himself had been a member of the jury which declared György Vadász to be the winner; he had designed the very successful and popular Hungarian pavilion at the Hanover World Fair. Schwajda then commissioned Mária Siklós to prepare plans, although she had not taken part in the competition and had never designed a new theatre before, her only relevant experience being the reconstruction of theatres (with questionable success)-and Commissioner Schwajda's home. The extra-legal, incompetent and arrogant nature of the proceedings brought protests from several professional organisations. The Chamber of Architects eventually expelled Mária Siklós, which means that if her appeal is turned down by the court (a judgement expected in October) she will never again be able to put her own name on designs.
Meanwhile, the theatre was finished (judgement would, even in law, not be retroactive). The opening took place on March 15, 2002, the national holiday, with the first round of the 2002 general elections on April 7. There is little doubt that all this had been timed as part of the election campaign from the start but the Young Democrats were defeated. The building, however, now stands, rather remote in that wasteland, and without adequate public transport at that.
From the perspective of the law, the issue is a disgrace. It is undemocratic and unprecedented to build a national theatre without a national consensus. Nothing can mitigate this, even if the building were perfect. But it isn't. Chaotically mixing various architectural styles and allusions under the aegis of eclecticism, both the interior and the exterior are over-ornate and tasteless. It tries to mingle elements ranging from the Roman Colosseum to a shopping mall. More problematically, it fails to meet the requirements of a 21st-century theatre, which include the need for stage and auditorium to form a single space. Instead an old-fashioned proscenium stage with an inflexible frame was built, which seeks to resemble baroque galleried theatres. The stage is inflexible to the point of motionlessness. The acoustics are poor and the stage cannot be seen properly from a quarter of its 600 seats. The public interiors feature a jarring mixture of colours and shapes, resembling hotel foyers and corridors. (These were designed by a British company specialising in such interiors.) All in all: whatever should be modest, simple and functional is ostentatiously raucous, reflects the snobbery of the nouveau riches, and is of poor quality from a functional point of view. The only exception is the all-electronic stage machinery, which is state-of-the-art.

The election campaign also required a production to open the theatre with. The two noted directors approached by the commissioner in 2001, Gábor Zsámbéki and Tamás Ascher, turned down the invitation. (Both are well-known internationally; Ascher's latest production came onto the stage of the Akademietheater in Vienna in May.) It was now the cultural ministry's turn to find a director. János Szikora eventually agreed to produce The Tragedy of Man.
Imre Madách's play (1861), the most frequently played Hungarian classic, has been mentioned several times in this column and has recently been put on by several companies, though none of these productions offered something special. Long held an epigonic relative of Faust, the play has always puzzled directors as to which facet to highlight, the philosophy or the vision? Lucifer, who demands his share in Creation, struggles with the Lord for the souls of our first parents. He becomes Adam and Eve's guide after they have eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and have been banished from Eden. Lucifer sends them a dream and takes them through the history of mankind, from ancient Egypt to contemporary (i.e. early capitalist) London, and even into a utopian future, a near-Orwellian phalanstery, and a Beckettian endgame of vanishing sunlight and a cooling Earth. The romantic loftiness of the poetic text is in sharp contrast with the main idea, the question whether it is worth engaging in struggle when ideologies are dishonest and the end is destruction. On awakening, Adam prepares to kill himself, when the Lord lets him know- through Eve-that he is about to be a father, which makes him abandon his plan.
The most conspicuous element in János Szikora's direction is money, the huge sum spent on the production. For its first, partial, season the National Theatre received a subsidy of 2,300 million forints, almost five times as much as the entire budget of the Vígszínház last year, which mounts its productions in two buildings, on three stages. (Its main auditorium alone sits twice the number that the National accommodates.) This could of course cover the spectacular sets and fees ten times higher than customary in Budapest. (This has led to some tension in the profession since a dresser in the National makes more than the best actors in the best Hungarian theatres.) The expensive and ultramodern stage equipment does its job: a colourful hurly-burly is built, using scenery, light and projections. The stage is dominated by a montage of light and sound. Adam and Eve roll on stage in a jellylike amnion (the license had to be bought from a French circus). In ancient Athens tourists get off a Jumbo to visit the ruins and the amphitheatre. The Roman bacchanalia takes place on a table the size of half the stage, held up on the shoulders of slaves, which, when tilted, throws the principals and cholera victims (looking like Auschwitz inmates) into the hell of a crematorium. The Constantinople of the Crusades has a metro, and the Muslim warriors are fired on by an Osama bin Laden-lookalike patriarch who totes a machine gun. Kepler's disciple arrives in medieval Prague astride a rhinoceros, the London fair is a shopping mall, the last Eskimo on the cooling Earth watches Walt Disney's Bambi on a large-screen television, in the company of a giant dead seal, while his wife is in the solarium. Anachronistic, sometimes splendidly spectacular ideas seek topicality at every moment, but are as eclectic as the building. Ana-chronism, as such, is not the problem; trouble is the production offers very little in the way of exploiting the philosophical dilemmas treated in this great work. Perhaps all this would be less disturbing if the spectacle were backed by the actors. But actors are not really needed in this production: they are just slaves of the machinery, lifeless extras, servants of the visual effects. It is only Lucifer, played by Róbert Alföldi, who is able to suggest the philosophical depth of Madách's vision of mankind's ongoing struggle with its own nature.
Tickets for the first performances could be booked from January on, at the very place in the city where the building, demolished in 1965, had stood. They were sold from the kind of covered cart which 19th-century strolling players used to travel in. People stood in line for hours on end in the freezing cold to get their tickets.
By now, however, public interest in the production has dropped. Then came the second production, Shakespeare's The Tempest, directed this time by the untrained commissioner of the theatre himself, and the ceaseless motion of the fantastic stage machinery was again to "perform"-without any apparent organising idea or competent acting-something only distantly resembling this other enigmatic masterpiece of poetic drama.