Tamás Koltai
People and Puppets
Sándor Weöres: Holdbéli csónakos (Waterman on the Moon) - Frigyes Karinthy: Holnap reggel (Tomorrow Morning) - Béla Pintér: Parasztopera (Peasant Opera).
Tamás Jordán, who was appointed director
of the National Theatre in 2002, announced that the 2003/4 season - the first
in which he would no longer be tied to plans inherited from his predecessor
and be able to implement his own ideas - would be devoted solely to Hungarian
stage works. That new repertory is a clear gesture, signalling that the National
Theatre regards a constant presence of the country's dramatic literature on
its stage as a matter of outstanding importance. It is instructive to note
that when the Royal National Theatre in London finally secured a permanent
base of its own, on the South Bank, in the early 1970s, the call was very
much for it to devote more attention to the classics and modern works of world
theatre rather than the native tradition. Here in Hungary, though, it is the
home-grown works that stand in more need of nourishment, possibly because
the country does not boast quite such an abundant dramatic literature. And
the push is perhaps all the more understandable, considering that the building
on the Danube left bank in which the National Theatre is now housed - whatever
the many qualms about the design - represents its first permanent home since
the institution was founded as long ago as 1837 (it operated in temporary
quarters for the entire intervening century and a half).
The works that are being put on in this first season, with one exception,
are revivals. That exception, the sole new play has not yet been identified:
as of the time this article is being written (late autumn), the jury selecting
the winning play from a competition run by the National Theatre is still at
work, but the plan is for that to be mounted in the spring of 2004.
So far, two premieres have taken place. The first was of Waterman on the Moon,
a fairy-tale play by Sándor Weöres. Weöres (1913–89) was one of the last century's
supreme poets, capable of sounding registers from the childishly playful to
a matchless philosophical profundity. Waterman on the Moon was written in
1941 at the request of a puppet theatre ensemble, with an intention also to
put it on at the National. That fell by the wayside, however, and the first
performance did not come about until 1970 - the same year as an opera produced
from it was put on. Virtually every one of Weöres's theatrical works similarly
took years and even (as in this case) decades of delay before reaching the
stage. There were various reasons for this, but the l'art pour l'art irrationality
of which he was regularly accused certainly did not go down well with political
régimes of any stripe, and he found the road to the public's heart by no means
an easy one either. A hefty two-volume theatre guide that was published in
1981, which, over and above the acknowledged stage masterpieces of Hungarian
and world literature, found room to outline dozens of second- and even third-rate
plays, manages to mention his name only twice, and then as the translator
of a comedy by Moličre and of a Chinese play (he was a globetrotter from the
1930s onwards, and the poetry translations that he produced, working from
rough translations, over half a century, filled three substantial volumes).
We now know that a couple of Weöres's verse plays - Octopus avagy Szent György
és a sárkány (Octopus, or St George and the Dragon, 1965) and A kétfejű fenevad
(The Two-headed Beast, 1968) - are amongst the cream of Hungarian-language drama,
and as such they are regularly revived. The characters of Waterman on the
Moon are the typical figures of Hungarian folk puppet theatre: Vitéz László
('László Hero', a kinsman of Punch or Pulcinella), Paprika Jancsi ('Johnny
Paprika'), and Bolond Istók ('Stevie Muddlehead'), but mixed in with them
are story elements from universal mythology such as Ancient Crete, Babylon
in the time of the Assyrian Empire, Silene in North Africa at the time of
Emperor Diocletian, and the Chinese Empire (Weöres reckoned that the books
which had the biggest impact on his work were Laotzu's Tao te ching, the Akkadian
Gilgamesh, and the Bible), with the cosmos forming a third plane. Princess
Peacock-eye is pining for the Waterman on the Moon, about whom we learn little
more than what his name suggests: he sails around on a small boat on the Moon's
surface, and he sings. However, the four great kings of the Earth are also
suitors for the princess's favour (and her hand in marriage), though she is
not destined to be won either by them or by her ethereal idol but by her playmate
who, by the end of the piece - after many intervening adventures - is elevated
from being heir to the Lapp throne to the ruler of Lappland. The story has
no moral pay-off, no cathartic aspects, and the tale is completely irrational
and carries no message, which makes it refreshing.
The play is performed on the National Theatre's main stage. The technical
facilities of this highly contentious, overly ornamental and less than ideally
functional building are best suited for mounting huge spectacles, and a miraculous
puppet theatre meets those conditions to a T. The complex trapdoor system
and high-tech sound and lighting equipment come into their own. A lot of money
and talent has been poured into the production: the colour floods alter by
the second, there are flashing lights, dazzling back-projections, and gorgeously
costumed characters vanish into the ground, then soar in the air. The scenes
are staged on two levels, that of a puppet theatre and that of live theatre,
with the two dimensions alternating, the humans also being puppets, the puppets
also humans. A whole army of puppeteers, dancers, singers for the choral inserts,
as well as actors have been coached by the various specialists and are marshalled
by director Péter Valló, a real pro. The bottom line of the daft nonsense,
if there is one, is that happiness is relative; the reason why the characters
are puppets is so that life should not be painful to them. Fortunately, children,
the segment of the audience who will most enjoy the production, are un-likely
to tumble to that notion, as they will be completely engrossed in the theatrical
glamour.
...
Puppet-like also describes
the way the characters come across in an equally hard-to-categorise new theatrical
work, the Peasant Opera. This is likewise a tragicomedy, ostensibly belonging
to the operatic genre, though it would be a mistake to think it runs along
traditional lines.
The joint creation of composer Benedek Darvas and writer-director Béla Pintér,
it draws on the widely diffused folk-tale motif, preserved in oral traditions,
of the son who, unrecognised on his return home, is murdered by his parents
for his money. Camus took this as the basis for Le malentendu, using it to
incorporate an Existentialist concept of God, the creator who has brought
us into the world only to permit tragedies to occur without so much as a peep:
the force of destiny, as the title of Verdi's opera declares. Destiny is an
appropriate mainspring for a tragic puppet play in the form of an opera, but
then who writes operas these days? Only those who seek to enter the caste
of the élite with an ear for niceties of tonality. Their works receive a single
run of a few performances in some splendid opera house and are then quickly
forgotten. With few exceptions, a yawning gulf now separates contemporary
opera - indeed, modern serious music in general - from the general public. But
is modern opera esoteric by necessity? Is it not something to be 'consumed'
by a wider audience?
Peasant Opera has a go, at any rate. It is composed of separate numbers and
recitatives. The latter have the function of getting us from one aria to the
next, so it is these which contain the objective information that drives the
plot forwards, just as they do in the libretto that Da Ponte wrote for Don
Giovanni. Pintér's recitatives are mundane texts, often vulgar and even obscene - for
intentionally ironic ends, of course. Darvas, on the other hand, gives the
accompanying music a regular lilt and even throws in a Baroque-style harpsichord
continuo, and so manages to be completely faithful to the genre yet witty
with it. The melodies for the arias have their source in Hungarian folklore
(as in Zoltán Kodály's works for the stage). The writer-director brings opposing
worlds face to face on the stage through a peasant ballad in which a story
of passion in the classic folk style of a García Lorca is welded with picturesque
Western romanticism as copyrighted by Puccini (La Fanciulla del West) - and
with a parody of the latter. The groom here, despite being in love with his
step-sister, is preparing to marry another girl when, at the wedding, it is
revealed that she is the daughter not of her supposed father but of a stranger
who had been to America then, on returning home, had seduced the mother. The
uproar that ensues unravels the hidden strands: the one-time seducer was,
in fact, no stranger but the groom's much older, now legendary brother who,
having made his fortune abroad and brought the money back home incognito,
fell victim to the murderous greed of his very own parents.
That simple story is told by a sophisticated dramatic-flashback technique.
The seduction scene, for example, emerges as a highly embellished memory,
whilst the murder is held back as a delayed climax to the very end of the
piece. The stylistic potpourri accords with the portrayal of a reality cobbled
together from the mundane and the soap-operatic, an Americanised vignette
tipped into a peasant-style wedding (a favourite topos with Pintér). Thus,
when the priest asks if anyone knows any cause or just impediment why the
couple should not be joined together in holy matrimony, the repatriated Hungarian
kovboy (the word is, of course, given a Hungarian pronunciation) makes his
entrance kitted out with all the appurtenances of the sentimental folklore
that has accreted to him; the Hungarian-inspired figures - moustachioed father,
drunken railway man - hover in a zone somewhere between the homilies stitched
on samplers and seedy reality. That same flippant cross-referencing defines
the character of the music. The blend of folk and art song, spiced up with
fruitful variations of melody and text, is complemented at appropriate places
with influences from musicals and rock music, as well as by Baroque-style
closes and interludes. All of this vouchsafes a consistent, deftly parcelled
treat of pastiche and parody.
The direction abounds in clever ideas. The musicians, made up and costumed
as old maids, sit on a stage set designed as a barn (Yuri Lubimov did something
of the kind when he directed a production of Don Giovanni in Budapest some
while ago). On the entry of the dream-cowboy, a torrent of music and lights
floods down from above. The characters are deliberately puppet-like in their
movements, freezing in poses during the arias to allow the singers to blossom.
As the finale nears, the tragedy creeps unobtrusively to the fore, as befits
a proper opera. Peasant Opera deservedly received the critics' award for the
best production in the musical entertainment category of the 2002/3 season.
Tamás Koltai
editor of Színház, a theatre monthly, is The Hungarian Quarterly's regular theatre critic.
