Tamás Koltai

Letter from the Pécs Theatre Festival

 

Each year in June, Pécs, that most pleasant city in southern Hungary, hosts the National Theatre Festival, bringing together the best and most important productions of the season. The selection system calls for a single curator to assemble a programme for the competition. This year the curator was György Karsai, Professor of Ancient Greek and Latin, who teaches at universities in Budapest, Pécs, Lille and Nanterre. He is also a theatre critic. His selection method differed somewhat from earlier practice - of the sixteen productions he picked, two directors staged two apiece, and three theatre companies presented two productions each. This means that dozens of companies with several hundreds of productions were not represented at all. It is unusual in that earlier curators had sought to make a balanced selection - not that they managed to avoid arousing resentments. There seems to be more resentment than usual this year, even though no one has had the courage to claim the selector was partial at least not publicly.
In many respects the Pécs National Theatre Festival differs from other such festivals in Europe. The director, Tamás Jordán, the manager of the Budapest National Theatre, is an able organiser and, as one leading Hungarian director put it, an outstanding master of ceremony. In the end, the event was not so much a professional gathering as a ceremonial procession, a summer carnival, of which the productions in competition were just one element - and not even the one most emphasised. Over the ten days of festival, there were several social occasions allowing for those in the theatre world to engage in official and informal morale boosting. These included readings, university and school performances, "evenings with", book launches, talk shows, stand-up comedians, professional discussions, and of course, the conversations in restaurants and cafés, or strolling on the pedestrian precinct in front of the theatre. The unofficial motto was "let's feel good", which excluded a preponderance of audienceunfriendly experiments and disturbing productions. As Gábor Máté, artistic director of the Budapest Katona József Theatre, put it, what they wanted to offer were "productions that widen the horizons of theatrical vision and thinking", a message emanating from the festival, and in a certain sense from the Hungarian theatrical profession, too. It means a preference for the easily marketable and the commercial, or, to use the current phrase, audience-friendly products. By regulation or, in milder cases, by persuasion, the "Pécs concept" tends to limit the scope of alternative and experimental theatres, including those of Hungarian companies working outside the political borders of the country. The trouble is that the productions that are artistically important are found exactly in the areas thus excluded.
The Pécs Festival, therefore, reflects the average of the six hundred or so productions staged during the season. This is true even if this year's festival was unusual in the sense that it included several of the season's best productions, such as two versions of Euripides' Medeia (by the Katona József Theatre from Budapest and the Sepsiszentgyörgy [Sfantu Gheorghe] Theatre from Romania), two pieces directed by Sándor Zsótér (Adrienne Lecouvreur by Eugene Scribe and Mary Stuart by Friedrich Schiller), and the provocative political pamphlet Fekete ország (Black Country) staged by the prestigious Krétakör (Chalk Circle) Theatre (all of which have been reviewed in this journal).

Apart from providing an opportunity for the general public to see these productions, the Pécs Festival is where those in the theatre world, too busy during the regular season, meet to see each other's productions and then discuss them. These discussions and debates are usually informal and take place in restaurants, cafés, in the street or in the theatre lobby, but there are also official discussions and debates and, of course, a jury that awards the prizes. This year the jury's non-Hungarian member was James Leverett, an American dramaturge and university teacher. He expressed appreciation especially for Krétakör's production of Black Country, directed by Árpád Schilling, for A sütemények királynôje (Queen of Cookies) by the Béla Pintér Company - also reviewed here, as are the company's productions in general - and for the Katona József Theatre's Ledaráltakeltuntem (Vanishinthemincer), directed by the young Viktor Bodó. The latter is a free adaptation of Kafka's The Trial. Riotously funny, it dissolves Kafkaesque anxiety in the style of David Lynch's horror films. With glorious contributions from the company's first-class actors, it earned most of the jury's prizes.
Where the prizes went reflects the structure of Hungarian theatre.
Hungary treasures the tradition of the permanent company. The best is still the twenty-three-year-old Katona József. The two directors who brought two productions each to the festival, Sándor Zsótér and Eszter Novák, also work with permanent companies, but their presence here was as guest directors. Árpád Schilling and Béla Pintér each have their own company. Yet, they cannot be described as independents, since their financing comes from the same central budget that finances what are called "institutionalised" theatres, albeit through different channels. The difference is that while the latter receive their annual support as a set percentage of the national budget, the former are granted only basic support and have to source their production costs from tendering and from sponsors. Krétakör Theatre does not even have a permanent home. They rent different premises for each production - most recently they used the old Second World War casemates under Buda Castle. Thanks to the international acclaim they now enjoy, they are also funded by foreign institutions, among them MC 93 Bobigny near Paris, as well as the festivals of Avignon and Berlin. Their latest production was created with the Salzburg Festival, where the premiere took place on 9 August. The play, an adaptation of Phaedra by István Tasnádi, will be performed in Hungary from the end of September on.

Viewed from the outside, even from the prosperous West, this theatrical structure looks propitious. There are probably not many countries in Europe where state support is granted to as wide a range of theatres as in Hungary. In Budapest alone, some thirty repertory or temporary companies receive funding from the state, and for most of them this means as much as sixty to seventy per cent of their annual income. Nor are the regional theatres maintained by their city or county alone; they too are due a slice, smaller though it is, of the central cake. The differences in the amounts are relatively slight; an experimental theatre receives not much less than a musical theatre which caters to wider popular tastes. Not long ago, Andrew Lloyd Webber visited Budapest to attend the premiere of the first nontemplate production of his musical The Beautiful Game. On watching the performance, he was amazed that, in the brief closing scene of the play, a children's football team, eleven small boys, came on stage. This would not be feasible in England, he said, as it would be too costly. Could it be that we are richer than the English? This is too good to be true. The children's team, as so much else, is paid out of state support, and the theatre swallows the revenues. And these are not slight, since it is a popular musical in great demand. It has a long run, and tickets are relatively expensive - though not nearly as expensive as in the West. Many claim that state support for the art of theatre is spread too widely - and unfortunately reaches much that is not art. Even though the support is substantial, companies still face constant difficulties, because the funds they have to raise themselves are hard to come by. Ticket prices are low as they are geared to the purchasing power of the audiences. The sponsorship system is undeveloped, and money to be acquired through tendering is scarce. This explains the constant financial difficulties, the complaints and the inclination to play safe, none of which is conducive to innovations, initiative and, in general, to high-quality productions.
The repertory system brings relative security. Each company keeps eight to ten plays, sometimes more, in its repertory. Productions are staged a couple of times a month and have a long lease on life, though their maintenance - the storing of the sets and the technical work - is costly. This is not the way to great box office success; on the other hand, complete flops are rare. It is hardly noticable whether a play is performed two, three or four times a month in just one season or continues succesfully in several seasons. The system allows a company to score points by employing a director of high current prestige. Sporadic performance is a disservice to a production; this is the dark side of the cherished repertory system. Unemployment is insignificant, but salaries for actors and technical staff are low, with the exception of the Budapest National Theatre. In order to make a decent living, actors have to take on other assignments, only some of which can be measured by the standards of art. Most of them are overworked, doing radio work in between rehearsals and performances, or even during the night. They rush off to casting calls for commercials or, even worse, undertake parts in one-off productions of low standard. The long-term immersion in workshop activity, so natural in the leading companies in Europe, is rare here. This explains why there are fewer internationally acclaimed companies in Hungary than in Poland, Lithuania or Russia.

According to many whose voices carry weight, the theatrical set-up in Hungary is, despite the wider-than-usual support system, parsimonious rather than generous. It is wasteful and thrifty at the same time. It is wasteful, because not much is achieved with the large sums allocated. A substantial proportion of productions, especially outside the capital, have short runs. They are costly to mount and soon dropped from the repertory, rather than taken, say, to a city sixty kilometres away. There are hardly any exchanges of productions or guest performances. The same play or opera is often staged in neighbouring cities - with different sets and casts. There are no co-productions, something routine in most countries in Europe. Each city clings to its "own" theatre company as against engaging in a far more economical regional construction, which is also artistically more remunerative, because what it creates is not too quickly discarded but allowed to draw on a larger audience. On the other hand, the current system is also thrifty, because small budgets mean slipshod, penny-pinching productions - of no artistic merit, yet sellable, because there is a public hunger for theatre. Such productions are redundant, wasteful in this sense, but they create a reason for cynical "subsistence" directors to complain about scanty financial resources.
Many claim that this snug status quo, similar to the old mechanism of industrial production, is obsolete. Still, there are no significant changes underway. Both the government and those running theatres are refraining from a genuine overhaul of the system. Understandably so, as a rationalisation of the structure would produce casualties. It would mean the end of a comfortable living for many, the end of "barter" deals based on friendly business contacts ("I do a play in your theatre, you do one in mine"), and an increase in unemployment. Also, the question would have to be asked why the Academy of Theatre and Film sends out into the world new crops of actors and directors each year. The professional elite is wary of change for simple reasons of survival, and the supporting elite for political reasons. Instead, they make their compromises with the present system, though everybody senses its precariousness through the slow erosion, the diminishing finances and the slow financial decline of the best workshops. Transfroming the structure, it seems, would only benefit the theatre.

 

Tamás Koltai
editor of Színház, a theatre monthly, is The Hungarian Quarterly's regular theatre critic.