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The reburial, on June 16th, 1989, of Prime
Minister Imre Nagy, hanged and buried
in an unmarked grave in 1958, was the
foundational event in Hungary's change of
régime. What had been forbidden even to
talk about had to be looked squarely in the
face-the bloody genesis that lay behind
Hungary's Kádár-style consolidation, the
price the country paid for its relative
prosperity within the penumbra of Soviet
occupation and the relative freedom in this
'happiest of barracks'. The tacit compromise
that the bulk of Hungarian society
had made with the Kádár régime aroused
painful feelings of guilt and self-examination;
however, the changeover proceeded
as a quiet transition. In contrast to the fall
of the Berlin Wall, or the events in Prague
and Bucharest, there was no dramatic
catharsis, but rather an unease, grumpiness,
indifference and, perhaps, shame.
Equally, the demands that had been made
in 1956 had, by 1989, lost their topicality;
interpretations of the Revolution diversified
as competing, occasionally updated 'accounts'
of '56 emerged. All of this led to
argument, acrimonious confrontation,
'appropriations' of the Revolution and even
the vacuous claims that no change of
régime had taken place. This, sadly, is still
the case. At the time of writing (four months
before the 50th anniversary of outbreak of
the Revolution), it is not hard to forecast
the discordant voices that commemoration
is going to set loose.
None of which makes for an easy
reception for any play about the events of
1956, and particularly not when we know
the background to the incidents that the
playwrights set at the core of the plot.
What happened in Köztársaság tér-
Republic Square-in Budapest on October
30th, 1956, was nothing less than mob rule,
and Life magazine gave the world tragic and
abhorrent images of what happened there.
To this day, an unchallenged reconstruction
of what happened remains unattainable.
A group of armed freedom fighters entered
the building of the headquarters of the
Greater Budapest Communist Party, which,
apart from party officials and members of
the secret police, was staffed by civilian employees
and a detachment of young conscripts.
There is no way now of knowing for
sure whether there had been any prior
provocation, but repeated pleas from the
occupants of the building asking for the
armed guard at the headquarters to be
reinforced fell on deaf ears. The commander
of the sole tank that was eventually
dispatched to quell the disturbance was so
uncertain as to what his task was, and who
exactly he was supposed to be defending,
that he left the scene not long after. It
seems likely that the "defenders" opened
fire and that fire was returned, with
casualties, both dead and wounded. A
group who were sent out of the building to
negotiate a cease-fire were mowed down
and hacked to pieces, as were others who
attempted to flee. Public opinion condemned
the lynching from the outset,
except for a few individuals who claimed
that the killings were provoked, or who
forwarded bizarre conspiracy theories as to
why the people defending the Party Headquarters
could be held responsible. The
execution of the truce negotiators and
those who had already surrendered, along
with the abuse of their corpses, constituted
an outrage from which other armed groups
of freedom fighters sharply dissociated
themselves-at least, in their recollections.
The big question for the play's reception
is why its authors chose as their subject this
isolated, unrepresentative event, demonstrably
the revolution's sole atrocity, to mark
the solemn occasion of its half-centenary,
rather than create a monument to the unsullied
idealism and courage of the freedom
fighters and their willingness to lay down
their lives. The issue is not the sociopolitical
assessment of 1956, or the placing
of its aftermath into perspective, but rather
the aesthetics and cultural role of drama
as a genre.
Casemates is not an anniversary piece;
the Katona József Theatre is too good an
ensemble to put on such a piece. It is not
the theatre's job to commemorate, eulogize
or celebrate. Nor is it to write history. The
striking of postures of heroism, pathos or
catastrophe by Hungarian historical
dramas, with few exceptions, usually fizzles
out in self-pitying or self-justifying anguish.
Casemates does not seek to locate or
evaluate the Revolution in the light of
intervening time, and thus it is irrelevant to
ask why it takes as its subject the October
30th massacre in Republic Square, of all
things, if it does not provide an appropriate
slant for evaluating the Revolution. It may
be based on documentary evidence, but
Casemates is not a docudrama; it may
probe the reasons for human acts, but it is
not a whodunit, either (no more than, say,
Oedipus Rex or Hamlet).
Hungarian newspapers over recent
months have often reproduced a photograph
that was taken in Republic Square
during those days. A number of people have
professed to recognize the figure of a man
in a white raincoat as being a (later) film
director whose presence there at the time is
supposed to have been covered up by
another (later) film director during the
period of post-revolutionary reprisals.
Others reckon the figure is someone else.
Another recent story involves the shooting
of a street scene in a film about 1956. A
passer-by informed the director, "It wasn't
like that." Truth and legend merge in
memory. Calls for historical authenticity
have a place from the standpoint of writing
history, but it is not the task of art to
reconstruct the past.
There are as many histories of 1956 as
there are people who lived through the
events. András Papp and János Térey, the
authors of Casemates, who had not been
born yet at the time, end the play with
two lines: "One historical event disintegrates
/ Into nineteen hundred and fifty-six pieces."
(The word-play on pieces, of course, is
deliberate.)
The critic Sándor Radnóti has pointed
out that "the authors of the piece wrote a
historical play that has the ambition to
faithfully follow, as far as possible, the
actual events of a dramatic episode of the
Revolution that is superbly suited to be
shaped as drama. Indeed, they pose
historical questions, but those questions do
not include the historical topicality in any
sense of the events portrayed, nor do they
have anything to do with identifying with
the event itself or any of its protagonists."
The story of Republic Square, as Papp
and Térey see it, is a horror scene in a
magnificent revolutionary narrative. It
embraces heroism, cowardice, villainy,
narrow-mindedness and the abominable. It
is a monstrous nightmare farce; a lethal
tragicomedy of intentions, accidents, wills
and errors; a unique moment of awfulness
that, opened out and enlarged, shows the
Whole-not the 1956 Revolution, not the
psyche of the Hungarian nation or its
historical fate, but the mutually rancorous
murderous instincts that can be stirred up
by fear and vengeance-man's hidden
upheavals and their dimensions.
It is no doubt pure chance that the
Katona József Theatre's program for the
same season also included Troilus and
Cressida, in a production under the Romanian
director Silviu Purcarete. That also
deals with murders occurring as metaphysical
nonsense, irrespective of the fact
that at the back of the mundane episode in
Shakespeare's play is a war that was unleashed
for a woman of no virtue, whereas
with Papp and Térey it is a fight for freedom.
The stance and technique adopted by the
two latter are Shakespearean-iambic pentameters
alternate with prose, while the first
speech after the prologue is a paraphrase of
the opening lines of Richard III-in the
manner in which a mundane story is elevated
into universal drama. (Térey's mythologizing
inclinations are in no doubt, given earlier
works like his verse novel Paulus-see HQ
166-and his monumental play The Nibelung
Gated Housing Estate-see HQ 176-loosely
based on the Wagner tetralogy).
Casemates carries off the literary feat of
elevating a real story to an abstract level.
The local party headquarters and the
square-the defenders and the attackers-
provide a model for the antithesis of insider
and outsider. The insiders are the powerholding
ideological dogmatists (their ideas
and activists' jargon are abstracted), the
outsiders are the people seeking to depose
them. Both groups display hierarchic and
moral gradations. The insiders run the
gamut of party officials, officers of the
security force (ÁVÓ), special police, officials,
Communist true-believers and careerists,
decent and spineless people, employees and
conscripts-some brave and some cowardly.
The outsiders include insurgents,
passers-by, released jailbirds, working-class
people and former aristocrats, one-time
adherents of the wartime extreme-right
Arrow Cross, ranters and mollifiers, the
humane and the inhumane.
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The inside and
outside are at the same time the upper and
the lower, as in the classical pattern, with
the insiders as the wealthy and the outsiders
as the dispossessed. As to the insiders,
rumour on the outside suspects they are
leading a life of luxury within and that they
have a system of underground casemates,
or vaults, where freedom fighters are being
held. The siege of the party headquarters
begins almost by accident, with ambushes
being laid on both sides and innocent
victims falling on both sides. A bloody farce
ensues, with the tanks sent to relieve the
defenders opening fire on them by mistake.
Fatal terror erupts, with someone trying to
parley a truce stretched out dead, with no
way of knowing who shot him and from
where. A hell is let loose-hangings, lynchmob
frenzy, mutilation of corpses. The
people are degraded into a mob, the crowd
into a rabble. In the end comes the rude
awakening when it turns out there was no
luxury, nor were there any casemates.
The authors highlight individual faces
on both sides, each with their fragment of
fate. There are no main characters, just
these largely one-way figures, though two
individuals are focused upon. One is Endre
Mérô, a party third secretary who is left
alone as he wrestles with his conscience
(this character is "modelled" on a real-life
individual named Imre Mezô, secretary of
the Greater Budapest Communist Party);
the other, Nikkel, leader of the besiegers
(likewise an identifiable leader of a group of
insurgents), who by the end reaches a state
of near-total disillusionment. The storyteller-
cum-commentator known as Spokesman
is a figure who brings to mind the
Paris-Match photographer Jean-Pierre
Pedrazzini, who was fatally wounded in
Republic Square. He is an anti-Thersites
who, unlike his abusive Shakespearean
counterpart in Troilus and Cressida,
enunciates bitter moral principles. One of
these, for instance, is "we have a single
house, a single space", and therefore also a
single leadership structure and a single
rabble-those, too, are what "we" are. His
outsider's tragic-ironic viewpoint necessarily
expands the dramatic dimension into
the present-day-for example, by posing
quiz questions and acting like a straitlaced
reporter in a reality show, giving the parley
team three minutes "to leave the House"
(which is a reference both to the "Party
House", as the building was called, and the
TV reality show Big Brother). Spokesman's
role as an intermediary adds to a long list of
other verbal anachronisms, like a poet type
who, on a phone call out of party
headquarters, blames the celebrated rebel
Communist author Gyula Háy for the turn
taken by events. (The writer emigrated from
Hungary after serving over three years of a
prison sentence for his part in wording the
intellectuals' revolutionary manifesto.) He
also grumbles that a day will come when he
will become one particular besieger's
minder (i.e., as an officer in the security
forces, he will recruit the besieger as an
informer to report on friends, colleagues
and neighbours). Past joins up with
present, the rhetoric of iambic verse with
the obscenities of everyday language, a
tragic historical horror with a political
pamphlet in the form of a dramatic poem;
thus creating the strangest, the most
original and the most outstanding new
Hungarian play of recent years.
The production was directed by Péter
Gothár. Some people thought it would
have been better to go for a director who,
like the authors, belongs to the post-1956
generation. It would certainly have been
different, and there should be no obstacle
to doing so in the future. There is no
question that Gothár carries the imprint of
the last fifty years within his very being (not
to speak of his work), as the distinguished
theatre productions and films to his credit
bear witness. His directing style sits well
with the Katona company-sticking closely
to real-life specifics, but still retaining
enough elasticity to stretch to a tragigrotesque
dance of death, almost a modern
morality play. (A subsequent director may
be able to demonstrate that a more abstract
dramaturgy also works.) The stage setting,
which Gothár also designed, revolves
around a mobile steel frame that is fitted
with wheels, a tippable platform and swingdown
or pop-out window-door sections,
which permits it to convey both the
metaphor of the "House'"as an island and
its progressive destruction. The outsiders'
base is formed by a corrugated portico and
a few steps. The two groups are positioned
close together, almost eyeball to eyeball,
and the inevitable narrowness of the space
between them is a signal that the two
groups are ultimately one. Gothár indeed
capitalizes on that by having the outsiders
and insiders hold a discussion over the
corpse of the shot-down bearer of the white
flag-rather as if they were on a companionable
hunting party-as to the input
and output, meaning the fatal bullet's entry
and exit wounds. (This was originally part
of the text to be delivered by Spokesman.)
The biting irony comes to the fore at other
points also, such as when the whole crowd
whispers a password all together, or when
the sickeningly disparate company poses
for an idyllic group picture. ("The light is
good now," Spokesman says.)
The tightly abridged text imposes a
tautness on the play. Scenes come in quick
succession, with the rhythm being set by the
mixture of stylized and realistic effects
(blood sprinkled from a tea-pot, gunshots
and explosions produced by varied means,
panels of real steel and a surrealistically
tumbling piano) and variations of theatrical
dynamics. It is not acting but the ensemble
that has a solid presence on the stage. The
martyred truce negotiator is a fall guy
trapped by ideology. The crowd leader ("love
him for being ours and Hungarian") in the
end tears off his National Guard armband
and, disenchanted, "leaves to go courting".
A colonel who loses his nerve dies in action
wearing tracksuit bottoms, while a colleague
of the same rank turns out to be an insane
fanatic. A range of female fates are built into
the destinies of the woman soldiers among
the insiders. The pilot of a "biplane" flies
round the auditorium on a wire cable, and a
misinformed tank commander plays out a
tragic farce highlighted by a gigantic
magnifying mirror. On the other side,
appearances are made by, among others, a
peg-legged marauder, a homophobic prison
lag, a woman who cuts out a human heart
(she later hops it because "her kitchen's in a
mess"), a gentleman of the old school in a
Tyrolean hat, a kind-hearted young woman
with conciliatory instincts (the thing that
stops her from being lynched is that she is
said to be an actress because of her
declaiming a dramatic tirade), and a
humanistic saver of lives. "The authors'
aim," writes Radnóti-and the production
bears this out-is
sensual evocation of the crowd. The crowd
is the dramatic formation from which the
characters step out, only to return to it after
playing their scene. The episodic structure
makes it possible for the chaotic automatism
of the multitude to come into being
not through voices, but characters. For that,
it was necessary that no main figure stand
out from the crowd. All the same, the
crowd here is not a faceless mass for which
only the whole, but not its components,
gains as a face.
The cast ends the play in their street
clothes, with their own faces. Unlike
Pushkin's or Büchner's portrayals of
crowds, we see the appearance here of the
alienating effect of the actor's face separate
from his or her role.
In relation to the play, the production
is both conceptually and stylistically
rather muted to be in any danger of
running too close to the bone of current
public taste, either politically or aesthetically.
Notwithstanding that, surprise
and resistance on the part of the audience
were palpable. Some walked out; others
did not join in the applause at the end.
There are countries where that is by no
means unusual, where real theatrical
scandals may occur, but Hungary is not
one of them. Nor were there demonstrations
against the Katona József Theatre's
production. A prevailing apathy would
seem nearer the mark. The critical reaction
has not been appreciable either, with
no airing of polemics. The influential
critics who so often loudly decry the
publication of mediocre volumes of poetry
or run-of-the-mill novels have been
strangely subdued. Could it be that they are
too stunned, or has the prestige of theatre
fallen so low?
Because there are things to talk about.
A discussion of the play's merits would be
of more value than silent indifference. 
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