János Mohácsi is also a writer-director, widely recognised as the outstanding talent of the generation now hitting their fifties. This time he is not following his habit of rewriting a classic but draws his subject "from life" (though, as will be seen, the late-lamented István Örkény has also left a dramaturgical "fingerprint" on the performance). His subject is Hungary's 1956 Revolution. One of the many unfortunate events in the commemoration of last year's fiftieth anniversary was a playwriting competition, which had the grotesque result of stimulating a rash of substandard stage works. The best two productions were not in fact conceived with the anniversary date in mind at all. One of those, András Papp and János Térey's Kazamaták (Casemates), staged by the Katona József Theatre in Budapest towards the end of the last theatre season, was reviewed here (see HQ 183). The other is a piece self-explanatorily entitled 56 06, which was put on by Mohácsi's team at the Csiky Gergely Theatre in Kaposvár in January 2007. That team-János Mohácsi himself, his brother István (also a writer) and composer Márton Kovács-have assembled for presentation on the stage some of the anomalies that have been witnessed in Hungarian public life since the political turning-point of 1989-90. In so doing, the banality of the daily grind is made to appear like some sort of demented mythology.
Kaposvár's "1956 piece", which carried the subtitle Crazy Soul, Beaten Hosts peers into the maelstrom which opened up in the wake of the tragi-grotesque farce that marked last year's anniversary. The commemoration on October 23rd 2006 was hijacked in shameful bad taste by an alltoo- successful "rerun" of the original protests. Images that were more than likely quite inexplicable to most foreigners were carried by the world's media: the siege of Hungarian Television's headquarters; a demonstrator starting up a 1956 tank that was parked in the street as part of an exhibition; the mass rallies ending in clashes between protestors and police- all a faithful mirror of the sad fact that Hungary has not yet come to terms with its own past.
The Mohácsi trio have undertaken this process of self-examination. What they uncover is nothing new, but it is still fairly shocking. The descent to the lower depths of the well of the past is intended literally as a visual metaphor: the characters are let down on cables in open cages containing one or more of them. Dangling, swaying, lurching up and down, they speak the Mohácsi version of Orwellian newspeak for the 1956 anniversary, replete with official speeches, jeering and the chants of football hooligans. The "dumb talk" which was parodic when the Mohácsis used it in their adaptation of Schiller's Intrigue and Love has since passed into everyday language; theatrical overstatement has been superseded by the nonsense of reality.
Having alighted at the ground level of the past, we come up successively against three foci of conflict that are the subjects of three fairly long scenes. In the first of these, the goons of the ÁVÓ, the feared state security office of the 1950s, swoop down to turf out of their home a family that is about to have their son buried (a rag doll representing the little boy's corpse is tipped out of the coffin), and only at the end of various atrocities does it turn out that the heavies have come to the wrong floor as they had only been looking for an apartment which had a telephone.
(This family-called the Toths, in overt homage to Örkény-will be encountered in several further episodes.) In Scene 2, the "Big Brother" complex unfolds with Kádár scuttling off to Khrushchev in November 1956 and being told "to do what he wants"-meaning "what we want", as Khrushchev puts it. This dependency is underlined by bonds that expand in time and space so as to touch on the feud between Kádár and Imre Nagy; on Béla Kun, leader of Hungary's short-lived Soviet Republic in 1919, who as a refugee in the Soviet Union fell victim to the Stalinist purges of the late Thirties; Josip Tito, the independently minded leader of the postwar Communist party in Yugoslavia (who was called a "chained dog of the West" by his Hungarian "brothers" until a reconciliation was achieved in 1954); and other Soviet "brothers" of the time, such as Suslov, |
Mikoyan and Andropov. The third and most potent scene revisits a topos that is something of a Mohácsi favourite: the Hungária General Hospital, during the days of the Revolution, with doctors in the midst of chaos, panic and the reek of booze. Nurses are shuttling between surgery and running off revolutionary fliers; the strains of Beethoven's Egmont Overture; Imre Nagy's last radio address ("the Government is in its place"); a female doctor, an embodiment of the angel of the fight for freedom, who will not tolerate booze in her operating theatre but uses a penknife, an injection of petrol and electric current to murder an innocent man who, as a joke, was having himself photographed in his brother's ÁVÓ uniform. This scene is a horrifically absurd summing up of the Magyar soul as Mohácsi sees it: compounded of decrepitude and heroism, romanticism and narrow-mindedness, pettiness and magnanimity, self-sacrifice and monstrosity- the mythology of our madness.
The production intersperses the horrific burlesque of events in the public domain with private tragedy (the Toths lose their daughter when she is admitted to the Hungária General Hospital for pneumonia), but it is the impact of the former that defines the piece. Younger members of the audience will probably have a hard time catching many of the allusions. For instance, they might not be aware of the reality of a time when there was a chronic shortage of telephone lines (so a dwelling with a line was a real bonus), or may not know that a chained-up, barking man represents Tito ("Who's he?" they may well ask), or why the Egmont Overture has associations with 1956. (It was played over and over again by Hungarian Radio, in place of its regular programmes, when the Revolution broke out.) Nevertheless, the more perceptive of them may at least pick out and grasp from the bedlam the idea that aspects of 1956 in which politicians or teachers tend to invest false emotion can also be seen by sharper eyes as ghastly historical hogwash. The Mohácsi team are able to put this worm-eaten cavalcade across with amazing formal discipline. The pastel-shaded flower-pattern wallpaper of the scenery, with its fluorescent emblems of despotism, provides the necessary backdrop to open up a surreal space and an easy path for entrances and exits. The costumes-pale pink to denote the Soviet zone, for instance-are ironic masterpieces. Composer Márton Kovács, switching between his own music and Soviet martial songs, taps into a supra-real dimension. The actors are all versed in a common theatre idiom of tragic grotesquerie. Thus, Mrs Toth, on stepping over the country's frontier, as represented by the Iron Curtain of the theatre's safety curtain, looks back on the homeland she has left and freezes in mid-action, like Lot's wife turning into a pillar of salt. The Toth boy's eighteenth birthday is "celebrated" by hanging him-something based on well-known cases of the ghastly retribution wreaked by the Kádár regime (minors sentenced by the courts for capital offences would be held in prison until they reached the age of majority, when they would be hanged).
Zsolt Kovács plays the leading role of Imre Nagy as the martyred prime minister at the mercy of his own decency. At the end, János Mohácsi stages a fictional postexecution charade-this too, incidentally, is reminiscent of a play by Örkény: Stevie in the Bloodbath.1 In that, Kádár obtains an amnesty for Nagy from Khrushchev;as James Bond he is rescued by a black girl from a hail of bullets; Neil Armstrong steps onto the surface of the Moon with him; a priest friend digs an escape tunnel from the Château d'If to Heroes' Square in Budapest (where the ceremony prior to Nagy's reburial took place in 1989), and he marches along to the singing of a surrounding posse of Young Pioneers in their red neckerchiefs. Two removal men carry on a screen which is showing the 2006 siege of the Hungarian Television's headquarters, lest we forget where we are living. Then Imre Nagy, a wan smile of the blessed on his features, saunters out of the theatre into the open air, into immortality.
This is an instance where the theatre is not drawing on the past but is serving the truth by falsifying reality. |
