One day they win six hundred million forints (about $3 million) on the lottery. They are well aware that this is roughly equivalent to two Nobel prizes, that the Burtons bought an Adriatic island back in Tito's time, they are aware of stocks and shares, stock markets and inflation, aware of cholesterol-free diets and policemen being able to find the heroin they've already planted in the wardrobe. In short, they know too much and too little to feel unrestrained delight at their good fortune. The first thing they do is stash the winning ticket in a cocoa tin (a Prah tin, brought back from Yugoslavia in the Seventies). The more they think about what they can do with the money, the more doubts they have-the Woman in particular. She's convinced the Man will spend it on other women and the children will probably leave off their schooling, which they aren't too keen on anyway; they will all probably have to leave the country to get away from their relatives and what's in it for them abroad. "Why the hell did you buy a ticket?" she asks. The win has become a burden they would be best advised to shed. Spiró catches the tone of this relationship perfectly and their helplessness now that fortune has smiled on them. Even so, Prah is no psychological study-it's more than that.
Trying his hand at anything and everything (small business deals, subcontracting this and that, you name it), the Man has always come off badly. Everyone, from the small fry to the multinationals, has taken advantage of him: he's been lied to, ripped off, driven into debt and had the heavies turned onto him. The Woman has been no more fortunate. Sixteen years previously someone forged her signature on a denunciation; proceedings were started against her, and by the time her innocence was established, she had lost her job and was unable to look local people in the face. Even when she borrowed money from relatives, the extortionate rate charged meant they had to sell their car to pay the loan off. They know the world of money: thugs sitting on a kitchen stool to count out their protection money, an earringed shaven-headed gorilla who tried to run the Woman down on a zebra crossing and kicked her on the shins while onlookers just laughed. This is how we should behave when we are rich, she tells her husband, if we are to fit in, get your skull shaved and mow them down on the crossings.

After all, people only like you for your money. Perhaps their own kids will hire a hit man so that they can lay their hands on all the money. Maybe the winnings won't even be paid out by the bank; they'll deny everything, take the ticket round the back and never come back. Besides, no one's going to believe them, they'll get stitched up on a charge of fraud, bank robbery even. There's nothing they can do about it. Que sera, sera. "Misery- we had our share of that. And there's no changing that." Spiró's description of those who lost out in Hungary's democratisation after 1989-90 is right on the mark, sharply covering the bleak social realities of the last seventeen years. Even so, Prah is no docudrama, no dramatisation of current affairs-it's more than that. For the Man and the Woman, the 600 million-forint prize is the sort of chance they are not equipped to handle. At first, however, they reckon they are up to it. Their imaginations, fuelled by the movies, are set free, even if they don't take the ideas they come up with too seriously. They can buy an island, a villa on the sea, a mine- even a six-kilometre stretch of private motorway. But when they put their minds to it in earnest, it becomes clear that they lack a firmly grounded point of view. "They won't amount to anything anyway," says the Man, talking about their offspring. "Not even if they scrape through to college. They're dispensable, just like us-the whole country's excess to requirements." Spiró, using his characters as mouthpieces, sketches out what it means not to see a future. There's just the postcommunist legacy, the lack of prospects that lurks under the leaking plastic sheets that cover their glassed-in kitchen, the provincialism, the loss of class roots. He brings out the responsibility borne by society's élites, without naming specific politicians or institutions (political parties are only referred to in the context of their hiring of mobsters). There is no reference to the political skirmishing or to the power games and manipulations disguised as ideas and principles that, taken together, conceal the real problems. The only thing on display is everyday people. Those who have "won" on the lottery of Hungary's change of regime and are alarmed by their prospects are, of course, the audience. We laugh at ourselves, just as we do in Gogol's The Government Inspector. A tragicomic metaphor of a play, Prah is truly an allegory for our times.

Kornél Hamvai likewise chooses comedy, or rather farce, as his way of smothering venomous views about the state of society, though for him Communism is not of the "post" variety but the original article. He goes over half a century back in time, to the early Fifties in Hungary. One of Szigliget's interesting aspects is that it takes Michael Frayn's Balmoral as its model, rewriting it with the author's permission and subsequent approval. Most Hungarians are likely, at best, to dimly recall Balmoral as the royal residence that features in The Queen, where the British royal family traditionally spend their summers. In Frayn's play, writers take over the castle as a kind of retreat where they endeavour to produce creative work. In Hungary, that function has long been fulfilled by an old country manor at Szigliget, at the western end of Lake Balaton, and this is where Hamvai locates his own piece. Another aspect of Frayn's farce also attracted Hamvai's attention: the word "Balmoral" itself, which lacks only an acute accent for Hungarians to read it as a somewhat sardonic way of saying "low morale". Hence the word "balmorál" is appended to the Hungarian title as if it were indicating the piece's genre.
Frayn's conceit is that communism has taken over in Great Britain, and a journalist, a Communist from czarist Russia, arrives at the retreat in order to conduct an interview with one of the writers. Hamvai, of course, has no need to invent the idea that communism rules (or rather ruled) in Hungary: he simply sets the action in the year 1953 and

makes the journalist an Italian sent to Szigliget as the personal envoy of Palmiro Togliatti, the Italian Communist Party boss of blessed memory, in order to interview Tibor Sass, a Stalin Prize-winning Hungarian writer of the day. As in Frayn's work, or in Georges Feydeau's French farces, there is matrimonial infidelity-the author in question beds a woman writer-and a love triangle, with the jealous husband making an unexpected appearance. There is also a corpse, with the Stalin Prize-winning author pegging out, which means that someone has to be found in a hurry to take his place and keep the lid on any scandal. And who could be more suitable for this cover-up than the ingenuous caretaker who bears an uncanny resemblance to the writer? (As in Feydeau's pieces, this is a matter of double-casting, with the same actor playing both roles.) Hiding the dead writer in a trunk affords the obligatory comic situation, the verbal banter affords wry witticisms, and behind it all is the rigid political climate of Fifties Hungary, with its stool pigeon, the Party's trusty caretaker, and the Interior Ministry's minder for foreign visitors (who is almost blind and falls in love with the Italian journalist). That background need not be taken too seriously; there is no longer anything new to reveal about that era. Hamvai aims to entertain rather than scandalize-unlike, say, Joe Orton did, forty-odd years ago, with the same sort of plot elements in his Loot. Hamvai insouciantly skips over the inconsistencies of the plot, trusting that the audience will be more interested in the situations than their logic.