Tamás Koltai
Total Theatre in Transylvania
András Visky: Hosszú péntek (Long Friday) • Chekhov: Uncle Vanya •
Puccini: Gianni Schicchi
[...]
In Transylvania, Hungarian theatre goes
back as far as in Hungary itself, with
the first performances in the Hungarian
language given in the 1790s. The Hungarian
National Theatre of Kolozsvár (Cluj) opened
its doors in 1821. As nation-states in the
nineteenth century favoured the use of
the national language, the ideal of
independence and of national identity
emerged as its guiding principles. The
avant-garde of the twentieth century, on
the other hand, gradually wiped out rigid
intellectual and aesthetic boundaries.
Though there have been conflicts in the
relations between Hungary and Romania in
their ethnic policies both in the Communist
era and since the transition, Transylvanian
Hungarian theatre has been a beneficiary of
interethnic coexistence. Rooted in its conservative,
literary-oriented and naturalistic
tradition, it has profited greatly from the
more imaginative, highly visual art of the
Romanian theatre and its taste for the
abstract and the stylised.
To be sure, this required openness on
the Hungarian side. Of the twenty or so
Hungarian-language theatre companies in
Transylvania, it was the Kolozsvár company
that showed itself to be pre-eminently
open-minded. They were the first to break
with a theatrical style springing from
romantic national ideals that was archaic,
pathetic and hopelessly dusty and which
carried the implied message that respect for
tradition was a pledge for retaining cultural
identity. This break started with the 1960s
and was associated with an outstanding
director, György Harag. One of his students,
Gábor Tompa brought the company to
international fame, turning it into a regular
participant at major festivals and, this year,
gaining admission to the elite club of the
European Theatre Union.
Of their current productions, three
deserve special mention. Two of them are
directed by notable Romanian directors,
and Tompa himself has directed a stage
adaptation of a novel by the Nobel laureate
Imre Kertész.
[...]
Uncle Vanya was directed by a director who has achieved word fame, Andrei Şerban.
[...]
Some scenes are circus turns. One of the
actors, playing a drunk, falls off a startlingly
tall fire ladder, tumbling and bouncing ever
lower in an ankle-breaking feat, finally
slumping against the wall at the bottom of
the ladder, only to rip out, with the same
momentum, a plank of wood. He then
staggers along holding on to the plank
wobbling on his shoulders and stands it
beside himself only to catch it adroitly the
next moment and break its fall just before it
lands on one of the audience. When Vanya
fires at the professor, he fights his way
through the audience, ‘misses' five times
over; when the gun fails to fire at the sixth
attempt, he places the chair upside down
on top of a table under which the potential
victim is hiding, during which time the gun
finally does fire. This is pure knockabout
slapstick. Upon taking their leave, the
actors roll over in the mud which covers the
stage after a theatrical rainfall, causing the
finale to be entirely devoid of poignancy or
melodramatic pain. Instead, they are all
overcome with cynical bitterness and heavy
lethargy. They summarily re-visit all the
important locations before taking their
leave by the safety curtain, toward the
auditorium, thus linking the close of the
play to its beginning. The safety curtain
rises, and during the applause all the
players rush along all the possible isles and
paths, along the top of the seats, up the
outside stairs to the balcony, taking bows
and leaving gobs of mud behind them
wherever they go. The reality of theatre
soils theatre itself—the ‘temple of art'. The
raising of the chandelier puts a full-stop
mark to the performance and a sentimental
tango booms out for a last time.
[...]
Tamás Koltai
editor of Színház, a theatre monthly, is The Hungarian Quarterly's regular theatre critic.
