If politics means the business of the city (polis), then political theatre is the theatre of public business. But what is public business?
For instance, it is public business if there is a hatred or feud that persists in a community across several generations. "That's why murder moves on to murder / through blood and does not leave alone / the double line of Atreus"—in Euripides' tragedy Orestes. The most recent murder was committed by Orestes and Electra, who killed their mother and her lover because they in turn had murdered their father.
In the performance by the National Theatre, we see the siblings, fugitives from justice, cast out in the street. To quote the new translation's contemporary idiom, the police (revenge goddesses called Erynnis) are in "hot pursuit" of them and the jury will vote over their fate. Orestes had been assigned the task of revenge earlier by Apollo.

The task: to kill a mother for him. Therefore he has the right to expect the protection of the god. The other arm of justice is the assembly, which guards law and order as well as the rules of living in a community, and which decides who is guilty. At this assembly it is people like Menelaos who are voting— who dragged the country into war because of his unfaithful wife Helen and who is therefore responsible for the dead.
Who has the right to pass judgment? Who has the right to talk about moral deficit? The gods are untouchable, the politicians are corrupt; out of fear, the "horrible children" are acting like terrorists. (They reminded one critic of the German terrorists of the 1970s: Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof.) The game works out at the expense of the people (the plebs), whom—the Argos women's choir— Euripides depicts as deeply indecisive.

The National Theatre's performance translates the antique political drama into today's language. Hungarian tailoring of Greek mythology—sewing new garments out of old clothes—is common in theatre. István Tasnádi's play Fédra Fitness does not change the story of

Phaidra, who is in love with her stepson Hippolytos.
Unlike the earlier versions, this performance is a myth-parody. The actors—even the mythical heroes not connected with the literally interpreted plot—talk while working out on exercise benches and machines.

The myth parody is also a parody of a way of life, a caricature of cultural and mental degeneration. Here also, celebrities are the unworthy main characters. The world-hero Theseus brags and grumbles just as before falling into a coma. The dirt-conscious, ultrasensitive, precocious teenager Hippolytos' image of sexuality is that of a teenager who's just reached puberty; his political programme is infantile and stupid, and does not promise much good for the day he steps into his father's place. We also

have a cunningly servile yet also macho brigand who supports those in power and a "personal trainer of mental hygiene": that is, a cynical intellectual. It is only the idiotic Minitaur who is acquitted by the author: his reward is a closing monologue resulting from a cleared-up mind. The rhetoric of this speech resembles the visionary accounts of messengers in ancient drama as they relate divine judgments—an apocalyptic vision with the implacability of a tsunami.

Maxim Gorky's play of a hundred years ago, Barbarians depicts the mundane everyday "as it is". This play is not about celebrities, the mentality of the "power elite", but about the life of average people.
In the Katona József Theatre's production, director Tamás Ascher lays open the intricacies of

how people live together. Within this he uses his multifaceted approach to expose a huge range of emotions and raw nerves. There might be sharper surgeons than him (in fact, there are not many), but he is the most able stage director at dissecting the complexities of living as a social animal.

The Pintér Béla Company's performance of their play The One Never Returning rhymes with this old story almost word for word. The plot takes place today. Here, a four-member team of engineers is off to start working abroad, on a building construction in the imaginary West- Fatalistan (ironic name, its root is in the latin fatum meaning fate), which should be set somewhere in the Middle East. They have won a tender and can go and build something (exactly what, the play never tells us). Except, according to their contract, only three of the four can travel—Mr. Goodman and Mr. Freeman

(speaking names, of course) tell them this in the name of the American customer who ordered the job. Therefore one of them has to stay behind: has to be dropped. It is difficult, however, to inform the one selected for the part of the loser; the three start a game of devious manipulation and weave a thread of lies to make him lose heart so they can finally liquidate him. They morally blacken him, smearing his private life, while they themselves are morally much darker than their victim. Finally they succeed and lose their partner without whom they set off to West-Fatalistan to meet their own fate.