Tamás Koltai

Belated Amends

Milán Füst: A boldogtalanok (The Unfortunates) • Sándor Weöres:
A kétfejű fenevad (The Two-headed Beast)

 

It is something of a commonplace that drama has never been the dominant genre in Hungarian literature and that the Hungarian theatre has therefore always lagged a bit behind. The single exception proves the rule. Ferenc Molnár, whose plays were performed in theatres around the world during his lifetime, was celebrated in Budapest, the city of his birth, as a permanent author-in-residence at the Vígszínház, or 'Comedy Theatre', which alongside the National Theatre was the most important theatrical company in Hungary.
There is more than a hint of truth in the brief description above, but it is not the whole truth. There were some Hungarian writers and poets who also wrote plays, and their dramas are no less significant than Molnár's works for the stage, yet they never achieved the same success. There are several reasons for this, one of which is the figure of Molnár himself, who from his first sweeping success in 1907 with Az ördög (translated as The Devil in 1908) was in a position to dictate both style and theatrical ideals with his elegant salon pieces. Indeed his influence was such that along with his epigones he came to assert hegemony over the theatre. One can hardly fault him for this. He was too talented, and he was able to take possession of the world of the theatre. The theatres of the day, however, cannot be excused entirely for having exercised a dictatorship over taste. The light-hearted Molnár weighed heavily on theatre life. Theatre managers eager to garner success with similarly facile plays rejected works for the stage that offered more complex and less crowd-pleasing portrayals of social conflicts. There were significant writers of whom the theatre took not a moment's notice, and there were others who were effectively silenced as dramatists. Still others were 'merely' deformed by the whims of the theatre, tamed into writing to meet commercial needs, and not just for a few years, but in many cases for decades.
Today two authors of the recent past have risen to new-found prominence on the programmes of Hungarian theatres, authors whose works have been rehabilitated for the stage as theatrical companies have ventured from time to time to rediscover them from a contemporary perspective (unlike Molnár, who needs neither rehabilitation nor rediscovery: he has stayed as he was, and the new productions of his plays are at their best when they differ little from their older and traditional ones). Milán Füst (1888–1967) created a magnificent oeuvre as a poet, aesthete, novelist and playwright. His 1954 translation of Shakespeare's King Lear is definitive, and his novel The Story of My Wife (1942, English translation by Ivan Sanders, 1989) reportedly almost won him a Nobel Prize for Literature. His 1931 play Negyedik Henrik (Henry IV; revised 1940) was not performed in Germany only because of the poverty of the translation. Still, his works for the stage generally met with little or no interest in Hungary.
The Unfortunates, written in 1914, had to wait half a century for its premiere. It made it as far as the desk of the director of the National Theatre, who recognized its merits but considered it so depressing that he backed down fearing that it would weary the average viewer. The case of Füst was typical of general attitudes in the theatre at the time, which had limited tolerance for the portrayal of everyday social realities on the stage, and this was true not only of the commercial theatre, but also of the National Theatre. These audiences most certainly would have turned up their noses at The Unfortunates, based on a brief newspaper report about the suicide of a young seamstress. She and an older female friend had been the mistresses of a printer. The two women decide to kill him, but the girl turns the pistol against herself at the last moment.
It is hard to imagine how a twenty-fiveyear- old writer was able to elevate this wretched melodrama about an eternal triangle from the banality of a shudderinducing slice of life and transform it into a portrait of far wider validity concerning psychological traumas, crippled emotions and miscarried lives. Yet in the minimalist simplicity of this bleak story, reduced to its bare essentials, an existential drama and tentative poetry lie hidden. The stifling atmosphere of self-tormenting emotions in human relationships limns depths that were only to become mainstream half a century later with the likes of the British kitchen-sink plays of the fifties and early sixties. Seen from the outside, the male protagonist strikes one as a bungling Don Juan; in truth he is fleeing himself. He does not wish to encounter his former self, who had once deserved a better fate. The two women, each in her own way, attempt to thwart his flight, and they fail to realize that they are intensifying his smouldering self-loathing. The growing tension leads slowly but surely to the death of the innocent and vulnerable victim.

[...]

Like Füst, Sándor Weöres (1913–89), one of the finest Hungarian poets, was discovered late as a dramatist, despite the fact that he had taken an interest in the stage as a boy, as evidenced by the 'opera fragment' written in all likelihood when he was fifteen or sixteen and discovered only posthumously. Tucked away among the papers of his estate were also many subsequent fragments that no doubt remained unfinished due to the lack of interest, later coupled with ideological control. Seven of his plays were published in his lifetime, the earliest of which dated from 1938, but theatres were never particularly keen to keep them on stage. For a long time only his fairy-tale plays were performed, and only towards the end of the sixties was the monumental verse play entitled Octopus avagy Szent György és a sárkány (Octopus, or Saint George and the Dragon, 1965) professionally staged.
As a poet Weöres revelled in teasing out playful morsels of stylistic and poetic bravura. His work as a playwright is characterized by a similarly dazzling formal variety, displaying a readiness to experiment in many different genres, though his output for stage can basically be categorized under two headings. The historical and mythological perspectives offered by his philosophical pieces alternate with fairytale plays, which tap into folk humour and customs, romantic flights of a lively fantasy. In many cases, these elements are intertwined, and it is precisely this intertwining that gives Weöres' art its unique flavour. Of the above-mentioned hallmarks, his choice of historicalmythological subjects and the philosophical handling of these subjects are simply foreign to the established traditions of Hungarian theatre. This was not the only reason why he was unable to develop closer relations with the theatre, however, and abandoned writing for the stage early in his career. His decision was probably due more to the cavils of cultural policy surrounding any performance or publication of the plays. Permission was given for Act 1 of The Twoheaded Beast (1968) to be published in a provincial magazine, but not for any sequel, and permission to produce it on stage was withheld until the eighties. It turned out to be the last play Weöres wrote.
Today it is not difficult to understand why The Two-headed Beast was banned. (Hungary officially had no censorship, bans were not in writing, but they were known to be based on the personal decision of the Party's chief ideologue, transmitted verbally. It was advisable to accept the verdict to avoid punitive sanctions, such as losing your job, a punishment by no means unheard of.) The root cause was undoubtedly the irreverent, ironic and satirical stance that Weöres adopted towards history, which was completely at odds with Marxist philosophy. The Two-headed Beast amounts to a pamphlet, a squib, about diplomacy, the pact "that rulers stitch together against the populace."
The play is set in Hungary in 1686, at the end of an era during which a large chunk of Hungary had for a century and a half been under occupation by the Ottoman Turks, with pro-Habsburg and pro-Turkish forces striving to reach a modus vivendi, in other words, to settle in for long-term survival. Weöres depicts the tragicomic situation in which new alliances are sealed (and also undone) on a daily basis, first by the Turks against the Habsburg loyalists, then by the Habsburg loyalists against the Turks, not to mention the abiding hatred of Catholics for Protestants, Christians for Jews, and those who consider themselves true-born Magyars for upstart foreigners. It is not hard to discern in this a satire, already relevant at the time the play was written, of nationalist, racist and other animosities linked with social exclusion. The key to the plot is that there is no way of telling who is what, whose side they have taken, where they have lain low, or who is disguised as what, because the subterfuges and masquerades in which the people have engaged in the struggle for survival have made them unrecognizable. For Weöres, historicism itself is a mask, though he garbs his plot in period costumes and scenery (though, clearly, this is little more than a matter of appearances), even weaving in the city of Pécs, because the play was written to be performed by the theatre there. The characters are given dialogue couched in an opulent archaic Hungarian crammed with imagery, often irresistibly funny and always superbly comprehensible. These are fireworks of linguistic devices, poetry at its best but with a thrust. When, at the end of the play, Weöres has a soldier-turnednarrator who has gone crazy in the wars cry out, "Down with world history!", he is cancelling with a single stroke all power politics built on self-interest and camouflaged with slogans and lies, from the beginning of time to the present day. "What times, eh!" complains one of the characters, and, since time immemorial, not a minute has gone by for which his lament is not valid. A free mind, an independent spirit, a childlike temperament sticks two fingers up to a hollow, fossilized philosophy of history.

[...]

 

Tamás Koltai,
editor of Színház, a theatre monthly, is The Hungarian Quarterly's regular theatre critic.