From its pocket-sized theater in downtown Budapest, the Katona Jozsef Theatre is peeking out cautiously at the brave and possibly dangerous new world of democracy.
For an independent-minded and idiosyncratic troupe at the peak of its powers, it`s an odd time for handwringing. But then, the Hungarian artistic world is an odd one and the demise of Communism won`t change that.
Eight years after it became an independent theater, the Katona troupe has established a worldwide reputation for its powerful handling of the classics. Already a hit from Moscow to Paris to London, the Katona theater will present Gogol`s ”The Government Inspector” as part of the Chicago International Theatre Festival.
It will be the Katona`s first appearance in the United States. In April, the troupe was in Caracas and Bogota. This month it`s in Paris, for the second time.
Back home in Budapest, the Communist Party has just thrown in the towel after 43 years of running the country. The Soviet army is going home. The first free election has produced a center-right government determined to
”return the country to Europe,” as they say in Hungary.
No Hungarian objects to this-not even most Communists. Actors, like other artists, cheer it on. But after the cheering stops, there will be financial and artistic questions to which no one has answers.
”Being Socialist meant that nobody got real salaries, but we were assured of lots of social and cultural things at low prices, including education, buses and theater,” says Tibor Teri, the Katona`s executive manager.
”Nobody could have paid normal theater ticket prices out of the bad salaries,” Teri said. ”We aim mostly at students and the intelligentsia, and they can`t afford high prices. So our tickets are 50, 70 and 100 forints
(about 80 cents, $1.10 and $1.60). But we get great subsidies.
”Now this principle doesn`t exist any more,” he said. ”But nobody knows what will replace it. We`re all uncertain.”
But certainly the shift from Communism to capitalism will mean more freedom, more artistic license, for Katona and other theaters? Well, yes and no.
Unlike most of Eastern Europe, Hungary had no revolution. Rather, it inched into freedom. Its political liberalization began in the mid-1960s. For years, things could be said out loud here that were only whispered elsewhere. In the end, it was the Communist Party that ended its own domination.
But all of this was done in a roundabout, byzantine fashion. Outright anticommunism was banned, and dissident writers were punished. But almost everything else was permitted, at least most of the time. However, sometimes the same thing was permitted one day and not the next, and no one ever knew what the rules would be.
”For the past 10 years, political pressure has been a myth,” Teri said. ”Theaters made their own artistic decisions. It was very seldom that we were prevented from doing anything. Out of 300 new plays (in all theaters)
every year, only one or two were stopped.
”How it worked was, we sent a plan for the season to the council, which sent it to the Ministry of Culture, which sent it to the Party. When a play was banned, there never was a formal letter. Instead, Gyorgy Aczel (the cultural czar who devised and ran this system for 25 years) would call the director in for a cup of coffee and mention that it might not be a good play to do. The director got the message.”
Despite what Teri says, the result was a good deal of self-censorship, to try to outguess the regime and get around the system. Dissident Miklos Haraszty called it ”the velvet jail.”
Now Hungarian artists, having gotten around the system one last time, find it suddenly is behind them. The question is: Will Hungarian theaters, forced to find a market, learn that crowd-pleasing can be more limiting than the strictures of a Communist government?
”To run a theater on a market basis just isn`t possible,” Teri said.
”The theater must be more than a market place. The theater must help society grow. Only Broadway theaters are purely market theaters. Everywhere else, especially in Western Europe, there are subsidies, public or private.” The Katona theater has never seen itself as overtly political. Rather, it grew from a vision-radical in Hungarian terms-of what theater should be.
In the early 19th Century all theater in Hapsburgian Hungary was in German. The growth of nationalism, culminating in the 1848 revolution, was fueled by writers like poet Sandor Petofi and playwright Jozsef Katona, for whom the Katona troupe is named.
(In Hungarian, family names come first and Christian names last, e. g., Bartok Bela or Petofi Sandor. Hence, when they named a theater after Katona, they called it the Katona Jozsef Theatre, which is how it`s known here and abroad. It`s OK to call it the Katona theater-but not the Jozsef Theatre.)
The revolution led to a Hungarian National Theatre whose mission is to preserve and protect the Hungarian language and encourage Hungarian drama. Its first duty is to the nation.
By 1978, the theater had become the stodgy plaything of cultural bureaucrats. To revive it, it was put in the hands of two directors, Gabor Zsambeki and Gabor Szekely.
Zsambeki and Szekely were less interested in the Hungarian language than in developing a style of theater that used classics to reveal truths about modern life. As theater officials say, a conflict grew between the National Theatre`s ”national task” and the two directors` ”social and theatrical task.”
In 1982, Zsambeki and Szekely left the National Theatre, taking some members of their troupe with them, and were given the Katona Theatre, which had been a chamber theater attached to the National Theatre since 1951 and now became independent, while keeping its old name. (Szekely left the theater last summer.)
So was born the Katona troupe that will come to Chicago. It is a theater devoted, as its official literature says, to ”reality . . . to present live people, recognizable types of contemporaries, not abstract symbols but people in social reality.”
Well, this is admirable stuff, but most theaters anywhere would say the same. What makes the Katona people different?
First, the linkage of classics to the life of today. This, Teri stresses, does not mean playing Hamlet in blue jeans. The troupe occasionally ignores traditional costuming-”The Government Inspector” is played in more-or-less modern dress-but the effect is a timeless, rather than modern, quality.
The theater`s repertoire is largely classical-a sprinkling of modern plays weighted with ”The Misanthrope,” ”Twelfth Night,” ”The Three Sisters” and the like. But the idea, Teri said, is to play them ”so the public can see its own beliefs and opinions. We say what they feel. A combination of the old and the modern must reveal the essence of the part and the play.”
For an East European audience, eager to read between every line, this is important. For a Western audience, the troupe`s value probably lies more in the sheer quality of its work.
”The Government Inspector,” for instance, is a farce of astonishing physical vigor that manages to be at once hilarious and politically pointed. Gogol`s play is a satire based on mistaken identity: an impecunious ne`er-do-well, having washed up in a provincial town, is identified as a government inspector by the town`s corrupt officials, who fawn over him while he plays them for fools.
Janos Ban plays the putative inspector with wide-eyed guile and amazing athleticism. Peter Blasko, as the mayor, mixes cringing servility and petty tryanny while his wife, Juli Basti, is a provincial harridan ready to sell herself or her daughter to the callow ”inspector.” The rest of the acting is broad and rich, oozing bile and corruption, full of hick slyness.
It is all good, hammy stuff, each character parodied to get at the central truth. Chicago audiences will get a running translation, but you don`t have to understand a word of Hungarian to grasp what is going on in every mind.
The troupe operates from an odd little theater on Petofi Street, near the Danube. The 380-seat auditorium, with its scuffed red velvet walls, is scarcely bigger than the stage, which is nearly 50 feet deep. It is on the ground floor of an apartment building. The stage`s height is 13 feet and the sets are spacious but squat.
”Our 380 seats is about right,” Teri said. ”If there were more, we couldn`t have the same contact with the audience.”
The Schedule
The Katona Jozsef Theatre of Hungary performs Nikolai Gogol`s ”The Government Inspector” at 7:30 p.m. June 19-23 and 2 p.m. June 20, 23 and 24 at the Blackstone Theatre, 60 E. Balbo St. Tickets are $10-$35. For ticket information: (312) 644-3378 or (800) 545-3378.
