This edited volume does a masterful job at lifting the curtain for us all on an important and vibrant European stage.
Summary
Rating
Good
Title aside, what is central to the collection of contemporary Hungarian plays published by Methuen is not womanhood or its depiction in non-conventional roles but, rather, the playwrights’ predicament of being artists “in opposition” to the illiberal leanings of the government of the day.
A fairly detailed introduction by the editor and translator, the Salford University academic Szilvi Naray, gives us the background to each author’s history of attacks from mainstream Hungarian media, including those who had previously enjoyed external recognition and awards. We are left in no doubt that we are about to engage with political satire.
A standout, powerful play that works extremely well in translation and will cross time and boundaries is The Dead Man, by János Háy. It is a simple tale of a murder, told in the first person, by a woman whose psyche was first shaped by the announced loss of her husband in war and, later, by the imposition of a normal couple life by his sudden return. Its power rests with in emotional ambiguity, the plain logic of the telling, and matter-of-fact emptiness of death and its emotional consequences on the surviving.
Prah, by György Spiró is a delightfully entertaining two-hander. A husband-and-wife’s delirious descent into paranoia and self-sabotage, it doubles up as a commentary on the diverging values of the younger generation from that of the two leads: hard-working but forever suspecting and fearful of bureaucratic abuse.
Prime Location, also by György Spiró, is surreal, grotesque social satire in the spirit of Swift’s A Modest Proposal We are in the waiting room of a slick and financially efficient nursing home where we slowly get to grasp its gruesome operating model, enabled by the privatisation of social security functions traditionally provided by the state.
Sunday Lunch,by János Háy and The Bat, by Krisztina Tóth are somewhat similar in their settings: dysfunctional couples fighting for emotional space and sense. Although the narratives and tones are different, both plays tell of the strain and dehumanising nature of family relations and child rearing: itself a defiant statement in a cultural milieu steeped in the Catholic ideology of good and healthy (heteronormative) family life.
The curse of political satire in theatre is that, though vital, it seldom travels across borders. Even more rarely does it survive the political age it was born in. Gogol’s The Government Inspector, Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui and Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist are glowing exceptions, but exceptions nonetheless. When a long preface is required for context, it no longer feels like reading theatre but more like handling historical archives on the themes of liberal values or political corruption in a specific time and place. Such is the unsettling predicament of readers unfamiliar with the language or artistic scene in Orbán’s Hungary.
Despite this contextual caveat, Dr Naray’s edited volume does a masterful job at lifting the curtain for us all on an important and vibrant European stage.
Book Editor: Szilvi Naray
Publisher and Imprint: Bloomsbury, Methuen Drama
Year of publication: 2024
Series: Drama and Performance Studies
ISBN: 9781350370722
