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IS THE GLASS HALF FULL OR IS IT HALF EMPTY -
Children's Theatre in Today's Hungary
1. Unhappy Optimists
Hungarian pessimism, now regarded as a several-hundred-year-old national characteristic, compares the situation of children’s theatres to a half empty glass, whereas the headstrong optimism so typical for all temporary phenomena likens it with a glass half full. Strangely enough, it is the optimists who are truly unhappy. Many, including me are convinced that ten years after the bloodless change of the system we live in a financially divided country – a fact that even politicians admit. Once we are finally ready to face this problem, we’ll have to realise the significance of children’s education. Should we use our chance to find new forms to express a new meaning, the work of those who make children’s theatre can also become more significant. Teachers, psychologists, sociologists alike feel the need for a change of paradigm, as do experts of children’s sports, child and family protection, juvenile crime prevention and those trying to help the disadvantaged. The first positive signs of this change are to be seen in children’s and youth productions all over the country.
There are still two approaches to be found in the wide selection of children’s plays of many genres. Gifted performers and theatre workshops take children audiences seriously. They keep the youths’ spiritual and intellectual characteristics in mind while searching for answers to real human questions. On the other hand, some theatre-makers shrug simply saying: “Why bother? For children it will be good enough.” Some perform modern stories, as well as fairy tales in their entirety, uncensored, breaking taboos, while others depict childhood as a world free of conflict and upsetting emotions or passions – which mirrors but the wishful thinking of the adult artist: “If only I could be a child again with no responsibilities!”
These diverse qualities express our temporary situation very well. With no more central instructions to follow, the great state children’s theatre closed down, the national puppet theatre split into two and a dozen new puppet theatres sprang up all over the country. Some big playhouses in the capital and in the country keep performing for children and some private companies, off groups, family puppet theatres and dance theatres started producing unique quality children’s shows, but they find it still difficult to compete with the cheap programmes on the market. Although drama teaching is now part of our national education and this year the second class of puppet-performers is going to graduate, but actors and directors are still not required to study any children’s theatre theory or practice. I would like to believe that the empty half of the glass is going to be filled with productions which serve the true interests of children. Theatre-makers will hopefully try to make children happier and more respectful of one another’s feelings and values, using the unique means of theatre to improve the children’s quality of life.
Children’s Theatre in the Fifties
In a theatre it’s always easy to tell how we see children, what we think is important for them and what expect from them. This was true even back when the egalitarian view resulted in huge crowds of children being shepherded in vast auditoriums where they were supposed to learn some very serious lessons. In those times presenting the socialist ideal of man was the single most important aim of staging tales. The lessons were always clear: the poor man overcomes the rich, tames the dragon and turns bad guys into good ones etc. Mark the difference: he does not kill them, he reforms them. Never has the stage seen so many kind dragons, who stopped breathing fire, so many wolves, foxes, and lions who stopped eating meat after being brain-washed, so many charming, sugary witches as in these stage-adaptations. But if there is no real dragon and no wicked witch, children will feel that their fears are not taken seriously and they will be left alone with their angst.
Adaptations of classic fairy-tales back then were also deprived of passages found pedagogically useless or even harmful, passages which often carried the innermost meaning of the story. No wonder that the children could not sit still, they chatted and shouted and moved about, all of which was but a reaction to the lie on stage and to the low artistic standards. A good example is the case which happened in the fifties in the Pioneer Theatre. A ten-year old boy was caught shooting U-nails from the auditorium on the stage. They stopped the performance and dragged the boy on stage. A teacher held up the two-kilo bag of U-nails and asked the audience: “What punishment does this guilty boy deserve?” „Death!” – reverberated some hundred children voices unanimously.
But it wasn’t only bad traditions that we inherited from this era. It was in these years that parents and teachers learned to love taking children in their care to theatre, even after school-time and this period invented the foldable chairs in the Budapest Puppet Theatre and in the Kolibri Theatre [folded they are higher and can seat children, unfolded they are at normal height for adults – the translator] and the undying fashion of sold out children’s shows.
Thanks to missing gymnasiums and the inappropriate nature of the existing ones the problem today in Hungary is not how to create a sacral space worthy of theatre in these schools, though we do feel what the newer performances seem to prove, namely that truly differentiated thoughts are better communicated in less vast auditoriums. In an era when many writers, poets, fine artists and actors were sentenced to silence for being “decadent bourgeois”, puppet and children’s theatres offered them refuge. If they wanted to avoid political commissions and still stay alive, the best authors were given the chance of writing tales or poetry for children.
What is left of that today? Brilliant writings for children (by Sándor Weöres, Károly Tamkó Sirató, Ágnes Nemes Nagy, Ervin Lázár, Balázs Lengyel, István Csukás, Magda Szabó etc.), poems and tales, without which Hungarian literature would be poorer today and children spending their days in the kindergarten or in school would have less to look forward to. At the same time they left us a heritage which considers tale-adaptations and fairy-tales the single most important territory of children’s theatre, almost excluding any other topics.
From the fifties contemporary Hungarian writers inherited a dislike for timely topics. The few existing children’s production of this kind have are imported products. Thanks to the translator and the performers, they still often turn into true Hungarian shows when meeting their audience here.
2. A Need to Be Purified
„Any time and every time a society feels the need to be purified – says Endre Ady, a Hungarian poet and revolutionary reformer of the language of poetry at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in an article –, it turns towards the child, towards his future.” The truth of that thought is well reflected in the children’s shows which have become important in the past few decades and which served as the foundation for a new approach in this genre.
The seventies
In 1973 Tamás Ascher’s staging of Collodi’s Pinocchio adapted by Nelli Litvai produced in Kaposvár became a banner show of the young Hungarian directors’ generation who – like the poet seventy years earlier – were great reformers of language: the language of theatre. It was a company which changed a provincial theatre in Kaposvár into a real art theatre proved that children’s shows are taken just as seriously as those for adults. They are performed by the companies’ best actors, who educate a new audience for themselves. These children develop a finer understanding of theatre and stick to the company when they grow up. The miracle of Kaposvár has proven that there is another way of making theatre for children in big houses. It was in the role of Pinocchio that Judit Pogány became the popular actress known nation-wide that she is now. Launching an acting career this way was also a novelty in those days.[1] The play has been doing extremely well since then, this year three theatres put it on their repertory.
The eighties
In the eighties artists searching for renewal found a chance to present themselves in independent theatres more and more often. Great actors joined efforts to make children’s shows outside their home theatres and I, a young composer and director back then, adapted Ágnes Nemes Nagy’s poems and tales into a play called Auntie Pepper, which we performed at the University Stage in 1981 (more to that later). Similar encounters took place at the Játékszín in Pál Békés’s Clumsy Magician or István Csukás’s Twiggie both directed by Béla Tímár or Maugli which I staged with Péter Horváth in the same theatre. Older starts and young artists who craved for something new took up roles in these productions, thereby signalling that they want out of the frozen structure and that they find joy in a genre looked upon with condescension as long as they are allowed to take the initiative.
That these phenomena were premonitory signs of the coming political changes is now obvious. It was around this time that Péter Levente’s interactive children’s theatre became famous and thanks to a live TV-broadcast József Ruszt, director of Romeo and Juliet for young audiences, was seen come on stage and analyse some scenes with the youths sitting in the auditorium – promoting a form of young people’s theatre also unknown before that. In this period József Békés and his dramaturgy department in national television played a significant role in presenting and promoting new children’s plays. Through their work did some productions win national significance.
My first truly popular work for children, still on the repertory of many houses, gained national fame after the TV-broadcast. I had already been working in several public theatres as a composer, when the University Stage’s Poetry Recital Group led by Ibolya Surányi commissioned me to do a job. The company which consisted of humanities students mostly promoted me to director in a work where I started out as a composer only. It was after that, that I was commissioned to stage my first children’s show Wanderer’s Fun. At first I was reluctant, for I had had only bad memories of that genre from my own childhood, but they liberated me and so I could do what I was really interested in. Through playing with the audience the poems and tales turned into a kind of poetic and sacral children’s theatre with elements of happening – a genre which established the career of Auntie Pepper.
Auntie Pepper, ASSITEJ
Ágnes Nemes Nagy’s little tales and children’s poetry, her mythic fairy world was crying to be staged. So on the occasion of her eightieth birthday I made a kind of initiation show where I relied on the interactivity of the children. The success of the show was due to the much-loved actress in the lead, Margit Dajka, the co-operation of the great vagabond of theatre life, István Verebes and one of the Vígszínház’s leading actresses Erzsébet Kútvölgyi. The fact that the play has now become a classic can, I think, be ascribed to the fact that in this play the adult-child relationship was enriched by a new meaning. The adults who escorted the children to this performance could give up the functions associated with their power for one afternoon and become instead playmates of the child in their care and the other children sitting in the auditorium. The joy which adults and children feel when finding a mate in each other remains the decisive factor to keep the game alive. No one deprives them of their authority, but as in a real ritual, everyone finds their place: actor, child, adult and members of the orchestra all play a part at the birthday party of theatre in Auntie Pepper. (At the moment it is on at two theatres in Miskolc and Budapest and is going open in Eger in the spring.)
ASSITEJ (the World Association of Children’s and Youths’ Theatres) started becoming active in Hungary in this period. Perhaps the show’s great success explains the invitation I got to Sweden, then to a study tour Germany with two colleagues. What I saw in those countries was very different from the world of children’s theatre known to me and lured me to try if these initiatives have a place in Hungary. I had to wait until the change of the regime, when I won the managing director’s position of the Studio Theatre and the two smaller venues detached from the National Puppet Theatre.
3. Children’s shows after 1989
The Kolibri Theatre
The Kolibri Theatre founded in 1992 became a kind of repertory theatre where all age groups of children and youths have a choice of several productions meant just for their intellectual and spiritual development. From monodramas to musicals, from operas to puppet shows many genres find there place in our house. Contemporary Hungarian writers regularly write and translate plays for us. Needless to say, classics tales are not missing from our repertory, either. From among these we keep the ones on the programme which managed to grasp the archetypical essence of the story. Such is Andersen’s new puppet version of The Ugly Duckling adapted by Tibor Zalán and directed by Andrea Székely on the main stage and Nick Champion’s and Péter Fábri’s Jeremiah, the Snowman directed by Ágnes Kiszely in the studio, which has been invited to England for several-week tours four times already.
Tours in England
Since 1994 we have been touring in England regularly. In schools and at festivals at least thirty thousand children saw our different studio productions Barbro Lindgren’s Wormhenry, Jan Kross’s Master of Marzipan, our play based on the folk-tales about the great Hungarian king, Matthias, King Mathias Went Stealing and Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince on almost 130 occasions. Zoltán Bodnár and Bea Tisza do the bulk of the job as actors, while she also got a UNIMA-Prize for directing several of them.
Wormhenry
I would like to talk about two award-winning productions of the Kolibri Theatre in more detail. One is Wormhenry, an adaptation by László Kunos of Swedish tale, Algot Storm which I directed in 1992. This show is a good example for a children’s play that mostly audiences with no theatre tradition come and conceive their own stage language, the consensus between stage and auditorium indispensable for understanding the performance. The show starts with the protagonist introducing the sacral objects, the alphabet of the play so to say, which will then serve as the scenes of the performance. Since another character, the Worm is played by the actor’s finger, these scenes: a flower-plot, a baby piano, a lettuce, the king’s picture on the wall all serve as screens, as well. The rest of the scenes are illustrated by the actor’s movement. First he polishes an invisible show, then opens the door, walks down the stairs, says hello to the neighbour, crosses the street, narrowly escapes being hit by a car blowing its horn, then calms down sitting on a park bench and enjoying the falling leaves.
In the world of real and imagined objects the actor represents all other characters through his movement helped by an exact choreography of looks and by changing his voice. A psychological study proved that from this moment on the children accept the other figures for real. They can list thirteen characters and if asked, they can even draw them as individuals. The rules set at the beginning of the show make it possible for the spectator to understand this stylised acting, to feel and live through the tale about loneliness, friendship and of accepting being different. We played all over the world from Arizona to Canterbury, from Tirgu Mures to Lisbon. The last occasion was an ASSITEJ-meeting in Vienna where German-speaking children’s theatre experts celebrated János Bán’s performance.[2]
Retemetesz
Our other hit, Retemetesz is also hallmarked by a guest star, György Kézdy. He and the director, Margit Balla put the script together from Ervin Lázár’s tales. He is one of the most outstanding writers of his generation and has become famous through his tales in the past decades. His plays are also very popular, The Square Round Forest is regularly staged by different companies, his puppet piece The Tiniest Witch directed by Pál Lengyel is a well-liked repertory piece of the Budapest Puppet Theatre. One of the biggest tricks of staging Ervin Lázár’s works is not to fall prey to the funny names and the eventful plot and choose the easier solutions, as directors and actors often do. Many thought that the philosophy and deep humanism of his stories hold good only being read and that they will be inevitably pushed to the background on stage.
György Kézdy’s magical performance refutes this prejudice. The tales are illustrated by puppetry, wound-up toys, dramatised scenes with many characters and Mozart’s children-songs with a lot of humour and rich associations, whereby the real meaning is never pushed to the background. It is a real human situation, where an aging (grand)father tells his (grand)daughter just reaching puberty (played by Santana Lorena) about all things he considers important in life. This narrative tale touches every generation with its humour, philosophy, self-irony and deep emotions.
Puppet Theatres
I have to devote a separate paragraph to official puppet-theatres founded all over the country. A precondition of their foundation was the changing of the regime and the end of the National Puppet Theatre’s monopoly. The new generation of puppeteers threw themselves at the techniques, themes and styles earlier suppressed by the individual, crystallised style of the National Puppet Theatre, where the designer, Iván Koós and the director, Dezs? Szilágyi marked the great era’s adult shows and internationally acclaimed opera and ballet-puppet-theatre adaptations. The new generation, hungry for autonomy, most of them trained at that institution, formed new groups. Renewal was the slogan of the day. Back to the roots! – was the other one. A symbolic figure of this movement was Henrik Kemény, who followed the family tradition as the only representative of Hungarian market-place puppetry. His parents’ puppet theatre in the famous Népliget was destroyed back in the fifties as bourgeois remnants. Coming out of hiding his László the Hero, his devil puppets and his traditional puppetry performed in front of an audience again showed young players an example of puppeteers’ freedom and independence and of the never-fading freshness of market place puppetry. Bóbita from Pécs, Ciróka from Kecskemét, Vojtina from Debrecen or the Vaskakas Puppet Theatre from Gy?r are all looking for an image, trying to build their renewal on the ancient roots, each shaping the folk tradition to their own liking in the past decade.
The Transylvanian Ildikó Kovács, the famous Czech professor, Jan Dvo?ak or the Polish director, Marek Waskievicz helped those looking for something new learn the technique and the way of thinking which they had no chance trying before. Géza Kovács, Gábor Sramó, János Pályi, Andrea Székely, László Rumi, Károly Szívós, András Lénárt, Ágnes Kiszely, Janka Újvári, Pál Lengyel are theatre-makers in the thirties and forties, who have created something original and contributed to renewing the genre. The new government subsidised puppet theatres play in a repertory system to children mostly, with 4-5 new productions and several hundred performances a year. More and more often you get to see the person who moves the puppet, so that the actor’s qualities compete with that of the puppeteer.
Today you can’t talk about children’s theatre in Hungary without mentioning the new puppet theatres. It is a very positive thing that children learn the mother tongue of theatre in these houses all over the country.
Theatre of Shadows
From among the many excellent puppet theatre productions for children I would like to discuss the Theatre of Shadows by the Ciróka Theatre, which had been awarded with the critics’ and the Glass Hill Prize and the first book of Leporello directed by László Rumi. We first hear a live introductory music of a Serbian atmosphere, then two actresses carry a huge book on stage, a book which is also the stage of the show, which the characters leave but very rarely. From the pages of the book sets and furniture arise like the three dimensional books of tales. The protagonist is Ophelia – Michael Ende’s character.
It is his story we get to see in this mini world. An old woman prompter, a charmingly fragile marionette-figure, moves back home from the closed-down theatre, as theatre shadows join her. First they play it’s their home, then they go on an American tour and present their plays, Saint George and the Dragon. This scene seems to be an hommage to the director, László Rumi and the founders of Ciróka Puppet Theatre, Géza Kovács and János Pályi, it reminds one very much of the spindle legged market-place play of the same title, which toured all over Europe. The tale of the dragon moves on the tiny puppet stage, which seems to have infinite opportunities. Marionette, shadow play, two dimensional puppets appear and enchant you, one after the other among newer and newer sets in every scene.
In the end, on an endless field of snow, a black figure, Death asks Ophelia if he could travel on her sledge. Ophelia enters the realm of death through a gate with a winged figure. There the shadow theatre plays her story, the story of a little girl, who wanted to be an actress. A heart-rending tale depicted with a thousand ideas. The two designers who created the wonderful book-like puppet-theatre Ákos Mátravölgyi and Erik Goschmitt are were mentioning.
4. The Kaposvár Biennale – creative forms of children’s theatre
For the first time in ten years in May of 2002 the Kaposvár Csiky Gergely Theatre and the Hungarian Centre of ASSITEJ co-produced a children’s festival in Kaposvár, the First Kaposvár Biennale of Children and Youth Theatre to present the many new initiatives. The selecting critic István Sándor L. was focussing on the diversity of creative forms in play-acting. Next to the public theatre productions, among which Nelli Litvai’s The Knighted Wanderer directed by József Kelemen got the jury’s Biennale Award, independent and private theatres with significant achievements came to the festival. The Atlantis Group, who had already featured successfully at numerous festivals with a unique Grimm-adaptation, brought a collage of the most beautiful tales by Elek Benedek. In this production the director/designer/actor János Greifenstein’s unique imagery, creativity and gift to lead his actors was just as marked as in their earlier shows. Studio K.’s award-winning Roses and Violets was an adaptation of János Arany’s classic narrative poem adapted by the poetess, Zsófia Balla. Studio K. was one of the most outstanding independent companies before the change of the regime. A few years ago the founding director, Tamás Fodor reformed it in the form of a private theatre. As the leader of the company he is convinced a most important tool of actors’ training are children’s shows, therefore he stages one every year with unique care and very high standards. Puppets, made by Ilona Németh, play a particularly important role. With an unusually interpreted bunraku-technique, Fodor focused on widening the scale of acting tools in these works. His outstanding artistic achievement was awarded by the Biennale Award, the Glass Hill and the critics’ prize.
Dance theatres, family puppet theatres, the puppet class at the Academy of Theatre, TIE
One big surprise of the Biennale was the unique performance of the Dunaújváros Dance Theatre, The Brave Hero based on folk elements and enriched with dialogue was choreographed by Attila Rácz and had done very successfully at a Turkish Festival.
The new puppet class of the Academy of Theatre led by János Meczner presented itself at the Biennale. They came with a strange team-work production based on János Pilinszky’s The Golden Bird.
Two prestigious drama-teaching groups, the Round Table Association and the Káva Cultural Workshop performed their intense and theatrically effective shows. We witnessed of how they use their methods to work with the audience on what they have seen.
Last year at the 12th Kolibri Festival Gyöngyi Écsi got the Indali Prize (????) in Budapest. She is a narrator who recreates the national folklore of Slovakian Hungarians in a beautiful dialect, including the audience in an interactive game with a touching simplicity, yet very entertainingly. She is a fantastic performer we should celebrate.
Without family puppet theatres the picture would not be full. Let me just list the unique shows of Fabula, Figurina, Márku Theatre and Antal Bartha. Hopefully there will be a chance to analyse them later. Speaking of children’s performances, we must mention the emerging women directors: Ildikó Kovács, Katalin K?váry, Katalin Gabnai, Piroska Molnár, Judit Pogány, Margit Balla, Réka Pels?czy, Ágnes Kiszely, Andrea Székely and Bea Tisza all bear witness to a deep understanding of the children’s mind.
Future Plans of ASSITEJ’s Hungarian Centre and the Kolibri Theatre
It gives reason for optimism that we have started preparing for the next Kaposvár Biennale planned to offer a selection by the critic, Katalin Sz?cs between 4-16 May of 2004. Within the framework of the festival we invited about seventy Hungarian authors to take part in a drama competition for children and youths, subsidised by the Ministry of Culture.
The Kolibri Theatre takes a step forward, too. This year the Swedish Suzanne Osten stages Per Lysander’s Medea’s Children and we produce Stones by the Australian Stefo Nantsou, continuing our series of adaptations of plays which are thematically especially sensitive to children’s problems today, just like with Our Son by Sarah Moore Williams, a Welsh youths’ piece, which we are going to present in a production translated and directed by Péter Horváth in the Kolibri Cellar. We keep Mozart’s Entführung aus dem Serail, a true children’s show,in Károly Szívós’s and Ágnes Török’s performance on our repertory. We are co-producing a programme with five European countries (Norway, Denmark, Finland, France and Hungary), where we targeted audiences under the age of four. It is them we wish to address artistically, it is them we want to introduce to several new plays in the coming three years.
Finally I would like to mention my colleagues, who help me in my work: Klaudia Orosz as art director, Tibor Zalán as dramaturg, Oszkár Rotter as a choreograph, Viktória Végvári as a drama-teacher and Éva Vas, my assistant in ASSITEJ. Each of them contributed greatly to the new children’s theatre initiatives I am giving you an account of.
I could not draw a complete picture in this article. Typical and import and productions, like the family rock-musical, Attic by Gábor Presser, Dusan Stefanovity and Péter Horváth, which has been on repertory for several decades at the Vígszínház or the newest attraction at the National Theatre The Boatman in the Moon by Sándor Weöres directed by Péter Valló. I selected primarily from the productions which have been awarded and which are promising a renewal of children’s theatre in Hungary.
[1]Actors’ training in Hungary was exclusive to the Academy of Theatre in those days, a situation which has not changed considerably to this very day. Without a degree from that institution it was practically impossible to make a great career. The Kaposvár company was the first to start an acting school of sorts within the building, in that they employed aspiring young actors who did not make it to the Academy, but seemed – in their eyes – promising. Unlike in any other theatre these young people were often trusted with leading roles if the management believed in them. Many of today’s greatest stars were born in this workshop. Judit Pogány is one of them. [the translator – cf. with the article about Kaposvár].
[2]János Bán became internationally known after playing the lead in Jirzi Menzel’s Our Little Village. He is a founding member of the best art theatre in Budapest, the Katona József Theatre and performs at Kolibri as a guest.
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