I’ve just spent a week at the Contemporary Drama Festival in Budapest.  If I’d been told beforehand that this would involve scenes of cannibalism, coprophagy, wife-beating, gypsy-baiting and other extreme provocations including an act of fellatio on a clarinet, I might well have stayed at home, but I’m very glad I didn’t.

From the Channels playreading series at the National last year, plus another equally vivid reading of Georgy Spiro’s Funland soon afterwards at the Orange Tree, it would be easy for a British observer to come away with the impression that today’s Hungarian theatre is deep in miserabilist contemplation of the destructive social impact, first of the disappearance of communism, then of the arrival of European Community membership.  The Contemporary Drama Festival and its attendant “off”’ programme show a bigger picture, less in-yer-face, more off-the-wall, led by some brilliant directing talents and some impressive, large-scale company acting.

Underbelly

It’s not a new phenomenon.  Four years ago, at the same festival, you could see Arpad Schilling’s astonishing Kretakor company in their hi-tech, video-toting mode, shocking us with a TV studio confrontation between two serial killers in Nexxt, or Bela Pinter tickling the Hungarian underbelly in The Gate To Nowhere, or the Mohacsi brothers staging a big-cast, non-linear riot in their provincial outpost of Kaposvar.  The same groups were to the fore this year, with similar shows, and of course Katona Josef were back, this time featuring an award winning play (Collision!) from Georgy Spiro rather than one from Kornel Hamvai (Headsman’s Holiday).

Pinter works appeared twice in the programme: the first, his Peasant Opera, took the musical path begun in Gate To Nowhere and followed it to become a completely sung-through show, with a fine pastiche score by Benedek Darvas supporting a soap-opera tale of rustic inbreeding, told with the innocent vulgarity that characterises much of Pinter’s rough theatre.  His other play, the more recent Queen Of The Cookies, is a darker exploration of an abusive father, a policeman in the communist era, and the impact of his drunken brutality on his extended family.  Pinter’s retreat in time, together with imagistic settings and staging tricks like the almost continuous revolving of his small stage, seem to be an attempt to raise his shocking material above the realistic commonplace (his musical contribution, muted this time, lies in the whole cast providing backing on citherns), but he lets himself down with an off-key ending in which we are led to question the motives of even the well-meaning outsider who blows the whistle on this wretched situation.  All three Pinter shows that I have seen suggest a considerable but annoyingly careless talent at work.

High ritual

A new name to me is that of Zoltan Balasz, whose approach to staging is at the opposite pole from Pinter’s casualness.  Neither of the two pieces presented by his extraordinarily gifted Roma company was easy going: the first, Theomachia, is a dramatic oratorio by the poet Sandor Weores from 1938, based on the Greek myth of Cronos’ battle with his children, the second an adaptation, also in oratorio form, of Jean Genet’s The Blacks. Both featured powerful percussive scores by Laszlo Sary, rich costumes, wigs and masks by Judit Gombar and tight, precise choreography from Andras Szollosi.  All these elements, together with some remarkable singing, were welded by Balasz into two evenings of high ritual in which every inch of two very different but equally stunning stage configurations was used to enormous effect.  Without translation, it was difficult to judge exactly what was being said in these two pageants, and I would suspect that the Weores in particular is too wordy for its own good, but both productions stand as evidence of a striking new talent, with a strong style of his own that shows in a complete mastery of the staged event.

Found materials

The strand of ambitious, usually over-long, musically developed work from large ensembles, both rough and polished, was a running thread of the festival, offering fascinating points of contrast and comparison.  Most of the groups we saw had worked together for years, yet not all of them exuded the confidence of Balasz’s troupe.  Eszter Novak, the only woman director represented in the festival, drew hesitant performances from her regional actors in Peter Karpati’s The Fourth Gate, a cutesy stitching together of Hassidic folk tales that  showed

little attempt to look at the Jewish tradition in any depth.  Much more interesting was the rough but completely disciplined energy shown by a Hungarian-speaking company from the Ukraine in an adaptation of a poem by Ferenc Juhasz, The Boy Who Turned Into A Stag.  Attila Vidnyansky has been nurturing his raw young company in Beregszaz to the point where they have overcome any skill deficiencies by the strength of their commitment and the physical power of its execution.  The sight of yet another bunch of not so merry peasants trooping on to the stage, after the Pinter and Karpati shows, was not one to lift the cynical heart, but I was quickly won over by this group’s sheer unity of style, and the way in which they handled an enormous quantity of found materials to create superb pictures on a bare stage.  The piece contrasts town and country life, and its use of live and recorded music, of dreamy, formal folk dances contrasted with wild orgiastic techno, showed enormous assurance.  The finale, in which the hero sets out  on his last, transforming journey, picking his way along an aerial gangway between illuminated, antler-like poles held by his fellow-actors, is a moment of total stage magic.

Kangaroo court

Coming after the understated hints of Roma persecution in The Blacks, and the naïve but convincing energy of the Beregszasz company, the critical success of Janos and Istvan Mohacsi’s succès de scandale about the Roma, Only a Nail, was not so easy to understand.  The Mohacsis’ company, for all their energy and numbers (there were fifty actors and musicians on stage at Kaposvar), gave a sadly stagey performance, and although hell-bent on shock came out with a somewhat superficial account of millennia of anti-gypsy feeling, in a revue-style montage of disparate scenes, linked by a Tevye-like figure who talks to God between them.  The play’s five scenes had some of the satirical absurdity of Monty Python, most notably the one in which groups of Jews and Gypsies bicker over the Crucifixion under the supervision of a strutting centurion, and another in which medieval villagers make ever more hyperbolic claims about Gypsy atrocities to a kangaroo court.  The comic mayhem is interrupted to great effect by a scene reminding us that the Gypsies, too, were Nazi victims, when the entire cast strips for the gas chamber.  Marton Kovacs’s fine score, he told us, deliberately avoided any “gypsiness”, but in doing so once again called into question the authenticity of the enterprise.

The influence of television comedy is also apparent in Georgy Spiro’s  Collision!, for which a better title might be Crash!  At the Katona Josef, a large cast (again) look at the consequences of a huge jam caused by a motorway pile-up, which offers a chance to satirise everything the author detests about the new European Hungary, most of all its brash, moneygrubbing spirit of entrepreneurialism.  Its edge is blunted by Gabor Zsambeki’s curious choice to have all his actors play in the most exaggerated comic style.  The Hungarian critics divided their 2004 Best Play award between this and Only A Nail, forgiving the fact that the one was crassly over-drawn, the other at least an hour too long.

Singing smut

More state-of-the-nation satire and even more provocation, but with proportionately more polish, came in Arpad Schilling’s Kretakor company production of Blackland.  With help from the writer Istvan Tasnardi, he built a series of revue sketches based on the news reports sent over a period of time by SMS to his mobile phone.  A cast of thirteen in full evening dress deliver them, and the evening’s impact comes from the sight of these smart young people singing smut in perfect a capella, or straight-facedly enacting quite vile scenes on Marton Agh’s clinically crisp, door-lined white set – a nursery frieze around it emphasising that this is “a children’s show for adults only”.  Always ingeniously inventive, in parts extremely, filthily funny, it also has moments of real bite that point the finger at Hungary’s attitude to child molesters, Olympic cheats, gun crime, the homeless, rigged elections and (in one of the most shocking scenes of all) American abuses of Iraqi POWs.  It’s a stunningly competent production, all the more interesting for showing just one of Arpad Schilling and Kretakor’s many styles.  (The  Seagull coming to Edinburgh is in another vein entirely.)  And its final touch is a cod-review by one of the cast – in German – which puts us all in our place.

Schilling made his first impact with another very different production, Brecht’s Baal, in which the lead character was played by a darkly charismatic actor, Viktor Bodo.  Bodo has now emerged as a fine director in his own right, and his staging in the Katona Josef studio theatre, the Kamra, of Rattled And Disappeared, carefully described as “not an adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial “, is a sensation.  Many of the same cast who lolloped clumsily round the Katona’s big stage as Collision’s stereotypes reappear here, transformed into a sinister group of acrobatic psychopaths capable at a moment’s notice of becoming a slick song and dance troupe.  Levente Bagossy’s amazingly inventive set continues the walls of the auditorium back fifty feet until they almost meet, and the play’s absurd confrontations, silky seductions and horribly realistic tortures are played out over all its claustrophobic depth.  Three hours of untranslated Hungarian (with a few Broadway interpolations) passed in a flash.

From these examples, Hungarian theatre today shines as one of the liveliest in Europe, completely different in scale and bite from our own, and marred only by the tiniest sense of its own satisfaction at how extraordinary it is.