The Hungarian Quarterly, 1996 (46. évfolyam, 178. szám)
THEATRE AND FILM - Tamás Koltai: The Grotesque of Bygone Days (Mihály Csokonai Vitéz, Lajos Barta, Ernő Szép)
I shall write for a happier posterity, I shall write for the 20th or the 21 st century, for the age in which Hungarians will either be truly Hungarian or else truly nothing..." His first play, Tempefői (1793) is a veritable prophesy of his own fate, a mirror held up to a poet's predicament. The full title reads The Melancholy Tempefői, or It Takes a Fool to Become a Poet in Hungary. The play remained unperformed for a hundred and fifty years. A modernised version was produced in 1938, and the original was first staged 1948 in the National Theatre of Budapest. Tempefői is about the contrast between a man of intellect and, to put it mildly, the material world, or more roughly, the boorish good-for-nothing who despise all pleasures higher than eating and drinking, hunting and playing cards. The poet wants to find a patron to support publication of his heroic poem—or, more precisely, to cover the .printing costs, as the book is already out and the German printer demands payment (why German, not Hungarian, has a piquancy of its own). Tempefői is trying to find a patron, but is turned down by everyone, including the rich Count Fegyverneki, although it is his famous ancestor who is the hero of the epic poem. Fegyverneki is a telling name, and the other names also refer to the character and attitude of their bearers. Congreve's comedy of manners, The Way of the World (1700) comes to mind, in which the characters' names also highlight their manner; that play is currently being staged in the József Katona Theatre of Budapest. Some hundred years later, Csokonai also made use of this satiric potential. He shows no mercy towards the bad hats. Self-conceited and comic, these bumpkins deny Tempefői any money. Betrieger, the printer, allows him an hour's grace for the payment, then another, before having him sent to a debtor's prison. The hapless debtor tries his best to obtain help, even, paradoxically, from the two young women who are attracted to him, but it is a losing game, and it appears that he cannot avoid being taken in custody. The play is unfinished, Csokonai only left a draft of the ending. In this, Tempefői turns out to be a nobleman, a count, so he is immediately seen in a new light, and the happy ending is near. It is not accidental, perhaps, that the author was not very keen on writing up the bitter résumé. But more's the pity if we think of the acrimonious, back-firing dénouements of Moliére's comedies, for a solution like tljat too must surely have had a grotesque overtone. The Jászai Mari Theatre's production is indeed full of allusions to Moliére, as if we were swatching a Hungarian version of Le Misanthrope. Gábor M. Koltai, who • directed the Tatabánya company's production, and his literary consultant, Nóra Sediánszky, have added several passages to the text, some from other works by Csokonai—poems, letters and pamphlets —others from the dramaturgical pattern of Moliére's plays. One of the characters, a successful and supple-minded poet, is strongly reminiscent of Le Misanthrope’s Philinte even in the original; another requests in the complemented version an 'audition' much like Oronte's, and his reading of his bombastic poem similarly is drowned in critical derision and laughter. The Tempefői of the production is also an embittered misanthrope. A comic, at times tragic figure and no blameless victim, vis-ä-vis his inferior environment he is undoubtedly an autonomous talent, afflicted with a degree of self-admiration, swashbuckling and pettiness. With the help of linguistic modernisation and association, the director 'talks out' of the past to the present. The stage is covered in piles of manuscripts—the unpublished oeuvre of a poet?; the sheets are scattered, and an arm reaching out insistently from a toilet 162 The Hungarian Quarterly