Try to see these emblematic stage moments through Hungarian eyes:

• As Shylock, Shakespeare’s archetypal Jew, emerges from the shadows of an Escher-esque scaffolding to declaim his famous “hath not a Jew eyes” speech, a crew of black-masked apparitions representing the citizens of Venice materializes ominously and silently beneath him. Later, when the ducal court humiliates and banishes him, the citizen horde swarms after Shylock like a flock of voracious birds, or a pack of wolves intent on devouring its prey.
• After Abram, the young protagonist of a 1965 German drama called Hunting Scenes from Lower Bavaria, is driven to a senseless act of murder by the remorseless and brutal intolerance of his fellow villagers, who believe he’s gay, the entire audience is invited to join the play’s townsfolk in a jolly beer fest to celebrate the deviant’s bloody capture and consignment to prison.
• Despite having earned a college degree, taught at a Budapest university and started a family, the aging horticulturalist at the center of a grim new play called Hard can’t shake the rural provincialism of his youth. When he’s fired from his academic post, he takes refuge with his taciturn mother back in the isolation of the countryside and proceeds to drink himself to death. 

These moments, like any number of others that studded the first-class program of Hungary’s 2011 National Theatre Festival this past June, contain layers of meaning for native Hungarians that many of us outside the culture can only begin to fathom. With rare exceptions, the productions selected for remounting at the 10-day fête in Pécs—Hungary’s fifth largest city, nestled since medieval times in the Mecsek Mountains south of Budapest, near the Croatian border—were as cruelly dark and somber of theme as the sketches above imply. The brightest aspect of the program was the self-evident willingness of Hungarian theatremakers to plunge boldly into the political and social morass of this particularly troubled national moment and call those responsible for it to account.

That would include, unfortunately, the Hungarian government. As American Theatre reported nine months ago (“News in Brief,” Feb ’11), the conservative center-right party Fidesz beat the incumbent Hungarian Socialist Party by an overwhelming majority in April 2010 elections, gaining two-thirds of the seats in Parliament and control of 22 out of 23 major cities in the country. This virtually complete consolidation of power gives Fidesz the ability to change Hungary’s constitution at will, and the party has wasted no time in asserting control over the nation’s culture and media—including the frequently outspoken artistic community.

The turning of the political tide also meant dramatic gains for the ultra-right Jobbik “Movement for a Better Hungary” party, which stands proud on a platform of anti-Jew, anti-Roma (meaning gypsy), anti-gay policies. Although Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz colleagues appear to distance themselves from the radicalism of Jobbik, they appointed a member of the party as president of the government’s cultural and media committee.

In the months leading up to the gathering in Pécs, attacks on theatre artists got specific: Róbert Alföldi, the audacious and progressive artistic director of the flagship National Theatre in Budapest (see page 62), was decried on the floor of parliament as deviant, rowdy and treasonous, and his work at the National was labeled obscene and anti-Hungarian. Trumped-up demonstrations demanding Alföldi’s firing were countered by support from artists, writers, critics and theatregoers. Meanwhile, independent theatres—those not part of a state-sponsored network—have been threatened with complete elimination of their state arts funding (despite legal guarantees to the contrary), and leaders of most of the country’s regional venues have been replaced with undistinguished party hacks. Back talk from any quarter is met with official silence and indifference. 

“What’s going on in theatre is going on in every segment of society,” reports Andrea Tompa, president of the Hungarian Theatre Critics Association, whose own radio program devoted to theatre was closed down in March with no explanation. “You feel yourself as an independent critic being more and more marginalized. It’s the result of continued government improvisation, creating chaos. The frightening thing is the unpredictability, the sense that anything might happen.”

What has not happened, despite some 18 months of incessant pressure, is wholesale capitulation by the artistic community. That was made clear by the remarkable programming in Pécs of works like those described above—director László Bocsárdi’s Merchant of Venice, in which Shylock’s public ostracism bears a visceral parallel to the racism, exclusion 

and xenophobia that have haunted Hungary’s history; the National Theatre’s interactive production of Hunting Scenes, Martin Sperr’s post-World War II indictment of small-town homophobia, which director Alföldi wields as a caustic rebuff to the public campaign to have him removed from his post; and contemporary playwright János Háy’s Hard, an uncompromising indictment of the malaise and self-victimization that infects a society in which future prospects for its citizens are at best illusory and at worst nonexistent.

So these are not the best of times in Hungary. Neither are these the worst of times, as anyone who is familiar with this Central European republic’s history—even just its recent history—will hasten to assure you. After World War I, when the once-powerful nation’s bond with Austria was dissolved, Hungary lost some two-thirds of its territory and millions of its ethnic populace. The advent of the next war brought a brutal Soviet invasion, then German occupation, during which 440,000 Hungarian Jews were deported, mostly to Auschwitz. The unimaginable devastation and suffering of the war years were followed by long-term Soviet occupation, complete with purges, executions and deportation to concentration and labor camps. In the 1956 Hungarian Uprising against the Soviets, an estimated 20,000 died and a quarter-million fled the country. Finally, in 1968, the introduction of free-market and other liberalizing reforms began to convert Hungary from a communist satellite state to a modern republic, a transformation that became complete with the dissolution of the Iron Curtain and the relatively non-violent revolution of 1989. The country’s first free elections came in March 1990. 

The contemporary ramifications of the ruinous events of decades past run like a dark thread through Hungarian theatremaking. “In the communist era, words said on stage had hidden meanings that we all understood,” Alföldi told a gathering of critics and journalists at the Pécs festival. “After the social changes [of 1989], this kind of speech disappeared. But now hidden communication with the audience has come back.” 

That’s true enough in works such as Bocsárdi’s get-the-Jew Merchant; the classics have been a traditional vehicle for Aesopean indirection when repression makes it necessary for theatre artists to cover their tracks. The same trope is on display in rising director Sándor Zsótér’s site-specific festival staging—in the rooms and gardens of a private townhouse adjacent to a public square in Pécs—of Brecht’s 1938 anti-Nazi sketch Fear and Katzenjammer in the Third Reich (more often known as The Private Life of the Master Race). Zsótér’s talented young cast, acting shoulder-to-shoulder with 30 or so mobile spectators, effectively conveys the paranoia and dread infecting Brecht’s characters—a nervous judge, the Jewish wife of an Aryan doctor, a panicked informer—and the audience knows without a single signal what analogous forces of repression the production has in mind.

Judging from the National’s festival entries, though, Alföldi’s own dependence on sub-textual messaging is greatly exaggerated. Alongside the brazenly upfront protestations against homophobia in Hunting Scenes, which he directed, Alföldi and his collaborators advanced a similarly outspoken perspective on the bleak goings-on in postwar Hungary in an epic new play called We Live Once or the Sea Disappears into Nothingness Thereafter. Directed by János Mohácsi (and co-authored by Mohácsi’s brother István and musician Márton Kovács), We Live Once is a poetic, sometimes satirical, sometimes surreal three-and-a-half-hour slice of historical ruminations employing two dozen actors and a live band playing Kovács’s impressive incidental score. It premiered in early 2011, on the heels of demonstrations against the National and Alföldi, and met with unprecedented success in Budapest; the performance I attended in Pécs prompted a solid 15-minute ovation.

Why the fervent response? The multilayered, time-hopping plot of We Live Once takes off by depicting a notorious real event in 1946, when a village performance of a musical folk play called John the Valiant (based on a classic poem familiar to Hungarian schoolchildren) was broken up by drunken Soviet soldiers, a fight ensued and resisters ended up being sent to Siberia. A second act leaps forward to visit the gulag, where John is performed again for a Stalin-like dictator, then returns to the village in Act 3 with the heroic exiles, some magically resurrected from the dead to find a world transformed by “the great train of socialism.” Every scene is designed to resemble a museum space, as if the present is already frozen in timelessness; characters spout almost word-for-word quotations from Fidesz-era politicians about the nature of art and power. We Live Once speaks fiercely and independently to the present moment in Hungary, much as Angels in America illuminated a distinct era in American life. 

Such bravado may be new to the National, but it has been a long-standing commodity in Hungary’s independent theatre scene, where groups like Árpád Schilling’s internationally known Krétakör Theatre (which the director recently disbanded after 12 years of acclaimed collaborative work) set a tone of artistic feistiness and political radicalism that endures despite the inhospitable climate. “This small but important nursery is very important for the whole theatre culture, as a reservoir of new blood and young resources,” Tompa says of the independents. 

That banner was carried in Pécs by avant-gardist Béla Pinter, the 41-year-old actor-writer-director whose popular repertory company is known for drawing irreverent attention to social issues and the everyday incongruities of Hungarian life. Pinter’s entry in the festival dares to deal with the “gypsy question,” a hot-button topic (made even hotter by a recent spate of racially motivated murders that have yet to come to trial) that Pinter treats with grotesque humor and surprising evenhandedness. 

Pinter’s play is titled Muck (or, in alternate translation, Dirt or Scum) after its main character, an ungainly orphan Roma girl who is adopted by a rural couple who cannot have children of their own. That seemingly open-hearted act proves to be a fatal mistake: The community’s initial acceptance of Muck, despite her indolence and bad teeth, deteriorates over time into resentment and conflict; a sexual affair with her foster father (who is revealed to be a Jew) breaks up the parents’ marriage; and Muck joins the ultra-right Hungarian Guard, a tool of the Jobbik party, dressing the part in an authentic militia uniform and spouting racist opinions. When the hostilities she stirs up lead to murder, the victim’s corpse is incinerated in the oven of the village baker, Holocaust-style.

Despite its grim arc, Pinter (who performs a surreal comic turn as the doctor who initiates Muck’s adoption) tells the story in an ironic, bracingly theatrical style, mixing parody with folk music and dancing and creating an overall atmosphere of good-humored astonishment. Critic Tompa praised Muck for its clarity and intensity, calling it “an exact picture of contemporary Hungary.”

Not everybody at the festival in Pécs agreed with Tompa’s assessment, including Pinter himself. At a post-performance discussion on Muck, Pinter took issue with Tompa and others who extolled his play’s value as documentary. “It’s not a model of reality,” Pinter objected. “That’s why I placed it in the frame of folk motifs, telling it like a kid’s tale and using the four seasons to show time passing. It’s an absurd, dreamlike picture of reality.” That dreamy veneer, others countered, did little to deflect Muck’s potent analysis of the seeds of hatred and intolerance. 

The Mohásci brothers—director János, a stocky, disheveled fellow, and his lankier coauthor István—were on hand at another forum for an occasionally heated conversation about the National’s epic We Live Once, which German critic Thomas Irmer tellingly capsulized as “a fairy tale that shows the nightmare of history still at work in the minds of the people.” János Mohásci elaborated on the thought: “Our history is a construction, a tale, and it is the task of us to create it, whether we glorify it or not. We have to find out how to speak about the past.” That aspiration wasn’t good enough for one listener, a dramaturg with evident illiberal leanings who demanded, “I want to know exactly what these playwrights think about the events in their play. Just where do they stand? To open their thoughts generally to the audience is not enough!” The Moháscis rolled their eyes and moved on to more civil topics.

Censorious pressures were not always so evident in the festival’s celebrate-the-arts milieu, but they have taken a toll on artists, including veterans like László Bérczes, the 60-ish director of Hard. “What affects me personally [about the situation in Hungary] is that the two groups in this political battle are not connecting,” lamented Bérczes in an interview. “There is no dialogue. I try to be a go-between—I get a message here and try to give it to the other side, but neither side accepts. You piss and they decide which side you belong to. I hate it.”

Tompa further elucidated the bitter internecine division that so troubles Bérczes. “There is no solidarity here among theatremakers, either in Budapest or in the provinces, which tend to be more right-wing. There are two theatre unions, one right, one left, based not on the kind of theatre we do but upon who we vote for.”

Where does this prodigiously creative, grievously divided and politically threatened theatre community go from here? For his part, Alföldi believes the best way to negotiate the perilous shoals of the current moment is “not to confront the powers-that-be on their terms, not to write so many letters, but to do our work, basically.” That may be more easily said than done as the entrenched Fidesz government’s “reforms” and crackdowns continue to erode the fabric of Hungary’s artistic and intellectual life. As Bérczes sorrowfully put it, “Art and freedom are relatives, they are the same. But these are just words.”