Okay, so this is cheating a little. It is not quite Hungarian theatre inasmuch as it is happening in Sydney and all the actors are Australian, but it is a perfect way to introduce the English-speaking theatre-goer to one of the greatest masters of the Hungarian stage, Tamás Ascher, one of the most outstanding Chekhov-interpreters of our times, Tamás Ascher.
You might have seen his Three Sisters between 1986 and 1992 on one of the numerous stops of its international tours with the magnificent cast of the Budapest Katona József Theatre, as well as recently his Ivanov with the same company anywhere from the Lincoln Center Festival in New York last year through the Dublin International Festival three years before or at the Sydney International Festival in 2009.
He has worked at the Vienna Burgtheater many times (Gombrowicz's Yvonne, Princess of Burgundy, Ionesco's The Lesson and The Bald Soprano, Ostrovsky's The Forest), at the Helsinki National Theatre (Moliere's Misanthrope among other productions), as well as at the Berliner Ensemble and at the Oslo National Theatre, but he also did opera in Cluj in Romania, as well as in Budapest and Lyon (Don Giovanni).
Had he been born with a less obscure mother tongue spoken by more than the 14 million Hungarians, his name would be up with Peter Zadek, Luc Bondy or Declan Donnellan or Andrei Serban, who left a neighbouring country in the Soviet bloc and rising to world fame in the US.
Coming from a country with a deep understanding of the absurd, Ascher has been known for interpreting some of the greatest absurdist playwrights in revelatory stagings, including the Polish Witold Gombrowicz (Yvonne), as well as Ionesco (The Lesson and The Bald Soprano - both of which he has directed four times, always as double bills in the past thirty years) or Beckett (Waiting for Godot). As one of the leading artists of the legendary regional theatre in Kaposvár he also made a name by reinventing children's shows by taking the youngest audiences seriously and staging these plays with the same passion and energy as any adult play, including productions of Pinocchio or Winnie-the-Pooh, both of which ran for more than a decade.
Ascher's passion and gift for music brought a new understanding of the formerly always boring and happily-pink operetta - an Austro-Hungarian invention with great music and lovelorn dukes falling for penniless entertainment girls - charmed and educated broad audiences, while the introduction and witty, zesty staging of Western musicals, which barely escaped the censor's ban (Chicago, Cabaret), was an instant hit with spectators, earlier force-fed with Soviet partisan songs.
It is a man of many talents we are talking about when trying to describe the sixty-year old Tamás Ascher's achievements. And while it would be by no means easy to pick his best productions, the Hungarian master director is without a doubt most well-known for his interpretations of Chekhov's great works.
To be contd.
