Macbeth as a Tragedy of Consciousness on the Hungarian Stage after 1989

Abstract

In totalitarian systems, it would be difficult to find a Shakespearean play that lends itself better to political thematization than Macbeth, and the theatrical reception history of this tragedy in East-Central Europe is certainly indicative of how it has been employed to reflect on the current antagonisms of the country. Gradual but significant changes occurred in this reception during the past twenty-five years, after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Even if it has become a critical commonplace that the various modes of social and artistic expression had to redefine themselves after the changing regime in the former socialist block, we must observe the socio-political constraints of the period in which I would like to survey the history of Macbeth productions in Hungary. Before 1989, the theatrical scene in East-Central Europe was the field where perhaps the most intensive artistic experimentations were always combined, through the "double talk" or double coding of covert intellectual messages, with political awareness and subversive ideological critique. The theatre gradually developed a capacity to operate the mechanism of semiotic overdetermination or overcoding on two levels. 1 Other than the semiotization of every object on the stage, this overcoding functioned on a second level in the time of political censorship, since spectators and critics were constantly on the watch, looking out for meanings that could turn the theatrical representation into political allegory or a criticism of some aspect of the establishment. From the 1990s onwards, the theatre, like literature and cinema, gradually started to lose this political potentiality that could always guarantee some success if the performance was radical enough. This was, however, not only a loss of revolutionary opportunities, but also an emancipatory change, since the artistic expression no longer had to meet the expectations of a political horizon. The real liberation of the theatre was not only in the fact that it was no longer censored by the apparatus of party ideology, but through the break with the compulsory double talk of politicization that, for many, was the touchstone of artistic quality.