Hungarian Plays [antikvár]

Introduction In spite of the fact that there was once a 'golden' age, when Ferenc Molnár was a regular resident on Broadway stages, while his fellow expatriate Hungarians were equally at home running large parts of Hollywood and the British film industry, Himgary has never been a theatrical powerhouse. And, despite a current annual sale of five million tickets for theatre, opera and ballet in Himgary, this land of ten million Magyars cannot be said to boast a fertile culture of new home-grown drama: those people who choose to spend their nights out in darkened auditoriums staring at brightly lit stages do not necessarily want to see the products of their contemporary Himgarian writers' imaginations. But, it is pointless both to recall past splendours or to lament their absence at the present. The aim of publishing a collection of contemporary Hungarian plays in translation is to demonstrate what Hungary does have rather than to talk of what we once had, or what we now lack. This volume attempts to provide a wide-ranging introduction to what is being written and performed in the Hungarian theatre now. The Social Background The common experience of the people (or, more precisely, the peoples) in this region today is that the collapse of political barriers have not solved social problems. Indeed, some problems have become even more intractable. Inequalities among people and differences in their opportunities have widened tremendously. In this age of free enterprise, while some enjoy the benefits of economic boom, many others have found themselves much less secure, and more open to exploitation. Where once the central ideology provided something against which to struggle, there is now, as the Millenniimi approaches, a vacuum in which no intellectual movements have appeared to guide people's thoughts. In a nutshell, we live in a fascinating but often bewildering era, in the middle (or maybe still just at the beginning?) of a painful, though exhilarating, transition from the complicated concept of Conmiunism to something as yet unknown. The spectacular launch of this journey, in the 1990s, was prefaced by the relatively relaxed, if rather dull. ¦ I' ; .M '