Márta Jánoskúti is a costume designer devoted to the idea of collective art – a collaborative creative process in which the designer, thinking together with the director, dramaturge and other creators, develops the costumes in close relation to the piece, the performance, and the scenic concept defined by the set designer, while remaining faithful to the characters of the selected roles. Her art has been deeply influenced by the aesthetic of the fin de siècle and Art Nouveau, by Russian literature, and by her distinguished collaborators among actors, directors and designers. A distinctive feature of her career is that, after her formative and apprentice years, she has spent more than four decades as a member of a single theatre company, the Vígszínház (Comedy Theatre of Budapest, one of Hungary’s leading repertory theatres).
She has designed the stage visual world for the premières of numerous Hungarian dramas, including works by Tibor Gyurkovics, István Örkény, Tibor Déry, Gábor Görgey, and István Csurka. Through the colours and characterisations of her costumes created for feature films and television plays, audiences have also encountered her interpretations of the works of Margit Kaffka, Zsigmond Móricz, Dezső Kosztolányi, Ernő Szép, and Croatian Miroslav Krleža (Gospoda Glembajevi [The Glembays]).
She dresses her characters according to carefully considered colour compositions, which always carry a symbolic meaning beyond their literal, realistic content. A key element of her working method is the indispensable inspiration of the director and a thorough discussion of conceptual ideas. Her first mentor was Gábor Berényi (director and artistic head of the Szigligeti Theatre in Szolnok). After thoroughly researching the historical context of a work, Jánoskúti produces numerous sketches which serve as the basis for the final costume designs. To support their approval, she accompanies these sketches with fabric samples and detailed notes.
Once the costumes are shaped for the individual actors playing each role, the selection and ordering of the right materials becomes a decisive part of her work. She chooses her natural-fibre textiles according to specific criteria: they must be dyeable, easily adaptable to different cuts, resistant to creasing and tearing, durable over time, and responsive to stage lighting effects. She searches out sources of rare and disappearing fabrics, and if necessary, supplements them from her own collection.
By day she organises and negotiates – meeting with cutters, makers, milliners and shoemakers – and by night she refines and consolidates her drawings and designs, all in the service of a single overarching concept that unites play, actor and directorial vision.
In Pál Békés’s movement play Össztánc (All Dance), the costumes that support dance and gestural expression take on particular importance, since almost no words are spoken during the performance. The play was first staged in 1981 under the title Le Bal (The Ball) by Jean-Claude Penchenat with the Théâtre du Campagnol. Before mounting the Hungarian production, director László Marton held a marathon workshop at the Comedy Theatre with members of the Centre Dramatique National.
In this piece, the dance, the movement, the gestures, the colours and the costumes tell stories of people who frequent dance venues to meet others, pass the time or enjoy themselves. But what appears on stage is no faceless crowd: there is a girl in a lilac stretch miniskirt, a large middle-aged man in a jersey suit searching for a partner, a gentle character in a delicate powder-pink pullover, Hugo Boss-style suits, little men in shabby jackets, a “knight of the night” in a leather waistcoat, a relaxed gigolo with an unbuttoned shirt, a young woman in a flaring skirt, and a petite woman in a spotted dress. In this danced chronicle of our history, with its many costume changes and transformations of character, Jánoskúti envisions for each figure an individual character and visual form.
In terms of costume, everything is meticulously thought out and expressive. The playwright, Békés, noted in 2001 that the production had been performed 175 times since 1994. Along with the challenges of costume redesign caused by cast changes and last-minute replacements, another of Jánoskúti’s great successes must be mentioned: the costumes for A padlás (lit. The Attic), which by that time had reached its 475th performance.
Jánoskúti’s costumes are never self-serving exercises in visual art; they are created to express relationships on stage. Among her characteristic techniques are textile dyeing, ageing and antiquing, crocheting, knitting, and appliqué. In all this, she is supported by the Comedy Theatre’s own workshop, which also offers her countless opportunities for experimentation.
“I will never forget Éva Ruttkai in Peter Hacks’s Lotte, a monodrama in which she played Charlotte von Stein. It was the first piece she appeared in after the death of Zoltán Latinovits [legendary actor and Ruttkai’s partner]. The request was that, since the set was white, the costume should convey pain, joy, passion – everything. I dyed a fabric in which a strange pastel mother-of-pearl pink shaded into a mournful aubergine purple.”
(Interview in Criticai Lapok, link)
Her designs are always the product of a threefold collaboration – a close creative partnership between herself, the director and the set designer. One of her greatest challenges was the Comedy Theatre production of Shakespeare’s Richard II, in which the director’s concept centred on portraying the hierarchy of power and its downfall. For this production, Jánoskúti experimented with a specially woven, colour-graded fabric produced in the theatre’s workshop, which symbolised both the grandeur and the fragility of power in the depiction of the royal pyramid. The production was a resounding success, with every stylised costume, accessory and prop contributing to a unified whole. In the role of the king, László Gálffi [prominent Hungarian stage actor] embodied both the symbols of power and, through the crown, sceptre and cloak, the weight of its burdens – all of which the costume helped to express.
In every production, Jánoskúti follows the evolution and functionality of her costumes from the first sketches through the premiere to the hundreds of subsequent performances. She dreams in colours, and only after this comes the articulation of form. Designing hundreds of costumes for musical productions, or for the choruses of opera performances where each member must embody an individualised character, is an exceptional challenge. The task in productions with runs extending into the hundreds – such as Play It Again, Sam, Képzelt riport egy amerikai popfesztiválról (An Imaginary Report on an American Rock Festival), or Harmincéves vagyok (lit. I Am Thirty) – is not only to ensure durability, but also to adapt costumes to new performers, revivals, and changing physiques and characterisations.
A youth production must retain its magical quality at its five-hundredth performance just as much as at its first. The Attic had surpassed 500 performances by 2001, and by 2005 had reached its 600th. During the 500th performance, the audience was euphoric, because, as critic Gábor Bóta wrote in Magyar Hírlap (3 May 2002, p. 12), “we want to be here again and again – in this place where one can believe that even a murderer can be redeemed, that even the man who was shot has not truly died.”
Designing the large number of costumes required for opera productions – whether at the Hungarian State Opera House or the Szeged Open-Air Festival, both in Hungary and abroad – is an artistic task that demands not only great professional preparation but also psychological insight, sensitivity and empathy. In such productions, the costume designer must take into account the different physiques of opera singers compared with spoken drama actors, the often individualised costumes of choruses numbering in the hundreds, and the monumental scale of the performance space, which differs greatly from that of the prose theatre. Naturally, with choruses often comprising 120 to 150 performers, the principal singers must also be emphasised in a distinctly different way.
Film and television productions present a separate set of challenges, particularly in Hungarian-made works, due to the proximity of the camera and lens. The quality of costume design is reflected in the precision and durability of make-up, headpieces and masks. In musical theatre, costumes tend to be more constrained, but the musical interpretation itself often “sits” upon the costume, shaping its function. The technique of singing determines the possible forms of the costumes as well as the choice of props and accessories.
Márta Jánoskúti’s “home stage” productions of Chekhov’s The Seagull and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment were also formative experiences for her. On these she had the opportunity to work with director Yury Lyubimov and his favourite collaborator, set designer David Borovsky.
“I believe that if you filter what your personality suggests through your own hard-lived experience, something creative will emerge.”
(Színház, 21 September 2006, p. 21 – interview by Ildikó Lökös)
One of the greatest challenges of her career was designing five hundred costumes for a single production of The Tales of Hoffmann. The director assigned an individual fate and character to almost every member of the chorus, which Jánoskúti had to realise through different colours and forms. Similarly demanding was her work as guest designer for two productions at the Opéra de Nice: Mozart’s Così fan tutte, staged with a cast of French singers and Hungarian guest artists (directed by János Sándor, with sets by Árpád Csányi), and Rossini’s L’italiana in Algeri, which achieved resounding success in its 1992 staging.
In 1994, Verdi’s Macbeth was met with great anticipation in Cluj-Napoca. The production, mounted at the Cluj-Napoca Hungarian Opera with monumental visual impact, required the creation of 150 different costumes.
With more than 500 theatrical designs, Hungarian films, television dramas and guest productions both in Hungary and abroad, Márta Jánoskúti’s career is marked by truly extraordinary milestones. The Hungarian National Digital Archive preserves nearly 30 recordings of her work.
Her exceptional loyalty is also evident in her work as a university associate professor. From 1979 she taught continuously for thirty-two years. She gave numerous lectures on her design methods, approaches to source research, and techniques of realisation – at the Theatre History Collection of the National Széchényi Library, at the doctoral school of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, and at the Hungarian Theatre Museum and Institute in the Áldásy Palace.
Her draughtsmanship – expressed in pencil, graphite, chalk and montage designs – has also been demonstrated in independent fine art exhibitions. In 2015, a portrait film on her life and work was produced under the title Egy vígszínházi románc (lit. A Comedy Theatre Romance), directed by Árpád Soós. At the Nemzet Művésze (lit. Artist of the Nation) award ceremony, her achievements were praised in the following terms:
“For the work of a highly knowledgeable representative of the Hungarian school of design, whose art embodies the richness of thought and emotion grounded in a multifaceted understanding of genres, and for her creations which fuse universal human values with modern stylistic features.”
(http://nemzetmuvesze.hu/dijazottak/szinhazmuveszet/j%C3%A1nosk%C3%BAti-m%C3%A1rta/)
Márta Jánoskúti’s career can by no means be considered a closed oeuvre. In December 2015, she designed the costumes for the Szigligeti Theatre in Szolnok production of W. Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, with sets by László Székely and directed by Péter Balázs. She has also been widely recognised as the costume designer for numerous films and television dramas by prominent Hungarian directors, including Károly Esztergályos, Sándor Sára, József Pacskovszky, János Dömölky, Lívia Gyarmathy and Péter Gárdos. Her most frequent collaborations were with Dömölky and Esztergályos, on adaptations such as Krleža’s Leda and The Glembays, Margit Kaffka’s Májusi zápor (lit. May Shower), Örkény lexikon (lit. Örkény Lexicon), Móricz’s Fáklya (lit. The Torch), and Kosztolányi’s Édes Anna (Anna Édes).
Her prominent place in the creative process of theatre is born of her commitment to teamwork and her infinite patience toward ideas in gestation. Her openness, radiant smile, deep sense of responsibility toward her students, and her conscious archiving and preservation of her designs embody the rebirth of classical culture and the European intellectual heritage on many Hungarian stages. She is no longer a creator “hiding beneath Gogol’s cloak” – she is the Cloak itself, the protective net, inhabiting the garments of actors who daily embody the most demanding human roles.
Her induction speech as an academician, entitled Közel ötven év a színek varázsában (lit. Almost Fifty Years in the Magic of Colours), was delivered on 10 April 2015 at the seat of the Hungarian Academy of Arts.
Even after five decades, her oeuvre remains incomplete. She continues to create for both stage and screen. The collections and archives of the National Theatre Museum and Institute preserve and process the documentation, data, images, recordings and designs of nearly 400 productions from her career. Between 1965 and 2009, she designed costumes for numerous Hungarian feature films and television dramas, the descriptions and catalogues of which can be found in the IMDb film database.
[2016]
The author is Head of the Scenic Collections in the National Theatre Museum and Institute