Writer, dramaturge and director Csaba Kiss was already actively involved in staging theatre plays as a student of theoretical physics at the University of Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca, Romania), he and a friend ran a theatre troupe called Kabát (lit. Coat). Although looking back on this period, he used to remark that he did not follow the stone theatre culture and that their plays were only sold a few times, the avant-garde aspirations of the time provided the basis for his later career. Among others, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was staged by them under the title Idegösszeroppanás (lit. Nervous Breakdown). The play was performed by two performers (Csaba Kiss was also an actor at the time), and the central element of the stage was a table covered with live ants. The latter was a representation of the people of Venice with a tense nervous system, in stark contrast to the sincere emotions of the two title characters, and which created a sense of discomfort in the audience itself during the performance.
This treatment of the text, thinking as a dramaturge, also characterised his later career: his aim was always to explore contemporary points of identification in relation to the given dramatic text, even radically rearranging the usual emphasis of the canonical interpretation of the play. Thus, in creating the performances and revised texts he directed, he was not motivated by a deconstruction of the original text, but by a precise analysis of the text, breaking it down into small details and reconstructing it from a contemporary perspective. In this way, it is possible to reveal the human motivations of the characters and the humanity inherent in the text. He confessed about this: “As a dramaturge, I simply like to touch things, so I don’t have any sense of sanctity towards authors, because circumstances change so much in fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty or five hundred years, and the emphasis are shifted in plays so much, and these plays have to be applied to such different kinds of actors or different acting techniques that in my opinion, a more aggressive dramaturgy, that is, a more intrusive dramaturgy, a dramaturgy that is more heavy-handed in its interpretation, is sometimes good for things.”[1]
Although his textual technique uses tools attributed to postmodernism (text deconstruction, mosaic editing, the valorisation of the significance of gestures, quotation techniques, etc.), in an earlier interview he said in response to a question from István Nánay that he does not consider himself a postmodern creator. “My attitude is twofold: I anxiously reject it, but at the same time I use it. When I direct, of course, I don’t look for and find a solution because it’s ‘postmodern’, but because I feel that there and then, that postmodern gesture is needed to reveal what we consider important, what we want to express about the play, about the characters.”[2] As he explained, he believes that the independent postmodern gestures on stage do not form a story that is united into a linear narrative (unlike, for example, the works of Homer’s time), but merely attempt to achieve effects. However, these gestures and effects can only be successfully decoded in the given time and context, and although in contemporary art, effects replace timeless stories and heroes, behind this, there remains nothing but the director’s persona. On the other hand, his aim is always to bring the audience into a concrete relationship with the characters in the text, so that they are able to relate to the conflicts that arise through them from their own position. This does not create a meaning that can only be interpreted in the time of the performance, but rather a timeless, universal human question in a language that is comprehensible to the audience of the time. “If the performance is strong enough, if it succeeds in luring the spectator into an emotional trap, they will be willing to interpret what they have seen, to place it into their own world.”[3]
Hamlet
In 2013, he was elected a full member of the Department of Theatre Arts of the Hungarian Academy of Arts. He gave his inaugural speech based on the defining drama of his career, Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In his presentation, he paralleled the Hungarian regime change and the period since then with the moral questions appearing in Hamlet, with the issue of moral behaviour, justice and revenge, the expected absolution and solution. The aim of his investigation was to compare his own interpretation of Hamlet with the changes and conditions in Hungarian society since 1989, touching on the impact of the III/III list of agents and the events of 1956 on the present, the attempts to come to terms with them, or the postponement of such attempts.
As he recalled, he approached the director of the Győr National Theatre with the idea of staging Hamlet as a newly graduated dramaturge. The performance, which premiered on 23 May 1994 at the Padlásszínház (Attic Theatre) of Győr National Theatre, was his first direction of Hamlet, the play was about the difficulties of justice and the unrevealed truth. It revealed a world where Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were informers and where Hamlet refused to become one. In his view, the play was about understanding individual truths, truths that seemed to cover up the sin, but that did not bring real truth, real clarity, or the processing of the past. In the words of Claudius, he asks the question: if the sinner does ask for absolution from sin, can he have it while he continues to enjoy the results of his sin in the present?
His new production draws attention to new problems in a different historical context: the performance is set at the beginning of the millennium, when the first students and young thinkers who studied at European universities return home, bringing with them a different way of thinking and a different worldview. This is the situation that Csaba Kiss writes into the drama of Hamlet, that of the students, who are not only characterised by freshness, but also by strong moral foundations. Yet the place to which they return home is the same: progress and survival cannot be achieved on the basis of knowledge and morality. “No social class is safe. Everyone is living through. New homeless people, hundreds of thousands of people living below subsistence level, middle-class people losing their livelihoods. Young people on the streets, graduate unemployment on one hand – and speculation, unclean wealth, mafia laws on the other. Hamlet comes home from sterile Wittenberg to greedy Denmark. He talks of morality, absolute values, God, justice. No one understands. Here, the innocent are those who have not been caught. There is only one command: live! That is the absolute value. Survival. It redefines relationships, it overrides morality.”[4]
According to Levente Osztovics, this should not be performed based on the text of Hamlet, but by writing one’s own drama – this is when the drama Hazatérés Dániába (Homecoming to Denmark), a contemporary Hamlet story, was born. At its centre is the complex character of Claudius, a hedonistic, at once lovable and at the same time unscrupulously sinful and guilty. According to Csaba Kiss, the dilemma of Shakespeare’s drama, which can be grasped in our own time, is the lack of action, or the inability to act. The old Hamlet is not a ghost but a worn-out body, Hamlet is the educated, moral young man rejecting revenge, who has returned from afar, and Horatio is the same age as him but raised and socialised at home and demanding justice. The resulting play was performed shortly afterwards by the Veszprém Petőfi Theatre (4 October 2002) and later by the Győr National Theatre (9 October 2004), it was recorded on TV and in 2008 it was a subject for the intermediate level Hungarian literature graduation examination.[5]
Later, Csaba Kiss put the play in a new light for the third time, when he performed it in the empty space of the Miskolc National Theatre (premiere: Miskolc National Theatre, Hall, 14 April 2013). Despite the spatial arrangement, visuality also played a significant role in the performance: in the opening scene, Hamlet, returning home to mourn, finds himself confronted by the already reveling court, who, without any justice, have chosen to simply forget and move on. Finding an interpretation of Hamlet’s monologue, the opposition between revenge and morality in intellectual life, was, according to Csaba Kiss, an important point for the interpretation of the play as a whole. The interpretation of the grand monologue made him realise that for Hamlet, it is not the act of killing that is repulsive, since it has already happened to him (Polonius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern...), but the premeditated murder, the murder of revenge, is incompatible with his moral standpoint, and that is why the possibility of suicide and complete cessation occured to him. Claudius’ monologue becomes the other salient moment here: the confession, when he is aware of his own guilt, the request for forgiveness and the immediate questioning of the sincerity of this gesture. The problem of sincerity and the self-identity based on it is expressed at certain points in the performance, as interpreted by Csaba Kiss: “In this performance, I am very interested in Hamlet. So he himself. It is also the concept of the whole performance that the nine people around him, because there will be nine of them, plus him, have the task of making it increasingly difficult for him to remain moral. So to make it harder and harder for him to do what he has to do... that is, to bring the inner world into harmony with the outer world.”[6]
He describes the changes in the interpretations of Hamlet born in him as follows: “In the course of twenty years, the image of Hamlet that has been forming in me, the successive interpretations have often met with social changes, from the age of witnesses, through the relativisation of morality, through the need for confrontation and clarity, to the desire for reconciliation and forgiveness. However, Hamlet is not a ‘key drama’, and the current issues of the world can only be matched to the situations in the play at the cost of severe dramaturgical simplifications. Hamlet does not model social relations, but helps us to think about them, to find the necessary distance for judgement.”[7]
Macbeth
Csaba Kiss received his DLA degree (Doctor of Liberal Arts) at the University of Theatre and Film Arts in 2006. His thesis supervisor was his former class teacher Levente Osztovics, and his thesis was entitled: “Mi van velem, hogy minden zaj ijeszt?” – A Macbeth házaspár belső útjai. (lit. “What Is It with Me That All Noises Scare Me?” – The Inner Journeys of the Macbeth Couple. The subject of his analysis is a Dostoevskyan interpretation of Shakespeare’s other great drama, Macbeth, which focuses on the question of punishment. The first part of the dissertation is a study, a detailed analysis of the drama, illustrated with the script and DVD recording of Csaba Kiss’ first production of Macbeth, a performance with four actors at the Attic Theatre of the Győr National Theatre, on 9 February 1996. The basic hypothesis of his analysis is based on the visuality of the dramatic text, concluding that Shakespeare’s text, with its descriptions and the vision that does not appear on stage but is evoked at the level of the text, can only be understood in its entirety as a work that appears on stage. At the same time, an examination of the deep layers of the dramatic text reveals its complexity, which, in Csaba Kiss’ opinion, makes it stand out from the usual Shakespearean works. This is why he approached Raskolnikova of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, drawing parallels with the problems of Macbeth. The character of Macbeth goes through the phases of avoiding punishment, during which “in the course of successive murders Macbeth learns to live with sin, ‘gets used to the horror’ – and the psychological process moves from initial anxieties, hallucinations, elemental anguish of mind, to dullness, indifference, the maintenance of mere physical existence. The death that ‘arrives’ at the end of the play does not bring relief, resolution, catharsis – since it is merely the physical annihilation of a soul that is burnt out of all feelings, desires, hopes, and is in fact dead.”[8].
He touched on the Macbeth theme in two further performances, expanding his productions into a kind of “trilogy”: on 13 March 1998, the adaptation of Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov’s short novel, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District was presented in the Chamber of the Katona József Theatre, and, although the work itself is not a paraphrase of Macbeth, Csaba Kiss also considers his production of The Postman Always Rings Twice, based on James M. Cain’s work, which premiered on 22 September 1998 in the Studio of the Thália Theatre, to be a kind of Macbeth story.
Chekhov
Another important author in Csaba Kiss’ career was Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, whose dramas, short stories and correspondence he also researched and turned into successful stage productions. It is clear from these performances that in his case, a deep knowledge of the text and the thorough research behind it are combined with an understanding of the creative ideas behind the text, which is also reflected in a theatrical framework. He directed Chekhov’s The Seagull twice, first in 2008 at the Tamási Áron Theatre in Sepsiszentgyörgy (Sfântu Gheorghe) (premiere: 10 October 2008) and then at the Chamber Theatre of the Miskolc National Theatre (premiere: 07 December 2013). On 7 May 1997, the play titled De mi lett a nővel? (lit. But What Happened to the Woman?), based on the Russian writer’s short stories, was premiered at the Attic Theatre of the Győr National Theatre, and later he turned Chekhov's correspondence with his three lovers into a dramatic text, which he staged under the title Csehov szerelmei (lit. Chekhov’s Lovers) (premiere: 15 February 2002, Új Színház (New Theatre), Studio Stage).
But What Happened to the Woman? was widely acclaimed, it was recorded on TV, performed in prison and toured Transylvania, and in April 1999, it was also performed in Russian at the Moscow Art Theatre. According to Katalin Gabnai, “With the help of his actors, Csaba Kiss does not dismantle Chekhov, but opens it up as an interactive empire.”[9]. And according to Tamás Koltai, “The cheerful and touching hour and a half is nevertheless also merciless. Actors decide on love, pain, life and death with sudden determination. If they decide so, we suffer for Irina Bikulina.”[10]
Although, according to Csaba Kiss, at that time he considered his work on Chekhov’s biography closed, the story continued: “after my trip to Moscow, I accidentally came across Chekhov’s love letters. Almost immediately I fell in love with their teasing, mocking, mean-spirited, grotesque style. They were so un-Chekhovian. For example, he wrote to his young love, Lika Mizinova: ‘What tortures shall we imagine for you if you don’t come here (to Melihovo)? I’ll pour boiling water over you and tear a piece of beef out of your back with glowing tongs.’ Why beef?! – I thought, having a good laugh.”[11] Chekhov’s Lovers was based on 186 letters Chekhov wrote to three women, available in Hungarian at the time. Csaba Kiss transformed this correspondence into dialogues with the help of dramaturge Annamária Radnai, with whom he selected and translated further letters, including the women’s replies, and also filled in the missing parts from the memoirs of one of the women. The image of a man who avoids emotions, writes in a mocking manner and indulges in conquests, instead of the image of a longing, amorous writer, was drawn from this and formed the basis of the performance. This performance was also presented in Russia in 2003 at the Chekhov International Festival in Melikhovo. According to Tamás Koltai, the performance: “creates the distance of correspondence with the paradox that it eliminates distance. The partners are only virtually distant from each other, in fact they are in direct physical proximity, reacting to each other’s communication during the letters, metacommunicating, touching each other, getting into intimate physical contact. Unavailability thus becomes an ambivalent, metaphysical factor…”[12]
The latter became the opening piece of a so-called “love trilogy”, in the words of Csaba Kiss, as the main characters of Chekhov’s Lovers, Anna Györgyi and János Kulka, played a married couple in two other performances on a similar theme. Chekhov’s Lovers, A szakítás (lit. The Breakup) and Anna Karenina are “about the forms of love, the distortions of love, the means of love, the relationship between love and possession”.[13] The Breakup is a performance based on the film by Michelangelo Antonioni, a film director who had a great influence on him, and was presented at the Ericsson Studio of the Budapesti Kamaraszínház (Budapest Chamber Theatre) (4 October 2003). The performance followed the narrative of a film’s 3rd person point of view, while also employing cinematic devices for visual effect. At the centre of its story was a man torn between his lovers, played by János Kulka. The premiere of the third play, Anna Karenina, was held on 18 December 2004 at the Tivoli Hall of the Budapest Chamber Theatre with Anna Györgyi in the title role. The performance did not present the “usual” romantic story, focusing on the tragic love between Anna and Vronsky. For Csaba Kiss, Anna and Karenin’s love, and the change and passing of her love, and her exit, became the central conflict. In his reading of Tolstoy’s novel, the plot revolved around the process of love: a married couple who live happily together for years, and then something unexpected happens that throws the woman off course and sets her on a new path. And at the end of the process, from one moment to the next, two strangers stand face to face, unable to understand each other’s desires, yet still bound to each other. In his trilogy of performances, Csaba Kiss has explored the complexity of this attachment by incorporating and dramatising several text-types. He concludes that “those relationships are simple, when you become disillusioned with someone, turn your back, move away and the truck takes you to another apartment and you never think of that person again, but usually in our lives we do not carry the burden of such relationships, but we are somehow bound by love. The more problematic and the deeper a love is, the more it leaves traces in you, and you cannot erase these traces, but carry them with you.”[14]
Summary
Csaba Kiss’ oeuvre is varied, he worked with a wide range of texts, and as can be seen from the above, his work is characterised by analytical precision. In addition to his productions of Hamlet, Macbeth and Chekhov, he created performances with a unique tone, which put the given plays and revised texts in a new light, successfully transforming the system of meaning built up through deep analysis of the text into a theatrical language. One notable example was his production of Woyzeck, which was performed at the New Theatre on 7 March 1999, and was constructed from fragments of text by Georg Büchner. Compared to the traditional performances of text fragments translated into Hungarian, Csaba Kiss again created his own interpretation of the play about human cruelty and destruction by using additional sources: he translated all existing text fragments and variants and searched for the original trial documents. From this, Woyzeck appears as a declassified, alcoholic, homeless figure, which nuances his portrayal as an almost comically simple-minded or mentally damaged character, usually taken from Büchner’s texts.[15] He also directed the play Waiting for Godot (premiere: Attic Theatre of the Győr National Theatre, 07 April 1995), in which he twisted the interpretation of the drama by presenting the roles of Estragon and Vladimir not as vagabonds, but by assigning the roles to two vigorous women, Vali Horváth and Zsuzsa Dósa.
It is clear from the above examples that his plays and performances to date are the result of complex analytical work, and are therefore outstanding works of art in their own right. What unites them is Csaba Kiss’ method of working, which always involves detailed research, his unique staging style and his examination of the works from the perspective of the recipient, always with the aim of creating living, contemporary works with which the recipient can establish a valid relationship in his own present. About the latter and the background to his stage works, he said: “Instead of decisions based on personality, there are general, typifiable decisions and actions. [...] I would like to bring personality back to the stage. If I succeed in this, the audience will still be interested in it today.”[16]
[2016]
[1]Interview in Zsuzsa Varsányi's programme Zene-szó (lit. Music-Word), 05 May 1993, Petőfi 9.10 PZ
[2] István Nánay: Elvész a történet. (lit. The Story Is Lost.) A conversation with Csaba Kiss, Theatre, March 1998
[3] István Nánay: The story is lost. A conversation with Csaba Kiss, Theatre, March 1998
[4] Csaba Kiss: „Akkor nemesb-e a lélek…” Hamlet kérdései. (lit. “Then Is the Soul Nobler…” Questions of Hamlet. Inaugural Speech – Hungarian Academy of Arts, 12 September 2014
[5] Csaba Kiss: “Then Is the Soul Nobler…” Questions of Hamlet. Inaugural Speech – Hungarian Academy of Arts, 12 September 2014
[6] Emlékpróba (lit. Memorial Rehearsal) – Theatre series by Csaba Kiss, Gabriella Filip and László Fésüs, 16 October 2012, Színészmúzeum (Actor’s Museum) – Miskolc
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB_BhWL34TY)
[7] Csaba Kiss: “Then Is the Soul Nobler…” Questions of Hamlet. Inaugural Speech – Hungarian Academy of Arts, 12 September 2014
[8]Csaba Kiss: “What Is It with Me That All Noises Scare Me?” – The Inner Journeys of the Macbeth Couple, University of Theatre and Film Arts, Doctoral School of Theatre Arts, 2006. 136.
[9] Katalin Gabnai: Mit tudtok ti Irina Bikulináról (lit. What do you know about Irina Bikulina), Criticai Lapok (Critique Pages), June-July 1997
[10] Tamás Koltai: Mi neki Hekuba? (lit. What is Hekuba to them?), Élet és Irodalom (Life and Literature), 13 June 1997.
[11] Csaba Kiss: Csehov rózsaszín kanapéján ülve (lit. Sitting on Chekhov's Pink Sofa), Premier, May 2005
[12] Tamás Koltai: Csehovizálás (lit. Chekhovisation), Life and Literature, 22 February 2002.
[13] Professional discussion, Pécs Cultural Centre (Dominican House), 16 June 2005.
[14] Professional discussion, Pécs Cultural Centre (Dominican House), 16 June 2005.
[15] Gábor Bóta: A formátum tisztelete. (lit. Respect for format.) Meeting with Csaba Kiss, Magyar Hírlap (Hungarian National Newspaper), 06 March 1999.
[16] Gábor Bóta: Respect for format. Meeting with Csaba Kiss, Hungarian National Newspaper, 06 March 1999.