Directing the Madness

Last winter, János Szász captivated A.R.T. audiences with his production of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage. A few months later, Mr. Szász became a permanent member of the A.R.T. when he was named Director of the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training. A renowned Hungarian film and theatre director, Mr. Szász won a European Film Academy Award for his movie adaptation of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck. The movie was recently released with English subtitles, as was his film The Whitman Boys.

RM: What was your first significant experience in the theatre?

JS: When I was about fourteen, my father bought me a subscription to the Vigszinház, one of the biggest and most beautiful theatres in Budapest. Every second Sunday, he made me go to the Vigszinház. It was like taking a poison every other week, but it was a great poison.

RM: Did any productions make a strong impression on you?

JS: The Russian director Yuri Lyubimov staged his adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment at the Vigszinhaz. After seeing that production, I felt the need to go to Lyubimov’s Taganka Theatre in Moscow. I started going to Moscow and St. Petersburg for two weeks every year, seeing about fifteen Russian productions each visit. At the same time that I was falling in love with theatre, I was also falling in love with Russian culture. I still have an intense attraction to Russian theatre that grows stronger every day.

RM: What attracts you to Yuri Lyubimov’s work in particular?

JS: He always works with very few elements on the stage. He uses only the actors and a set that appears simple, but actually has many different layers of meaning. In Lyubimov’s production of Hamlet, for example, the set was a gigantic woolen curtain that could move all around the stage. The way they used that curtain was wonderful. When I was in Moscow, I met Lyubimov and his actors, including Vladimir Vysotsky, who played Hamlet. I drank vodka and talked with them for hours – it was heaven.

RM: You are also a film director. What are the biggest differences between directing a film and staging a play?

JS: When working on a character in a film, the director builds the character. But in the theatre, the director builds the character together with the actor. And so, in the theatre, power is really shared between the actor and director. The other main difference is that time on a film set is always limited. The producers are always looking at their watches, and I’m often given just five seconds for the most difficult scenes. As soon as I finish shooting the scene, the moment is gone. That can be tragic, because we don’t get a chance to try everything out. In the theatre, of course, we have the luxury of rehearsals, and we have a chance to improvise. I love improvisation. I’m not the kind of theatre director who sits down at home and designs every step for the actors. I want to see how the actors react to their characters.

RM: How do you begin work on a script?

JS: I’m an old- fashioned theatre director. Sometimes I improvise new scenes with music and dance, but I respect the lines of the text because I’m curious about the playwright’s intentions: what did the playwright want to say, and how and why did the playwright want to say it?

RM: What thoughts are going through your head as you prepare for Marat/Sade?

JS: I staged Marat/Sade in Hungary three years ago, so I know the general map of the play. But we didn’t have much time for that production, so I’m eager to continue exploring. I’m attracted to Marat/Sade because it offers a chance to get rid of the no-man’s-land between the audience and the actors. In the theatre, there’s often no interaction between the audience and the events on stage. I want to create an intense production that makes the spectators use their hearts, brains, and nerves. I want the audience members to be witnesses to the pain of the patients who want to be free. I’m also interested in the connections between the patients of the asylum and the parts they’re assigned in Sade’s play. Why is one patient, for example, given the role of Charlotte Corday and another patient handed the part of Simone Evrard?

RM: Like Mother Courage, Marat/Sade incorporates music and song. What do you like about the music in this play?

JS: The music in Marat/Sade is grotesque. Sometimes it’s quite funny, but often it’s extremely heavy. It’s a bit like circus music – music that’s perfect for an asylum. I like working with texts that incorporate music because it gives me the chance to collaborate with the choreographer Csaba Horváth. Working with Csaba gives me the opportunity to stand back from the production while he works with the actors, and I like the powerful, masculine quality of his choreography.

Ryan McKittrick is a graduate of the dramaturgy program of the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.