The Theatre of Hungarian Indians and Informants

Abstract

The contemporary Hungarian play Apaches on the Danube was conceived by dramaturg Krisztina Kovács, after she read the extensive secret police files on a group of friends, who secretly “played Indians” and followed the traditions of the Native American Apache tribe in the late 1950s, early 1960s Hungary. The play, which Kovács co-authored with playwright Géza Bereményi and opened in 2009, is a fictitious reconstruction of how the group was dissolved and their leader murdered as a consequence of a secret informant's revealing reports. The plot juxtaposes two historic periods; while the secret collaborator is coerced to betray his friends during one of the darkest periods of Communist dictatorship, his grandchild in the present accidentally meets the son of the informer‘s former victim and through this encounter he confronts and comes to term with the sins of the now dad grandfather.

Even though Apaches on the Danube may seem not to fit into the genre of documentary theatre, in this essay I argue that the performance still fulfills what is considered as the most important function of documentary theatre today: by melding fiction and non-fiction, it underlines that “truth is contextual, multiple, and subject to manipulation” (Carol Martin) and interrogates “the very notion of documentary” (Paget). Most importantly, Apaches on the Danube interrogates what constitutes the document itself; it demonstrates that not only archival files and visual materials should be considered as documents, but in the theatre of history and memory, mundane objects of the past, intangible atmospheric evocations of disappeared spaces and the historiographically informed scripts together document a historic era and/or event. It also emphasizes that the document is not an incontestable evidence, as the audience's understanding and reception of the past is not only an intellectual, but also, and primarily, a phenomenological experience.

Notes

¹ All quotations from the play are Lucy Frankel's translations. All translations of Hungarian articles are mine.

² The playwrights borrowed this funnel structure from Tom Stoppard's 1972 radio play, Artist Descending a Staircase.

³ The two perhaps best-known and most influential examples of recent Central European artworks that attempted to represent and reconstruct everyday life in Eastern Europe under the watching eyes of state security's agents and informants are the German movie Life of the Others (2006) and the Polish Theatre of the Eighth Day's performance Files (2007). While Life of the Others was an exceptional reconstruction of a historic era in a feature movie with fictitious characters and plot (although undoubtedly inspired by the creators' real-life experiences) focusing on the official and dissident art world of East Berlin of the 1980s, in the Polish play the members of the former dissident theatre company read from and enacted their own secret police files to highlight the absurdity and pettiness of the endless documents of duplicity and betrayal.

⁴ As I earlier stated, there were indeed groups of young men and women in Hungary playing Indians in the 1960s. The state security files also prove that some members of these tribes were recruited by the secret police. The only event that is surely fictitous in the play is the chief's murder; according to the accessible files at the Hungarian National Archive none of the Indian interrogations and trials ended with the death of the accused/interrogated (Makrai 2011).

⁵ To demonstrate how authentically manipulative and menacing the interrogation's fictional language is, I briefly quote from one of the original Indian files:

Interrogation: October 20, 1962

K: Besides the activities you already described in your confession, have you done any literary work in other fields?

F: I have not done any literary work in other fields.

Statement: I do not accept your answer. I am showing you the copies of the illegally distributed typescript ‘Council-Fire’, obtained in your apartment, which was created by L.N., Czechoslovakian citizen. At our disposal is the table of content, which shows that you published several of your works in this publication under the alias of ‘White Deer.’ Make a confession about this.

F: I admit that after L.N. requested, I sent him some of my old typescripts on multiple occasions, which he published in the illegally produced ‘CouncilFire.’ I also sent him the first three chapters of my unpublished Indian-novel. (Hungarian National Archive 1962: V-147492/1, 88)

⁶ This aspect is emphasized by a dialogue between the Chief's wife, Csilla, and her husband. Csilla asks: ‘What's their problem with the Indians?’ to which he answers: ‘They want to play too’ (Bereményi and Kovács 2009: 26). The literal translation of the original Hungarian sentence, ‘That they are not the one playing it,’ even more emphatically suggests the extreme extent to which the secret police needed to permeate into all spheres of everyday life.