I chose freedom
Viktor Kravchenko's autobiographical book I Chose Freedom is a “one-man manifesto,” tantamount to an indictment of Stalinism and the inhuman world of Soviet labour camps. Maladype Theatre published the Hungarian translation of the book, and from November 14, the work will be performed at the theatre by Zoltán Balázs. We spoke with the actor-director before the premiere.
You first encountered Viktor Kravchenko's work six years ago. Was it clear that one day it would become a performance?
It is part of my family heritage that my right, opportunity, desire, and need for freedom override everything else. Therefore, it was clear that a work titled I Chose Freedom would be extremely exciting for me. Six years ago, I read an interview with Ariane Mnouchkine, the wonderful French theatre professional, who mentioned this work among the books that had shaped her life. I had not heard of it before, but her opinion assured me that it must be a sophisticated, valuable work. When it turned out that it had not been translated into Hungarian, or even Russian (apart from the original English, it had only been published in Polish and Bulgarian), I decided to acquire the rights. At that point, it was still an open question how we would proceed. We started this expedition without me having read the book. All I knew was that it was about the political and private life of a Soviet official, and that it was published in 1947, which means that it’s an even earlier report on the Soviet Gulag and the horrors of Soviet terror than Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. When Péter Konok's translation was completed two years ago, I was able to read this wonderful work in Hungarian, which focuses on the extreme nature and character of Viktor Kravchenko.
What makes Viktor Kravchenko such an extreme personality?
Kravchenko, while moving forward chronologically in the work, is constantly struggling. He weighs up the character of his father, who is a very strong, dominant personality and a kind of mirror in his life, at the same time reserving for himself the right to change and redesign the moments he has experienced, his impulses, and his insights. This is why he is able to make such a big change in his life and turn against Stalinism, even if this undertaking is terribly difficult and means sacrificing his family, relatives, friends, and acquaintances. By becoming a dissident, he inevitably hurt all those who remained in the Soviet Union. Many of them, including his mother and wife Irina, were sent to concentration camps. Kravchenko nevertheless believed that by exposing an inhuman world, he could do more than if he had stayed at home, kept quiet, and become a silent witness to the Soviet system. After the publication of his book, Kravchenko was sued by the Parisian communists, who claimed that what he wrote was not true. According to contemporary statements, the Kravchenko trial was the “trial of the century,” which he later won. Kravchenko was photographed most often when he argued his case with spectacular gestures. Extreme, intense body language is not far from my own personality; expressiveness is indeed part of playing on stage. After all, Kravchenko is also very expressive, yet very sensitive beneath the surface. His quieter, softer, more delicate, more intimate moments must be created as well. He has poise and strength; he is a fighter. At the same time, he is an unpleasant, absolutely provocative, divisive figure. I am the same, so in that sense we are good friends.
Viktor Kravchenko's work forces us to confront the period of Stalinism and Communism, which are still sensitive topics today. They are taboo, dangerous, delicate, and unpleasant. What is at stake here is the processing of an era, a period and of the past. Some people are capable of this, while others are not. Some are open to it, others do not want to. Some would like to, but do not know how, while others do not want to, even though they have every opportunity to do so. There is no recipe for this. One thing is certain: by talking about it we can – and will – provide the opportunity. There is a line in the book where Viktor says to his father, “Many of us want to speak up, to raise the alarm.” The fact that people speak is a manifesto in itself. There are people among us who keep quiet, and there are those who speak up. I will speak up. That is all I will do. How spectators interpret these thoughts and words is a serious personal responsibility on their part. The viewer is the creator here. I cannot take responsibility for others. I can only consider my own responsibility.
What is your own relationship to this task?
Until now, I have consistently dealt with material that is more surreal, more poetic. This material offers plenty of opportunity for debate and misunderstanding, even though history and historians have already dealt with this period. But no matter how divisive and sensitive this issue is, I still thought: at 38 years old, I cannot ignore the 12 years that defined my childhood in Transylvania. This was the last period before Ceausescu's fall. We were out on the streets during the revolution, and I still remember clearly what happened. As a child, I witnessed the arrest of my grandfather because he was Hungarian. He was sent to prison, and my grandmother visited him regularly. I remember when the women in the family held the fort. Kravchenko writes that provocateurs can be recognized by their smell. I feel like that too: I close my eyes and I can still smell the smells I encountered during the house searches. Yet this is not accompanied by a damaged soul: although my family suffered a lot, for them dignity, the possibility of a better life, and the future were always stronger and more motivating than failure, self-pity, or accepting the role of victim. This is what I got from them, and it has had a profound impact on my life. Now, as an adult man, I have reached the point where I can formulate something about my childhood, my current life, and my possible older years. In this sense, it is very healthy material. I feel that I have a healthy approach to this performance. In this work, there is none of the idealism of stage plays, there are no heroes or antiheroes, there are no tricks, only one person standing in the middle.
Was it a conscious decision to stage the performance this year, in the Gulag Memorial Year?
My entire season is dedicated to Communism, regardless of this. There are certainly no coincidences. On the other hand, it took this long to obtain the rights, have it translated, proofread, publish the book, raise the money, prepare it, and create a performance. It's an interesting coincidence, and I'd like to say that it was completely intentional, but it wasn't: that's just how it turned out, and I'm very happy about it. However, the opportunity to explore the Communist past also comes up elsewhere for me this season. Starting in January, I'm also directing a play with a communist theme in Chicago, titled How to Explain the History of Communism to Mental Patients. It was written by the world-famous author Matei Visniec. It is a wonderful contemporary work, featuring Lenin and Stalin. After that, we will be doing a Dada cabaret here at home with Gábor Farkas and his band, because next year will mark the centenary of Dada. The performance is also based on a play by Matei Visniec, and Lenin and Stalin are in it as well. In Zurich, all the founders of the Cabaret Voltaire lived next door to each other, as did Lenin and Krupskaya. Somehow, everything is connected.
What image does Kravchenko paint of Stalin?
Kravchenko repeatedly calls Stalin a “crazy Georgian” and has a strong opinion of him, even though for a while he warranted a wonderful future for him. Stalin was one of the great prophets of his Communist conversion. Then he saw the system and Stalin himself become distorted. He sees him as increasingly stocky, fat, pockmarked, and toothless. Then there is an emblematic moment, like in a Jiri Menzel film, where Kravchenko takes the picture of Stalin off the wall, tears it to pieces, and flushes the scraps down the toilet. Watching the water gurgle, he knows that the party, the cause, and the leader will never again be the defining factors in his life. It's like a breakup, the end of a relationship. Either we end it, or we carry it with us for the rest of our lives, which is a tragedy. Perhaps the most terrible lesson of choosing freedom is that after Kravchenko arrives in America and seems to be able to leave everything behind, he still cannot find freedom. He carried the desire for freedom within his personality, inherited from his grandfather and father, although its unfolding depended on many factors. Women played a role in shaping his life, but so did his relationship with Stalin and other leaders, as well as American thinking. This will not be mentioned in the performance, but in the book he recounts how painful it was that the Americans supported the democratic aspirations of the Hungarians and Koreans more than those of the Russians. It hurt him that Stalin became a hero by effectively defeating Hitler at the end of World War II. Meanwhile, there was a war within the war, with 20 million Russian casualties.
Was Kravchenko ever able to forgive himself for having been part of this system in the beginning?
He tries to explain it to himself. Kravchenko was an engineer, a technical man, and had a successful career. He was good friends with one of Stalin's confidants, People's Commissar Ordzhonikidze. Later, he tried to convince himself that the only thing he could do, even if his family and many of his friends fell victim to it, was to open his mouth and speak out. He could never be sure that this was the only way for him to act. This is an unanswered question. That is why he never found his place again and became stateless. At the end of his book, he says that Viktor Kravchenko ceased to exist as a person and became an islander in no man's land. In my opinion, that is what he always was inside. I also think it is important to be able to portray this spiritual vacuum.
It is important to emphasize that Kravchenko was not a writer. He came from a working-class family, from which he naturally brought many values with him. The book contains beautiful, often complex sentences. When he composes his statement and writes the book, he uses such wonderful imagery that even writers would spend years searching for. Of course, this does not make it a literary work, but his language is incredibly sophisticated.
What does this performance undertake? To convey information about a particular era? Perhaps to raise issues that are still sensitive today?
In Jane Austen's novel Sense and Sensibility, one of the ladies says that what she likes in a particular person is that when they read aloud, they do not intrude on the text and its content. At Maladype Theatre, it is also an important directorial and acting instruction to let the text prevail. This does not mean that we speak in an old-fashioned, chanting, distant manner; on the contrary, we speak very personally. The text, in this case Kravchenko's work, is the real value, the content and heart of the performance: it beats, and blood circulates through it with the right energy, and the heart pulsates and comes to life. This is a very delicate matter, and perhaps not primarily an actor's task. The constant, DNA-like intermingling of the three levels of historical context, personal life story and profession requires an astonishing amount of mental work and concentration. You have to be very alert mentally, quickly formulate information within extremely long and complex sentences, and then quickly feed it back and forth through very short, staccato-like sentences. Meanwhile, you have to move forward and cover a 38-year period with the performance. This is very interesting because I myself am 38 years old.
You haven’t stood on stage as an actor for many years, which makes this performance even more special?
As an actor, I played many beautiful and good roles, so for the past 5-6 years I haven't really had the desire to perform. I still don't want to “perform,” but I do want to be able to tell these facts in the first person singular. In such a way that I do not intrude on the text, but my essence, my age, my knowledge, and my current thinking are present in the performance. I do not desire direct actualization either. This is not the purpose of the book either; rather it’s a testimony to an era. There are thoughts that are strengthened simply by being spoken aloud. People involuntarily connect things, not by reading, shouting, preaching, or forcing the great truth down someone else's throat, but simply by confronting them. And when people can read between the lines, they can express wonderful things.
Will the audience be active participants?
There are three reasons why the audience will be active participants. First, they will have to pay close attention because the material is so dense, concise, and concentrated that it is impossible to tune out. My personality and the tempo I dictate will also not allow them to switch off. Finally, although the text is a very precise score, I have the opportunity to improvise precisely because of who I meet in the audience at a given performance, whether in terms of age, cultural background, knowledge, or interests. So the performance has a very conscious, tense, precise structure, paired with an irregular, courageous, free game that responds to the moment, taking into account the audience sitting there. A combination of the regular and the irregular. It requires amazing mental work, great spiritual energy, and a playful spirit. Complicity. A wink.
The book, published under your theatre’s care, has already had its launch. How was it received?
The book made a very successful debut, appeared at the Hungarian Book Fair, and quickly became widely known. It fills a gap in the market and is being bought by people of all ages. The volume is beautiful, with cover art by Kossuth Prize-winning graphic artist István Orosz and a very high-quality translation by Péter Konok. Our colleagues invested a lot of energy at home and abroad to get this project to this point. The graphic artists who developed the concept, the team of experts... It is also exemplary that today, when there are few integrative programs, this project is characterized by wonderful cooperation. The Open Society Institute, the National Cultural Fund, the Ministry of Human Resources, and the Norwegian Civil Support Fund all considered this a common cause. In fact, this is the essence of my theatre as well: it does not divide people, but brings them together. Of course, I also thanked Ariane Mnouchkine at the beginning of the book; I owed her that. The performance is a summary of the book, and perhaps the personal tone brings the essence closer to the audience. The book and the performance complement each other very nicely. The common denominator is Viktor Kravchenko's character, personality, thinking, and mentality.
Kravchenko's son, Andrew Kravchenko, even sent a short video message to the book launch. What did he say in it?
Andrew Kravchenko is Viktor Kravchenko's only living son. He lives in Los Angeles and has very little personal experience of his father, knowing him almost exclusively from the book. For him, therefore, the main character in the book is the true ideal. Andrew had previously seen a recording of me playing Hamlet, and immediately recognized his father in it. Obviously, my personality is not far removed from this kind of torn, extreme existence. Today, Andrew can see that his father’s legacy is in good hands here in Hungary. He has grown fond of us and places great trust in all our requests. In the video message, he thanked us for everything in Hungarian. He was very happy and really liked the book. He wanted to come to the presentation, but couldn't because he also just published a book about his father. He has also reached the point where he can process his relationship with him. Viktor Kravchenko died in a room in New York, and to this day it is not known whether he committed suicide or was killed by the KGB, like Trotsky. For Andrew, his father is a complete mystery. However, knowing that we would not bring shame upon him with the Hungarian performance, he agreed that I could even perform it abroad.
So, is there a chance that I Chose Freedom will be performed abroad?
There's nothing stopping it. The performance is very mobile and easily adaptable. I could easily perform the evening in English or French. For Russia, I would have to learn Russian first, which would be an interesting challenge. In Russia, however, they don't even want to hear about the book; it still hasn't been published since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Perhaps if it were published in Ukraine, it would mean something, since Kravchenko is of Ukrainian origin. Sooner or later, the dam will break. Incidentally, this is not just a Russian trait: here in Hungary and around the world, we encounter many unpleasant topics that people don’t want to hear about. Not to discuss, but simply to hear about. If I talk about it, that's already sensitive. However, it is the job of an artist, a creator, to speak up. Not directly, not profanely, not in an actualized way, but by giving voice to a work of art.
The performance is accompanied by an educational program, the Kravchenko Case. We understand that participants have already been involved in the rehearsal process.
The Kravchenko Case is important as a multi-phase educational program because we are focusing specifically on young people. In the program, underprivileged, exceptionally talented students aged 14-18 will conduct mini-trials based on the Kravchenko trial, with the help of historians, social psychologists, Russia experts, and teachers. We are modelling Kravchenko's trial in Paris, where his own left-wing circle accused him of lying and claiming that everything he wrote was fiction. Kravchenko wrote his second work, I Chose the Truth, based on the trial he won. During the hearings, students will always have the opportunity to convict or acquit me, as Kravchenko. I consider it very important for this generation to develop personal responsibility, to be able to choose and decide, to be able to articulate differences, and to support all of this with arguments. The ability to argue—not necessarily in legal language, but in any very simple system of argumentation—can liberate the mind. Perhaps this generation will have a different attitude toward the issues of choice and civic responsibility, or even toward culture and the art of reading itself.
How does a rehearsal process work when the performance is created by a single artist?
As far as the actors' tasks are concerned, I founded Maladype Theatre 15 years ago, so I determine its spirit. The company has always strived to make the actors' presence as personal as possible, free from any kind of pose, role, adopted behaviour, or “performance.” Of course, it is very important within the actor's toolkit to be able to portray old, young, fat, thin, evil, and good characters, but the path, the process that takes the creator from their civilian self to the self that embodies the role is a different way of thinking at Maladype. It is much more subtle. In the current performance, for example, if I deal with Viktor Kravchenko's problem publicly, in front of the audience watching the performance, then my interest in the problem draws in the audience's interest, and they thereby create the possible character of Viktor Kravchenko. So it's a joint game. For this to happen, I need to be motivated, because then the issue becomes a joint issue. The point is not what I do or how I do it. If the audience sees how personal, how tragic, how true, how different, how harsh, how frightening what they see is, then at that moment we are already dealing with the problem, and then we are on the right track.
The performance also has a director, called the thought. The thought directs the performance. I direct my thoughts publicly, while also being the medium. I didn't feel the need for an external director, because if they start pursuing this very serious genre with me, then from that point on, the question is no longer what I say, but how I say it. So suddenly the content is pushed into the background and the form becomes more interesting. Of course, it is very difficult to make the thought the organizing and directing principle of the whole evening, since it is precisely the thought – or the lack thereof – that is the main question of our time. Yet thinkers were, are, and will be needed. We need to think, we need to reconcile different perspectives and worldviews. Not to remain silent, but to talk, to search, to weed out and replant.
Among other things, this performance is also a part of the celebrations around Maladype’s 15th anniversary, right?
We are indeed celebrating with work. While I’ll be in Chicago, András Jeles will be directing Three Sisters here, and later Sándor Zsótér will be coming to direct Richard III. It's a great season, fortunately there are many opportunities for us abroad. I can say that we still exist, although the future of independent theatres in Hungary is not very bright. To survive, you need good company, a sense of belonging, and a sense of humour. Especially a sense of humour.
How do you feel about the upcoming premiere?
I am looking forward to seeing what I can convey from all this. There is a lot of interest, so it would be good if my mind, my thoughts, and this opportunity were all in sync at a given moment. But that's not mandatory. It's an opportunity: playfulness makes it human, easy, self-evident. It's a story that writes itself. There are no taboos or secrets. I play in a room that can hold a maximum of 60 people, so everything that is not real will be exposed here.
Annamária Veraszto, faktor, 2015 / Translated by Léna Megyeri
You first encountered Viktor Kravchenko's work six years ago. Was it clear that one day it would become a performance?
It is part of my family heritage that my right, opportunity, desire, and need for freedom override everything else. Therefore, it was clear that a work titled I Chose Freedom would be extremely exciting for me. Six years ago, I read an interview with Ariane Mnouchkine, the wonderful French theatre professional, who mentioned this work among the books that had shaped her life. I had not heard of it before, but her opinion assured me that it must be a sophisticated, valuable work. When it turned out that it had not been translated into Hungarian, or even Russian (apart from the original English, it had only been published in Polish and Bulgarian), I decided to acquire the rights. At that point, it was still an open question how we would proceed. We started this expedition without me having read the book. All I knew was that it was about the political and private life of a Soviet official, and that it was published in 1947, which means that it’s an even earlier report on the Soviet Gulag and the horrors of Soviet terror than Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. When Péter Konok's translation was completed two years ago, I was able to read this wonderful work in Hungarian, which focuses on the extreme nature and character of Viktor Kravchenko.
What makes Viktor Kravchenko such an extreme personality?
Kravchenko, while moving forward chronologically in the work, is constantly struggling. He weighs up the character of his father, who is a very strong, dominant personality and a kind of mirror in his life, at the same time reserving for himself the right to change and redesign the moments he has experienced, his impulses, and his insights. This is why he is able to make such a big change in his life and turn against Stalinism, even if this undertaking is terribly difficult and means sacrificing his family, relatives, friends, and acquaintances. By becoming a dissident, he inevitably hurt all those who remained in the Soviet Union. Many of them, including his mother and wife Irina, were sent to concentration camps. Kravchenko nevertheless believed that by exposing an inhuman world, he could do more than if he had stayed at home, kept quiet, and become a silent witness to the Soviet system. After the publication of his book, Kravchenko was sued by the Parisian communists, who claimed that what he wrote was not true. According to contemporary statements, the Kravchenko trial was the “trial of the century,” which he later won. Kravchenko was photographed most often when he argued his case with spectacular gestures. Extreme, intense body language is not far from my own personality; expressiveness is indeed part of playing on stage. After all, Kravchenko is also very expressive, yet very sensitive beneath the surface. His quieter, softer, more delicate, more intimate moments must be created as well. He has poise and strength; he is a fighter. At the same time, he is an unpleasant, absolutely provocative, divisive figure. I am the same, so in that sense we are good friends.
Viktor Kravchenko's work forces us to confront the period of Stalinism and Communism, which are still sensitive topics today. They are taboo, dangerous, delicate, and unpleasant. What is at stake here is the processing of an era, a period and of the past. Some people are capable of this, while others are not. Some are open to it, others do not want to. Some would like to, but do not know how, while others do not want to, even though they have every opportunity to do so. There is no recipe for this. One thing is certain: by talking about it we can – and will – provide the opportunity. There is a line in the book where Viktor says to his father, “Many of us want to speak up, to raise the alarm.” The fact that people speak is a manifesto in itself. There are people among us who keep quiet, and there are those who speak up. I will speak up. That is all I will do. How spectators interpret these thoughts and words is a serious personal responsibility on their part. The viewer is the creator here. I cannot take responsibility for others. I can only consider my own responsibility.
What is your own relationship to this task?
Until now, I have consistently dealt with material that is more surreal, more poetic. This material offers plenty of opportunity for debate and misunderstanding, even though history and historians have already dealt with this period. But no matter how divisive and sensitive this issue is, I still thought: at 38 years old, I cannot ignore the 12 years that defined my childhood in Transylvania. This was the last period before Ceausescu's fall. We were out on the streets during the revolution, and I still remember clearly what happened. As a child, I witnessed the arrest of my grandfather because he was Hungarian. He was sent to prison, and my grandmother visited him regularly. I remember when the women in the family held the fort. Kravchenko writes that provocateurs can be recognized by their smell. I feel like that too: I close my eyes and I can still smell the smells I encountered during the house searches. Yet this is not accompanied by a damaged soul: although my family suffered a lot, for them dignity, the possibility of a better life, and the future were always stronger and more motivating than failure, self-pity, or accepting the role of victim. This is what I got from them, and it has had a profound impact on my life. Now, as an adult man, I have reached the point where I can formulate something about my childhood, my current life, and my possible older years. In this sense, it is very healthy material. I feel that I have a healthy approach to this performance. In this work, there is none of the idealism of stage plays, there are no heroes or antiheroes, there are no tricks, only one person standing in the middle.
Was it a conscious decision to stage the performance this year, in the Gulag Memorial Year?
My entire season is dedicated to Communism, regardless of this. There are certainly no coincidences. On the other hand, it took this long to obtain the rights, have it translated, proofread, publish the book, raise the money, prepare it, and create a performance. It's an interesting coincidence, and I'd like to say that it was completely intentional, but it wasn't: that's just how it turned out, and I'm very happy about it. However, the opportunity to explore the Communist past also comes up elsewhere for me this season. Starting in January, I'm also directing a play with a communist theme in Chicago, titled How to Explain the History of Communism to Mental Patients. It was written by the world-famous author Matei Visniec. It is a wonderful contemporary work, featuring Lenin and Stalin. After that, we will be doing a Dada cabaret here at home with Gábor Farkas and his band, because next year will mark the centenary of Dada. The performance is also based on a play by Matei Visniec, and Lenin and Stalin are in it as well. In Zurich, all the founders of the Cabaret Voltaire lived next door to each other, as did Lenin and Krupskaya. Somehow, everything is connected.
What image does Kravchenko paint of Stalin?
Kravchenko repeatedly calls Stalin a “crazy Georgian” and has a strong opinion of him, even though for a while he warranted a wonderful future for him. Stalin was one of the great prophets of his Communist conversion. Then he saw the system and Stalin himself become distorted. He sees him as increasingly stocky, fat, pockmarked, and toothless. Then there is an emblematic moment, like in a Jiri Menzel film, where Kravchenko takes the picture of Stalin off the wall, tears it to pieces, and flushes the scraps down the toilet. Watching the water gurgle, he knows that the party, the cause, and the leader will never again be the defining factors in his life. It's like a breakup, the end of a relationship. Either we end it, or we carry it with us for the rest of our lives, which is a tragedy. Perhaps the most terrible lesson of choosing freedom is that after Kravchenko arrives in America and seems to be able to leave everything behind, he still cannot find freedom. He carried the desire for freedom within his personality, inherited from his grandfather and father, although its unfolding depended on many factors. Women played a role in shaping his life, but so did his relationship with Stalin and other leaders, as well as American thinking. This will not be mentioned in the performance, but in the book he recounts how painful it was that the Americans supported the democratic aspirations of the Hungarians and Koreans more than those of the Russians. It hurt him that Stalin became a hero by effectively defeating Hitler at the end of World War II. Meanwhile, there was a war within the war, with 20 million Russian casualties.
Was Kravchenko ever able to forgive himself for having been part of this system in the beginning?
He tries to explain it to himself. Kravchenko was an engineer, a technical man, and had a successful career. He was good friends with one of Stalin's confidants, People's Commissar Ordzhonikidze. Later, he tried to convince himself that the only thing he could do, even if his family and many of his friends fell victim to it, was to open his mouth and speak out. He could never be sure that this was the only way for him to act. This is an unanswered question. That is why he never found his place again and became stateless. At the end of his book, he says that Viktor Kravchenko ceased to exist as a person and became an islander in no man's land. In my opinion, that is what he always was inside. I also think it is important to be able to portray this spiritual vacuum.
It is important to emphasize that Kravchenko was not a writer. He came from a working-class family, from which he naturally brought many values with him. The book contains beautiful, often complex sentences. When he composes his statement and writes the book, he uses such wonderful imagery that even writers would spend years searching for. Of course, this does not make it a literary work, but his language is incredibly sophisticated.
What does this performance undertake? To convey information about a particular era? Perhaps to raise issues that are still sensitive today?
In Jane Austen's novel Sense and Sensibility, one of the ladies says that what she likes in a particular person is that when they read aloud, they do not intrude on the text and its content. At Maladype Theatre, it is also an important directorial and acting instruction to let the text prevail. This does not mean that we speak in an old-fashioned, chanting, distant manner; on the contrary, we speak very personally. The text, in this case Kravchenko's work, is the real value, the content and heart of the performance: it beats, and blood circulates through it with the right energy, and the heart pulsates and comes to life. This is a very delicate matter, and perhaps not primarily an actor's task. The constant, DNA-like intermingling of the three levels of historical context, personal life story and profession requires an astonishing amount of mental work and concentration. You have to be very alert mentally, quickly formulate information within extremely long and complex sentences, and then quickly feed it back and forth through very short, staccato-like sentences. Meanwhile, you have to move forward and cover a 38-year period with the performance. This is very interesting because I myself am 38 years old.
You haven’t stood on stage as an actor for many years, which makes this performance even more special?
As an actor, I played many beautiful and good roles, so for the past 5-6 years I haven't really had the desire to perform. I still don't want to “perform,” but I do want to be able to tell these facts in the first person singular. In such a way that I do not intrude on the text, but my essence, my age, my knowledge, and my current thinking are present in the performance. I do not desire direct actualization either. This is not the purpose of the book either; rather it’s a testimony to an era. There are thoughts that are strengthened simply by being spoken aloud. People involuntarily connect things, not by reading, shouting, preaching, or forcing the great truth down someone else's throat, but simply by confronting them. And when people can read between the lines, they can express wonderful things.
Will the audience be active participants?
There are three reasons why the audience will be active participants. First, they will have to pay close attention because the material is so dense, concise, and concentrated that it is impossible to tune out. My personality and the tempo I dictate will also not allow them to switch off. Finally, although the text is a very precise score, I have the opportunity to improvise precisely because of who I meet in the audience at a given performance, whether in terms of age, cultural background, knowledge, or interests. So the performance has a very conscious, tense, precise structure, paired with an irregular, courageous, free game that responds to the moment, taking into account the audience sitting there. A combination of the regular and the irregular. It requires amazing mental work, great spiritual energy, and a playful spirit. Complicity. A wink.
The book, published under your theatre’s care, has already had its launch. How was it received?
The book made a very successful debut, appeared at the Hungarian Book Fair, and quickly became widely known. It fills a gap in the market and is being bought by people of all ages. The volume is beautiful, with cover art by Kossuth Prize-winning graphic artist István Orosz and a very high-quality translation by Péter Konok. Our colleagues invested a lot of energy at home and abroad to get this project to this point. The graphic artists who developed the concept, the team of experts... It is also exemplary that today, when there are few integrative programs, this project is characterized by wonderful cooperation. The Open Society Institute, the National Cultural Fund, the Ministry of Human Resources, and the Norwegian Civil Support Fund all considered this a common cause. In fact, this is the essence of my theatre as well: it does not divide people, but brings them together. Of course, I also thanked Ariane Mnouchkine at the beginning of the book; I owed her that. The performance is a summary of the book, and perhaps the personal tone brings the essence closer to the audience. The book and the performance complement each other very nicely. The common denominator is Viktor Kravchenko's character, personality, thinking, and mentality.
Kravchenko's son, Andrew Kravchenko, even sent a short video message to the book launch. What did he say in it?
Andrew Kravchenko is Viktor Kravchenko's only living son. He lives in Los Angeles and has very little personal experience of his father, knowing him almost exclusively from the book. For him, therefore, the main character in the book is the true ideal. Andrew had previously seen a recording of me playing Hamlet, and immediately recognized his father in it. Obviously, my personality is not far removed from this kind of torn, extreme existence. Today, Andrew can see that his father’s legacy is in good hands here in Hungary. He has grown fond of us and places great trust in all our requests. In the video message, he thanked us for everything in Hungarian. He was very happy and really liked the book. He wanted to come to the presentation, but couldn't because he also just published a book about his father. He has also reached the point where he can process his relationship with him. Viktor Kravchenko died in a room in New York, and to this day it is not known whether he committed suicide or was killed by the KGB, like Trotsky. For Andrew, his father is a complete mystery. However, knowing that we would not bring shame upon him with the Hungarian performance, he agreed that I could even perform it abroad.
So, is there a chance that I Chose Freedom will be performed abroad?
There's nothing stopping it. The performance is very mobile and easily adaptable. I could easily perform the evening in English or French. For Russia, I would have to learn Russian first, which would be an interesting challenge. In Russia, however, they don't even want to hear about the book; it still hasn't been published since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Perhaps if it were published in Ukraine, it would mean something, since Kravchenko is of Ukrainian origin. Sooner or later, the dam will break. Incidentally, this is not just a Russian trait: here in Hungary and around the world, we encounter many unpleasant topics that people don’t want to hear about. Not to discuss, but simply to hear about. If I talk about it, that's already sensitive. However, it is the job of an artist, a creator, to speak up. Not directly, not profanely, not in an actualized way, but by giving voice to a work of art.
The performance is accompanied by an educational program, the Kravchenko Case. We understand that participants have already been involved in the rehearsal process.
The Kravchenko Case is important as a multi-phase educational program because we are focusing specifically on young people. In the program, underprivileged, exceptionally talented students aged 14-18 will conduct mini-trials based on the Kravchenko trial, with the help of historians, social psychologists, Russia experts, and teachers. We are modelling Kravchenko's trial in Paris, where his own left-wing circle accused him of lying and claiming that everything he wrote was fiction. Kravchenko wrote his second work, I Chose the Truth, based on the trial he won. During the hearings, students will always have the opportunity to convict or acquit me, as Kravchenko. I consider it very important for this generation to develop personal responsibility, to be able to choose and decide, to be able to articulate differences, and to support all of this with arguments. The ability to argue—not necessarily in legal language, but in any very simple system of argumentation—can liberate the mind. Perhaps this generation will have a different attitude toward the issues of choice and civic responsibility, or even toward culture and the art of reading itself.
How does a rehearsal process work when the performance is created by a single artist?
As far as the actors' tasks are concerned, I founded Maladype Theatre 15 years ago, so I determine its spirit. The company has always strived to make the actors' presence as personal as possible, free from any kind of pose, role, adopted behaviour, or “performance.” Of course, it is very important within the actor's toolkit to be able to portray old, young, fat, thin, evil, and good characters, but the path, the process that takes the creator from their civilian self to the self that embodies the role is a different way of thinking at Maladype. It is much more subtle. In the current performance, for example, if I deal with Viktor Kravchenko's problem publicly, in front of the audience watching the performance, then my interest in the problem draws in the audience's interest, and they thereby create the possible character of Viktor Kravchenko. So it's a joint game. For this to happen, I need to be motivated, because then the issue becomes a joint issue. The point is not what I do or how I do it. If the audience sees how personal, how tragic, how true, how different, how harsh, how frightening what they see is, then at that moment we are already dealing with the problem, and then we are on the right track.
The performance also has a director, called the thought. The thought directs the performance. I direct my thoughts publicly, while also being the medium. I didn't feel the need for an external director, because if they start pursuing this very serious genre with me, then from that point on, the question is no longer what I say, but how I say it. So suddenly the content is pushed into the background and the form becomes more interesting. Of course, it is very difficult to make the thought the organizing and directing principle of the whole evening, since it is precisely the thought – or the lack thereof – that is the main question of our time. Yet thinkers were, are, and will be needed. We need to think, we need to reconcile different perspectives and worldviews. Not to remain silent, but to talk, to search, to weed out and replant.
Among other things, this performance is also a part of the celebrations around Maladype’s 15th anniversary, right?
We are indeed celebrating with work. While I’ll be in Chicago, András Jeles will be directing Three Sisters here, and later Sándor Zsótér will be coming to direct Richard III. It's a great season, fortunately there are many opportunities for us abroad. I can say that we still exist, although the future of independent theatres in Hungary is not very bright. To survive, you need good company, a sense of belonging, and a sense of humour. Especially a sense of humour.
How do you feel about the upcoming premiere?
I am looking forward to seeing what I can convey from all this. There is a lot of interest, so it would be good if my mind, my thoughts, and this opportunity were all in sync at a given moment. But that's not mandatory. It's an opportunity: playfulness makes it human, easy, self-evident. It's a story that writes itself. There are no taboos or secrets. I play in a room that can hold a maximum of 60 people, so everything that is not real will be exposed here.
Annamária Veraszto, faktor, 2015 / Translated by Léna Megyeri