Words can be found in translation, says PETER CRAWLEY
'Words", says Guildenstern with no small amount of distress. "They're all we have to go on." An amateur detective strutting and fretting his way through Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, he's faced with a familiar predicament.
Guildenstern is on the case of Hamlet, an unpredictable fellow whose madness “must not unwatched go”, but may actually be only “north-north-west” and, besides, when the wind is southerly, he can tell “a hawk from a handsaw”.
Words in the theatre, as in life, are treacherous things. They seem to be behaving themselves, then they act the maggot, they reveal things but mislead us, they frequently escape or fail us. Right now, writing from Budapest, I’m frequently at a loss for them.
The Katona József Theatre, whose stately Ivanovvisited the Dublin Theatre Festival two years ago, is currently showcasing its diverse repertoire and ludicrously talented ensemble. Playing at home, though, there's no need for English surtitles, and all of a sudden I have nothing to go on.
In my defence, I did try to learn Hungarian on the flight over. Hungarian, I read, is "an agglutinative language" with a "high rate of affixes and morphemes". Agglutinative? Morphemes? This was doubly distressing. Not only was my Hungarian not up to scratch, my English wasn't good enough to know why. So, taking my seat for A Hõs és a Csokoládékatona,I was mildly perturbed.
This is a new production of Arms and the Man, Shaw's political satire set during the 1885 Serbo-Bulgarian War. Everyone knows how Shaw described the US and Britain (two nations divided by a common language), so I wondered how Hiberno-Magyar relations would be affected when Shaw's language was made uncommonly agglutinative.
Morphology aside, the production found its own vocabulary of frame-breaking folk music, ironic dances, refined physical comedy and gleeful artificiality. Think Shaw meets Brecht, but funny.
Irish theatre could benefit from escaping the airless tyranny of the English language. Imagine how every actor and director might compensate if you had to watch theatre with the sound turned down. Most anglophone directors would never grab Shaw by the lapels and waltz him round the room, thinking, not unreasonably, that he’s hard enough to follow in English. In the Katona Josef, though, every other aspect of performance was made to work as hard as the text.
Not everything about eastern Europe is so easily decipherable. Watching an adaptation of Knut Hamsun's Hunger, in Hungary, on an empty stomach, is simply taking wordplay too far.
On the other hand, when Wunderkind Kornél Munduczó created a spectacularly subversive production of the Russian novel Jég, relying on a theatrical Esperanto of inventive design, outstanding performers, copious nudity and booming pop songs, I finally found the right words: Now you're speaking my language.
