The Danse Macabre of “Democratic Dictatorship”: Sławomir Mrožek’s Tango in State-Socialist Hungary

Abstract

Sławomir Mrožek’s Tango was first staged in a professional theatre in Hungary with considerable delay. The production opened in Szolnok in 1978, thirteen years after the world premiere of the play in Warsaw. “Mrožek had not been allowed to get onto our stages for years,” wrote Grácia Kerényi, the Hungarian translator of Tango, with surprising openness in 1978, thus highlighting the discredited status of the play in the cultural policy of the Kádár regime. However, it is a mistake that the premiere in Szolnok in 1978 was the national premiere of Tango, even if it was advertised as such on the playbill. Mrožek’s three-act play already had some production history on Hungarian stages, as it had been presented to audiences on several occasions before. Therefore, we cannot talk about a national premiere in the case of the production in Szolnok, but only about the first fully staged performance of the play in a professional theatre in Hungary. But this production still lives strongly in cultural memory. The essay outlines the reasons for this high status and analyses István Paál’s mise-en-scène according to the so-called Philther method.