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.