THE PLAYS OF FERENEC MOLNAR

By Dr. AMAR MUKERJI

(University of Saugor)

Though Liliom is known practically all over the world, it is strange that the dramatist who gave it to mankind has not yet received much serious attention at the hands of the critics. In fact Molnar tried his hand at various forms of literature, for, besides the dozen plays he has left behind, he has also to his credit a large volume of short stories, novels, fantasies, skits and poems which he had been writing from his boyhood days almost to the day of his death. This is mentioned here to suggest that, even if Molnar is not known to many of us in this part of the world, he need not be treated as a literary amateur who had only incidentally invaded the stage, or as one who is only a minor figure in the dramatic history of the world.

Molnar was born a Hungarian, though his mind is cosmopolitan, his proper stage Vienna, and his dramatic lineage French, The Vienna of his day had acquired a glamour out of all proportion to reality; it was the Vienna of Schnitzler and Herman Bahr. For long, in an otherwise matter-of-fact Western world, Vienna had been associated with the outward expression of spontaneous exuberance, full of song and laughter, and easy-going sentimental people.

The charm of the legend may perhaps be explained by something deeper than the envy of a rather drab society for one that is light-hearted and gay. The gaiety which was peculiarly Vienna’s cannot be measured by any of the familiar catch phrases like ‘Wine, Woman and Song’. These are but vulgar epitomes of Viennese eclecticism and, rightly understood, they imply the unabashed acceptance of the good things of life, the desire for self-expression, a discriminating appreciation of beauty and a sense of humour.

Naturally enough the Viennese sense of humour is civilised and mature, characterised by two broad features: the habit of not being solemn when one is serious, and the ability to discern the funny aspect of an idea. It is also known that high comedy flourishes in a society where exists this civilised sense of humour. It was in this atmosphere that the theatre in Vienna and Budapest flourished, with such dramatists as Schnitzler, Bahr, Herzog and Molnar.

Before them–and, I might almost add, round about them–in the theatre of Austria-Hungary (and it is better to take them together as Archibald Henderson has done) a transformation of naturalism had already taken place in the hands of Schnitzler, while Bahr’s pleasant comedy The Concert or Karl Schonherr’s The Solstice had asserted more than once that whether it is sophisticated society with its elegancies or flirtations or with its clever mockery and restrained regret, the drama’s main burden was, what a critic has called, ‘the waltz-time civilisation’. For a while, of course, Schnitzler carried the naturalistic method to the romantic field and Bahr experimented with expressionism. But the main burden continued to be realism, partly because of Austria-Hungary’s crying need for the ‘right to live’ during the inter-war years and partly because, as Gassner has stated, the stirrings of the realistic drama in Europe had influenced the external transformation of the Vienna-Budapest theatre.

The consequence was that the romantic spirit as ingrained in Hungarian nationalism was superficially democratised and transformed into the home of the bourgeoise and the hovels of the proletariat. “Romance, instead of stalking on the fields of honour or storming high heaven, wore less braid; fashionable clothes and rags served equally to cover its palpitating ventricles.” Moreover, the Hungarian playwrights had at their best begun to adopt a playful objectivity towards the exacerbations of romance; and their leader, particularly in the field of drama, was Ferenec Molnar. The contemporary Hungarian life was dominated by a landowning aristocracy grudgingly co-operating with a mercantile upper class. This class patronised the arts with unstinted enthusiasm but tolerated only a pleasant evening in the theatre. Entertainment spiced with urban sophistication became the criterion of modernity in the Hungarian theatre.

In the inter-war years especially, the entertainment in the Hungarian as well as the Central European theatre was leaved by a high sense of civilised humour, as we know from the plays of Alfred Savoir or Ernest Vajda, Fata Morgana, or even some of the plays by Lengyel, Bire and Fodor among others, are characterised by that peculiar trace of nationalism that is what dipped in saccharine without invalidating our modern sense of satisfaction with it. To the average spectator who cannot see below the level of the surface, the main source of appeal will of Course be either pure fun or unadulterated satire, according to his frame of mind. But for the trained spectator the laughter will be ‘thoughtful laughter’ where fun is mingled with a high level of intellectual exertion. And Molnar’s comedies are, what we may call, such sugar-coated pills intended to capture primarily an audience that had grown addicted to the cabaret so common in Vienna and Budapest.

It was natural therefore that Hungary’s leading playwright Ferenec Molnar, was a man of the theatre and that his plays epitomised all the virtues and defects of his school. His life and work reveal everything that is characteristic of a theatre that won wide acceptance abroad and belongs to dramatic history as one popular way of coping with life, that is, by sugar-coating it. Incidentally, his personal life too reflected this tendency, and his personality, inflammable in its many courtships and hedonistic in its taste for feminine charm, music and brandy, was coloured by the gifts of facile showmanship and sugar-coated compassion.

Molnar’s first dramatic success was The Devil (1907) though an earlier play Jozzi (1904) he had struck a favourite vein. Molnar had always been fond of children, writing an engaging novel about them in The Paul Street Boys, and the same strain continued in Jozzi which dissected the spoiled children of the comfortable classes.

The Devil, written three years later, is (as Allardyce Nicoll has said) “a play in which the satanic agent appears garbed as a man of the world”. At best the play was a fashionable variation on the Faust theme, with Mephistopheles employing suggestion to facilitate adultery. Although amusing, and although it brought Molnar the first taste of international reputation and a membership of the Petofi society, yet the play is thin and lacks the consolidated effect of some other plays on the Faust theme.

But the glory which the play brought to Molnar spurred him to marriage which, though entered into romantically, was not a success. Its failure hurled Molnar on a speculation on the nature of marriage and love in general. The result of this speculation was Liliom (1909) on which is based Molnar’s chief claim on posterity.

This is a tale of an amusement park bouncer who maltreats his wife and tries to rob a cashier when he needs money for the baby she is expecting. It is a tragi-comic tribute to the nobility that exists in everybody. Behind Liliom’s worthless behaviour and a vagabond’s false sense of bravado remains masked an affectionate human being; the only trouble is that his good angel is gauche and inarticulate. He is destined to repeat the pattern of his life even in his ghostly existence, after he has stabbed himself to avoid arrest for the intended robbery. From the earliest scenes, which bear the stamp of the naturalist school, the scene shifts to the only kind of heaven that Liliom could have imagined–a celestial police court. Fifteen years later he is paroled for a day to visit his family and to redeem himself by a good deed. But Liliom, ‘the useless lily,’ is unchanged. Eager to bring his daughter a gift, he can think of nothing better than to steal a star for her during the descent. Craving affection in his crude manner, he slaps her when she shrinks from him; the heavenly police, shaking their heads deploringly, take him back as a hopeless case. But his inchoate love remains a fact that his simple wife–and perhaps heaven too–understands fully.

The play, showing remarkable dramatic inventiveness and theatrical originality, was a failure when first staged in Budapest in 1909, but was a remarkable success when revived ten years later and is now Hungary’s chief claim to theatrical greatness. Mr, Lynton Hudson has said that “even if he had never written another play, his place in dramatic history would be secure”. And Molnar knew this, for, when the famous Puccini wanted to use this play as a libretto for an opera, Molnar refused saying that “the world will remember Puccini’s Liliom and the name of Molnar would be forgotten”.

As a play Liliom, says Allardyce Nicoll, “exists in the main for the sake of the scene in Heaven where the hero, an unsuccessful waif….is arraigned before a higher court”. ‘Behind its realistic background there is a symbolic lacoon, and Molnar’s synthesis of his defects of sentimentality and emotional contrivance becomes so perfect that sheer theatricality is assimilated in what Lynton Hudson calls, “the play’s character portrayal and its universal truth.”

The next play and the four others which followed it, were either comedies or comedies mixed with fantasies, each possessing variable merits and limitations. The Guardsman (1911), “a witty piece of sophisticated drollery on the theme of marital infidelity,” was successful as a film in spite of a fine symbolism underlying its brilliant comedy. For a while laughter seems to triumph in the plot devised by a jealous husband to test his wife, and if the curtain ironically falls on a man thoroughly baffled by a woman’s wit, you can detect Molnar’s “fundamental contempt of the Komodiant, of that side of our nature which eternally falsifies the truth”.

The Attorney-at-law (1912), also known as The Wolf, was a farce, while The Swan (1914) and Fashions for Men (1915) pursue a skilful way between ironic comedy and sentiment. The Wolf is a variation on the theme of the Guardsman in a lighter vein; The Swan revived the princess-meets-commoner theme and tells the story of the heroine who, falling in love with her tutor, decides to remain a swan majestically floating on her own watery element rather than step in an awkward manner on the common ground; Fashions for Men is “an ironic comedy of a hero, Peter, who acts with magnanimity when his wife runs away. His reputation for saintliness, however, brings its own rewards and his business is shown as prospering mightily from the esteem he has won for himself.”

In these plays that were written before World War I the predominant mood is that of a gay cynicism coupled with a constant awareness that the theatre should be as theatrical as a film should be cinematic. Not that, unobtrusive and kept well below the surface, there was not some universal truth or that once while there was no spark of the symbolism of the earlier Liliom. The spirit of fantasy also remained alive to develop in the first play that Molnar wrote during the War. Serving as war correspondent during the first World War, Molnar found time to give a view of the business he was engaged in a miracle play The White Cloud (1916) a part of whose action, as in Liliom, takes place in heaven. The note of fantasy which always colours Molna’s central ideas remained in the play and gave him kinship with the author of A Kiss for Cinderilla.

For the next few years Molnar, too preoccupied with various other types of writing, did not produce a play till 1923 when The Red Mill (produced in New York as Mima in 1928) developed the strain of The White Cloud. It is a philosophically conceived play, the characters in which are God, Lucifer, and a perfect human being. In structure as well as in substance the play comes near a morality play with a kaleidoscopic symbolism in which Life, conceived as a mill, grinds humanity into a tragic caricature of what it sets out to become. The forty scenes of The Red Mill begin where Liliom ended, in heaven where Lucifer strikes a wager with the Almighty that he can ruin the best of men. The choice of the perfect man is, of course, left to God, and the Devil corrupts his innocence with the time-honoured instruments of corruption–gold and woman.

Here the abstract thinker in Molnar emerged out of the one-time cynical and theatrical dramatist, and I have sometimes felt that Molnar had caught the Pirandellan spark and doubted the reality of the human individual. Not that the theatricality of life goes out of his vision but that he perhaps believes in Evrienoff’s famous statement: “Every minute of our life is a theatre...”

But, in spite of his fundamental emphasis on the human soul, the outwardly realistic action has not been abandoned at the altar of fantasy, as in the next play The Glass Slipper written in 1924. It combined a naturalistic background of low life with romance, re-telling the Cinderella story with gentle irony, since the Prince of the fable is only a middle-aged cabinet maker. The Cinderella heroine is a Budapest servant girl who has been nourished on too many romantic plays. The resultant is a fine yarn of sentimental fantasy threaded in an external realistic action with the dialogue now and then Sprinkled with Viennese dialect.

The next play The Play’s the Thing (1924) again proved Molnar’s mastery of the art of capricious and sophisticated comedy, as in the subsequent Olympia (1927) he displayed once more his skill as a satirist of royalty and high life in general. One almost feels that The Play’s the Thing completes the circle and returns to the technique of The Red Mill or The White Cloud. Its story is this: Albert Adam, the young fiancee of the actress, by chance overhears her making love to another man, whereupon one of his friends, a dramatist, hastily concocts a one-act play in the dialogue of which the overheard words occur. The result is that, when he listens to the rehearsal of the piece, Albert is happily convinced that the love-scene was fictional, and thus for him the imaginary becomes the actual.

The Good Fairy written in 1931 is the last play of Molnar’s which is available in the English version though I understand that he had written two more plays. In The Good Fairy a romantic usherette from a Budapest theatre gets involved in a series of adventures as a result of her desire to do good to everybody–thus preserving in a way Molnar’s reputation as an expert in the creation of amusing and theatrically effective situations.

Such are the plays of Molnar many of which had an established reputation on the Hungarian stage. Dramatically speaking, however, Molnar’s lineage may perhaps be traced to junior Dumas and to Scribe with his situations and dialogues having a finish that may occasionally appear a bit too rounded. In fact, Molnar’s dialogues may be said to have been modelled, too much on the Cabaret style, though his theatre-instinct enabled him to master a technique that helped him to know that craftsmanship plays a great part in all stage successes. Molnar can calculate the exact effect of every spoken line; he knows just which will raise a laugh and which only a lump in the throat. Molnar’s sense of stage was so perfect that he rarely missed establishing the right sort of balance between fantasy and theatricality, though the critics hold that the brilliance of his comic dialogue, so effective in the original, has been heavily lost in the translation. Sometimes the situation may be absurd, as in the first one-act play of the trilogy Theatre, but the ludicrous, which he gradually introduces into the network of absurdity, has a charm that only a few dramatists have achieved. The height of dramatic perfection Molnar attained in Liliom, and, as Barret Clarke has shrewdly observed, if he does not live by any other play he will live by it.

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