When Béla Pintér and Company take the stage at the Hopkins Center’s Moore Theater Friday and Saturday nights to present the play Our Secrets, their lacerating, sardonic portrayal of surveillance, distrust and betrayal set in Hungary in 1980, the audience might be surprised by how timely and urgent the play feels.
After all, what could a play set at the tail end of the Cold War in a-then Soviet-bloc country have in common with American democracy in 2017?
But with the apprehension in Europe and the U.S. that a moderate center is badly fractured, and concerns about what role Russia will play in international relations, the anxieties of the Cold War don’t seem quite as distant.
Add in the warp-speed advances of technology, with its ability to track almost anyone, anytime, anywhere, and the fear that a democratic society could also be a surveillance society is not so far-fetched.
Béla Pintér and Company premiered Our Secrets in Budapest, their home base, in 2013. A three-stop American tour takes the 10-person troupe to the Hopkins Center, Arts Emerson in Boston and the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York. The performance is in Hungarian with English supertitles.
The play begins with an antic performance by a group of folk musicians, two of whom, Imre Tatar, played by Pintér, and István Balla Bán, played by Zoltán Friedenthal, are close friends.
Tatar, a collector of Hungarian folk music, also publishes an anti-government broadsheet, which brings him to the attention of the Communist apparatchiks; Ban isn’t particularly politically subversive, but he is a pedophile wrestling to control his desire.
Government spying catches both men in the same net, and the tension builds as party officials squeeze Ban to inform on Tatar.
The two men’s friends, lovers and children (most of the actors play more than one part) also find themselves trapped in the dramatic web.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymzhUV2XYjA
The political structure controls the population by relying on guilt through association, as well as the pernicious compromises people make to survive.
Our Secrets may remind audiences of the feature films coming out of Romania in the past decade, with their exploration of the abuses of power, and the Oscar-winning 2006 German film The Lives of Others, which focused on the East German secret police, the Stasi.
But it has its own distinctive approach, as the actors play both the absurdities and tragedies of life in an authoritarian system.
The Valley News interviewed Pintér by email, which was translated by Nadia Gorman of Lyme, and Edit Nagy, a lecturer in the Center for European Studies at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
What follows is a lightly-edited transcript of the interview.
Valley News: Why did you decide to investigate and dramatize this period in Hungarian and European history? And why 1980 in particular?
Béla Pintér: There was a Central Eastern European theatre project, which aimed to deal with the communist past, especially the secret services, and they asked me to participate.
I started to think and work on the topic, and finally decided to make a performance independent of this project. The concrete year is not important, but the era is — a period when there was absolutely no hope for change.
VN: Since you were just 10 in 1980, how aware were you, as you grew up, of the compromises that Hungarians — and other Eastern European citizens — had to make to live under Soviet influence?
Was anyone in your family or in the circle of your family’s friends forced to report to the authorities that you are aware of? How did you research this?
Pintér: Nobody in my family had any connections with the state security/secret service. I spent my youth during this time of Hungarian history, so I know the milieu and I know what a man in uniform meant — I still feel the tension when I cross a border, and I remember the contemporary official expressions, the “language” that people in power used.
VN: What was your reaction when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the USSR, in 1991? What did you hope would change in Hungary, and what did you fear would not? And how has this played out, in your opinion?
Pintér: I was very happy when these enigmatic events happened; the taste of freedom was in the air for everyone and for me, as well. I was 18 years old in 1988. However, some kind of fear remained that this progress is reversible.
Fortunately, the Soviet power did not come back, but the methods, the mechanism of power can be very similar, even in a system we call democracy.
VN: Was there in Hungary after 1991 an effort to reveal the nature and scope of the surveillance state, as there was in Germany, when the Stasi files were opened? If there was no such effort, do you think there should have been?
Pintér: Unfortunately, in Hungary, we didn’t have an effort similar to the German process (Opening the State Security archives for the public immediately after the collapse of the Communism, wrote translator Edit Nagy); although the Stasi files were not fully disclosed either.
Thus, an overarching confrontation with the past that’s accessible and understandable for everyone never happened. The only advantage I can see is that this made our play Our Secrets possible, since this story was inspired mostly by this situation (the failure of confronting our past) and the consequences of it.
VN: Everyone in Our Secrets finds themselves compromised in some way by the surveillance state. How much of a backlash against such methods was there in Hungary after 1991 ? Do some Hungarians worry that the current government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban will revert to such widespread surveillance?
Pintér: The current government doesn’t use the secret service as it was used during Communism. The most concerning problem now is the development of a propaganda apparatus that is very similar to the former one-party states’ practices.
VN: Many of us now use computers and mobile phones, use Facebook and other apps, and we voluntarily agree to put very personal information about ourselves on line. Do you have concerns about the way technology tracks all of us now through our computer and mobile or cell phone use?
Pintér: Yes, I do. We have to be aware of it. The amazing achievements of technical developments can also make the users vulnerable.
VN: How do you view such figures as Julian Assange or Edward Snowden, who talk about the public good when they release sensitive government information but also, at least in the case of Assange, also seem driven by ego? Do you see any parallels between them and the bureaucrats and apparatchiks in Our Secrets?
Pintér: These people reveal the secret services’ methods, but it’s a two-sided situation. The question is: in a terror-threatened world, is it a right decision to release this kind of information?
VN: The pedophile in Our Secrets is not a completely unsympathetic figure, despite his longings and behavior. Why did you decide to make a pedophile, and his impulses and secrets, one of the centers of the drama?
Pintér: I saw a documentary about a pedophile who overcame his desires with tremendous self-control. I wanted to present him as a positive hero figure, but during the rehearsals it turned out that the performance is not dramatic, not powerful enough.
We had to rewrite his character as an active pedophile, to maintain and improve the dramatic tension. Even for the creators, it’s hard to categorize this new character. We despise his sins, but in the meantime while his secrets get exposed, we may realize our own everyday lies as well.
VN: You will be performing Our Secrets at Dartmouth just one week before Donald Trump is sworn in as president of the U.S. You’re coming to this country at a very unsettling and unpredictable period in American history. Are there any themes in Our Secrets that you think might apply to the American election?
Pintér: I was also shocked by Trump’s victory, but I remember that our company was on tour with another performance in France when Nicolas Sarkozy triumphed in 2007.
The Prime Minister, who has Hungarian origins (his father was Hungarian), also won the election with an aggressive anti-immigrant political campaign. Later, in his office, he turned out to be not nearly as radical as he had promised earlier. And now, in 2017 we just barely hear Sarkozy’s name, he is not a political factor anymore.
The material is adult, with some graphic scenes, and is not suitable for children.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.