by Lajos Becsi

Created on: November 04, 2009

Watching the tail in the end of your tale, and perchance to dream.

87 Years ago, when I was 6, my class mistress told me to do as I was told.

The trouble was she spoke Romance French and I only had the choice of a six-year old's smattering of Hungarian, Javanese and Dutch, in that order of fluency!

Years after, my mother told me with a giggle in her sweet voice, that she knew I would handle myself well in that sort of trouble; I had a devastating smile, she said, at that occasion!

Six years of trying to understand an amazing number of varieties of gobbledegook, in quick succession caused by almost constant travelling through Europe, just during and after World War One, will give you that smile.

It worked, that time, as a newbie at school in Geneva, Switzerland, as well.

Now a playwright, I've learned a few more languages, and how to handle those languages for a plot, you could say hermetic or hermeneutic, depending on my need and mood for clear expression of coherent thought, and for that matter, incoherent thought.

But, more often I dream that if ever the day arrives that my lines reap the honour of being declaimed, I'd be holding my breath for a while, and perhaps smile, no, surely, I'd smile!

And if that would be happening, I'd fervently pray that those lines would be heard in the clarity of understanding.

And I would hope that the lucidity of the statements would be embraced by the essential demands of emphases on the most meaning-carrying words. And of course I'd like to hear that phrases would be adorned by the correct ebb and flow in the varying speed of their delivery.

I do not overlook the need for simplicity of tone and inflection, especially when an infrequent darkness occurs, where by means of the sonorous voice a clear-cut and positive meaning is exposed.

I should like to allow a variance of understanding to occur between myself, as the author, and the listener to my lines, as delivered by the artistry of the actor in charge, who will follow the dictates of his own flights of fancy.

There should be possible a newness to appear through his profound insight, or even only through his casual probe in rhythmic probabilities in that phrase.

I would pray, even, that my lines will be listened to as if music would sound like that of Bartok, Mozart, or Berg!

I would wish that their guides to interpretation, so strict, yet so free, so complete and so rich, would tell the actor, like the musician, that both have a liberal licence which they might wish to use, when they reproduce the text whether in vocal or musical sound, as written by me.

Let the actor surrender his soul in rhapsodic abandon, whilst his brains pay attention to the words, in their meaning and tone, which he will, so artlessly, render into spoken sound.

If the day will arrive that my words will be spoken, and the listener is moved to sit still, I'd be silent and mute, while I pray that my ears would be theirs and our souls could be fused.

As for words, in writing, or read?

No need!

For we know: if that happens the ears of our audience will be able to read through those lines.-

While I read back the above, I sighed deeply and paused very long.

Then I giggled a bit, for God knows it. And I know it.

I'm nowhere near ready to ask that my play would be played.

In this open-eyed dream all the colour is set.

But the story and Dramatis Personae? Not yet!

-

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