YEARS OF LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS AT THE KOMÁRNO HUNGARIAN REGIONAL THEATRE
Komárno is one of the Slovak towns with the richest Hungarian theatrical traditions: in the 17th and 18th centuries it was a bastion of Hungarian school theatre production and school drama, but also the first performance by a professional troupe in the Hungarian language, Kotzebue’s Papelli, or The Miraculous Meeting, in a production by József Beke, took place here almost 200 years ago, on 8 May 1811. Since then, the town has become, with greater or lesser regularity, a stopping point for Hungarian touring companies – there were times when it was a stop for the strongest of them. At the same time, in the second half of the 19th century and especially at the turn of the centuries, a strong amateur theatre scene flourished here.
With the change of governmental power in 1918-1919, the historic part of the Hungarian town of Komárom on the left bank of the Danube, Rév-Komárom, was attached to the newly formed Czechoslovakia, which opened a new chapter in the town’s theatrical life as well. The conditions of minority status influenced and diverted the cultural, and thus the theatrical, life of Komárno onto a side track.
In the first Czechoslovak Republic, the positive driving force was represented by Károly Polgár’s company, which was pushed out of Bratislava and was among the first to seek out the town. In the following twenty years, among the most significant groupings providing theatrical programmes in Komárno were still the Bratislava and Košice companies (Ödön Faragó, Sándor István), as well as Dezső Földes’s Western Slovak Hungarian Theatre.
On 2 November 1938, by the First Vienna Award, the town was returned to Hungary, and its theatrical life subsequently unfolded according to the organizational order of Hungarian theatre: various provincial companies, especially the Károly Vértes company, gave somewhat unappealing offers to perform there. Towards the end of the World War, as the front approached, the people of Komárno cared about everything more than about theatre: from the last two years of the war, we have no knowledge of any theatrical performance here.
In 1945, the northern, historic part of the town, in its prewar extent, was returned to Czechoslovakia, which brought its inhabitants the inferno of persecution of Hungarians, deportations and resettlement; it meant complete hell of lawlessness, when the Hungarian word and its institutions – including theatre and theatrical activities – were condemned to complete silence. Only in 1948, after the communists came to power, under the influence of the development of the state’s foreign policy, did the circumstances begin to change. The Czechoslovak Hungarians gradually had their human and civic rights restored, they could newly organize schooling and culture, and the Hungarian word received civic right again. On 15 December 1948 the first issue of the Bratislava Hungarian daily Új Szó (New Word) appeared; on 5 March 1949 the broad-ranging educational and culture-creating institution, or rather the mother-tongue-supporting framework, Csemadok was established; in schools, teaching was slowly being started.