Plays
During the last ten years or so Peter has written six plays. The first three, a trilogy of ‘Hungarian’ plays were published in a book, Stolen Lives. Each, as a background, has a turning point of Hungarian history: The Visitor the war and the Holocaust, Distorting Mirrors the 1956 revolution and its bloody aftermaths and Stolen Years the collapse of Communism. More importantly, however, in all three the source of drama is the same, universal human tragedy: an irredeemable conflict between vulnerable individuals and brutal authoritarian dictatorships, relentlessly motivated by an obnoxious ideology, be it Fascism or Communism.
The characters are mostly outsiders or enemies, perceived or real, of the ’system’ which corrupts, undermines and finally destroys them. Yet, they are not to be defeated. The Jewish matriarch of The Visitor decides to leave her house with raised head to face the braying crowd; the psychiatrist/psychoanalyst of Distorting Mirrors whose son had been executed by the Communists, picks up a bunch of flowers she had received from one of her patients at her arrest; the two middle-age men of Stolen Years remember the imaginary paradise they wanted to escape when they were young and not realising they were in love.
“Lantos’s plays introduce us to a politico-personal drama of Hungary’s violent twentieth century times in a way that no other English-speaking theatre writer has.”
—Nicholas de Jongh, former theatre critic of the Guardian and Evening Standard
Stolen Lives was published by Regent Books London and can be ordered from Daunts Books, Marylebone High Street, London, W1, or click here to order Stolen Lives.
The common theme of the next three plays is extreme emotions and they were published in a book, Love and Obsession. The central characters could not be more different from each other: a French painter, a German Jewish chemist and a Scottish missionary.
Light and Shadow is the story of a love affair between James (Jacques) Tissot and a beautiful Irish Catholic divorcee with an illegitimate child, Kate Newton. Tissot came to London in 1870 to escape the Franco-Prussian war and stayed in London to become one of the most thought-after painter of social life. Their scandalous affair unfolded in puritanical Victorian London and lasted until her premature, tragic death.
The ‘anti-hero’ of Bread from Air –The strange case of Dr Haber is the Nobel Laureate of the title. Fritz Haber is credited to have produced ammonia, the basic substance of fertilizers, from nitrogen and hydrogen; thus saving the lives of billions. The same time he experimented with poisonous gases used during the First World War. He converted to Christianity, yet when the Nazis came to power he was forbidden to enter his own institute. His private life was also full of contradictions and tragedies.
The central character of So Great a Love is Jane Haining, a Scottish missionary who had been dispatched to Budapest in the 30s to be in charge of the Girls’ Home in the prestigious Scottish Missionary School. She became well-liked by the girls, other members of staff and the parents. Her position as well as the school’s became dangerous at the outbreak of the war for a large proportion of the pupils were Jewish. When she was ordered to leave Hungary she refused, for she thought that the girls needed her. On forged charges she was found guilty of spying and was transported to Auschwitz where she was gassed with more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews in the summer of 1944.
These three plays were published in a single volume as Love & Obsession by Regent Books, London and can be ordered from Daunts Books, Marylebone High Street, London, W1.
All six plays had rehearsed readings with actors and directors at prestigious places: the Park Theatre, Hungarian Cultural Centre, City of London, Tate Britain, Soho Theatre and New Diorama. However, there has not been a full production:
SIX PLAYS IN SEARCH OF A PRODUCER