János Nyíri

Janos Nyiri

Director who took French and English drama across borders and then wrote a highly praised novel about the Holocaust

THE Hungarian revolutionary, playwright and novelist János Nyiri was the author of three films, three stage plays and three novels, of which the critically acclaimed Battlefields and Playgrounds was his masterpiece. Recognised as a major Holocaust novel, Battlefields and Playgrounds was hailed as “vast and magnificent” by The Literary Review and A. L. Rowse wrote in the Financial Times that it was his book of the year.

He was born in Hungary in 1932, the second son of Tibor Nyíri and Julia Spitz, avant-garde Jewish writers in the golden age of Hungarian literature and cinema. His early years were blighted by his parents’ divorce, the Holocaust and Stalinism. Educated at the Szinház Filmmüvészeti Föiskola, the Academy of Film and Dramatic Art in Budapest, he established himself in his twenties as an original and promising theatre director, first in the provinces and then in Budapest.

When he led a group of rebel soldiers and intellectuals from Szeged into Budapest on October 23, 1956, Nyiri’s rousing radio broadcasts during the revolution drew the attention of the authorities, so he fled to Paris, forbidden to return to his native country until 1973. This became the subject of his article in the New Statesman, A Chilly Spring in Budapest.

In Paris, Nyiri taught at the Conservatoire and studied at the Comédie Française. While serving as assistant director to Jean-Louis Barrault at the Odéon and the Théâtre de France, he met his young wife, Jenny, the daughter of the British actors Lindisfarne Hamilton and Christopher Quest. János and Jenny founded their own theatre company, Le Jeune Théâtre de Marseille, where Nyiri directed plays by Molière, Beaumarchais, Racine and Oscar Wilde.

In the Sixties they moved to London with their children but Nyiri continued to work in France on a regular basis. During this time he adapted David Copperfield for the French stage and Molière’s Le Malade ImaginaireThe Imaginary Invalid at the Vaudeville Theatre in London’s West End. He took pride in introducing classic English drama to the French and French drama to the English stage, going on to direct The Marriage of Figaro, Phèdre, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and finally his own work all over Europe.

The first play that he wrote, Le Ciel est en Bas, a love story set “somewhere behind the Iron Curtain” and dedicated to his “comrades of Budapest and Prague”, opened at the Théâtre de l’Athénée in Paris in 1970, starring Jean Servais, and caused a huge critical and political stir. The French production was followed quickly by successful stage versions in Austria, England, the United States, Australia and, finally, in 1990, in Hungary.

Three separate films of Nyiri’s first play were made, for German television, Hungarian television and, in 1978, under the title If Winter Comes, for the BBC, starring Paul Scofield, Denis Lawson and Cherie Lunghi.

At the end of the 1970s Nyiri completed his first novel, Streets, which was published in England and received considerable praise for its depiction of workers, students and artists in the Hungarian uprising against the Russians.

Over the following decade, Nyiri worked on Battlefields and Playgrounds, which was published by Macmillan in 1988 and remains in print in several countries. Shortly before his death he completed his third novel, Heroes Welcome, a love story set in France and England in the Sixties, which will be published posthumously.

The American publication of Battlefields and Playgrounds was probably the high point of Nyiri’s career. The Wall Street Journal wrote: “Although hardly a month passes without some new account surfacing about a writer’s childhood during the Holocaust, nothing in recent memory approaches the greatness — the narrative beauty, the sublime character portraits and the cliff-hanging tension and drama — of Battlefields and Playgrounds.”

Nyiri is survived by his wife, Jenny, and their son and daughter, and six grandchildren.

János Nyiri, playwright and novelist, was born on November 9, 1932. He died of cancer on October 23, 2002, aged 69.http://timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article835506.ece