Egy, kettő, három

"Egy, kettő, három" by Ferenc Molnár is a one-act stage comedy written in the early 20th century. The play satirizes high finance, social climbing, and the manufacture of respectability as a domineering banker, Norrison, races to transform his ward Lydia’s secret taxi-driver husband, Antal, into an acceptable son-in-law before her magnate parents appear. Expect rapid-fire orders, door-slamming farce, and a sharp poke at power and propriety. The opening of the play finds Norrison in his grand office, about to depart on holiday, when Lydia arrives early with a telegram: her parents are arriving within the hour, and she reveals she secretly married Antal and is expecting a child. To avert scandal and protect a vital deal with her American industrialist father, Norrison mobilizes his entire apparatus, issuing a blizzard of calls and commands: new wardrobe and grooming, club applications, hotel suites, St. Moritz tickets, a medical certificate to quit the taxi job, even a hasty aristocratic adoption to give Antal a noble name. Board members are corralled to install him as a factory director, while a feverish lawyer, a precise doctor, a flustered tailor, and devoted secretaries keep the machine humming. As phones ring and papers fly, Antal is shaved, suited, renamed, and drilled under Lydia’s fierce encouragement, the scene whirling toward the parents’ imminent arrival.

Summary written by Project Gutenberg, by machine.