In multiple voices Jean Genet: The Blacks, Bárka Theatre, Black and White puzzle

Zoltán Balázs has created a gigantic puzzle into the middle of the Fencing Hall of Bárka Theatre. The organically connected elements of the puzzle of arts are the text, the sight, the movements and the music – they are all punctually designed and thought over by sharp logic. There are not any accidents, coincidences, empty places. Instead of them there are mental constructions which are hard to understand for the first time and amazing theatrical experience for those who are willing to immerse into those which are around during this evening, they can get into that “beautiful and new world”,, which is created by the director and his partners.

The music is not a parasite ornament on the text: László Sáry has rewritten the shortened outlines of

the text, which has remained from Gyula Tellér’s translation into an opera which has many musical

jokes in it. (dramaturg: Judit Góczán). The “new” Blacks – it gives the base and supports the vision of the director – is thinner, thicker and more direct than the original one was. The one-man orchestra that uses percussion instruments consists of Kornél Mogyoró and he is the conductor too. Between the actors and the “orchestra” the director puts another filter: the group of perfect young opera singers, who (László Böröcz, Beatrix Fodor, Zoltán Gavodi, Szabolcs Hámori, Apollónia Szolnoki) give sound to the actors’ mouthed majestic and vulgar, sometimes Hungarian, sometimes Gypsy texts. The singers first glide as shadows from one character to the other one, covered with black cowls, than later they become active members of the play. From these we can see, that it is not a usual performance at all: The Blacks in Bárka Theatre is a vision of arts, and an exceptional immersion and concentration are needed to perform and accept it. The sight which is made by impressive effects sometimes takes attention away from the message which is not superficial at all. It cannot be said to be a mistake, as the continuity, consistency and the concentration which are there in every moments of the performance, help our attention to get back again and again to the sight and the text.

The area has multiple meaning and works with a few sign. Judit Gombár’s set resembles the arena of

Rome and the circus stage of nowadays. The slippery auditorium is a circular metal installation which can connect and collect necessarily the viewers and the actors. The Fencing Hall of the Bárka Theatre was “the world of emptiness” during Zoltán Balázs’ previous direction here, in the Theomachia. There the scene rhymed with the cosmical emptiness of the play – now the director concentrates all energy into the middle of the area. He takes care not to break the magical circle too: both entrances of the occasional auditorium are closed by “in place” runner actors, by the Runner Virtue (Nóra Csizmadia) and the Runner Village (Dávid Csányi), when everybody takes their places. Wherever we sit we can sense by our peripherical view their presence: their two hours long marathon give beat and rhythm to the performance, they follow by their steps each other and the actions on the stage too and according to the actions they are getting slower and faster like the heartbeat. The area helps the concentration and understanding too. The viewers are sitting on planks on the three floors of the circular metal scaffold. In front of them there is the bier which holds (does not) the killed women’s body, above our heads “on its Earth Orbit” Artúr Kálid, as the Town of Saint Nazaire is moving for a long time.

On the opposite points of the circle the black platforms of the auditorium is going on in white, here are standing mostly the main characters of the performance. Their places are given by their skin tone, so by their black and white dresses, which are Spanish and Caribbean like, nicely chiselled and half translucent, designed by Judit Gombár. Zoltán Balázs leaves the traditional western directional act, which puts the whites above in the area so into a privileged position from the beginning, and keeps the blacks on the level of the earth, like subordinated ones. In his direction the blacks and the whites are on the same level (above the viewers!) and they are each other’s negative reflections. They are identical with themselves and with each other too – and they are not. Ahead of each group there is a woman: opposite the active Queen (Kamilla Fátyol) there is the silent woman, Felicitas (Erzsébet Soltész). On the side of the blacks except the Village (Balázs Dévai) there are only women, on the other side there are only men, so the genders reflect each other. (During the performance the man power of the Village gets emphasized and active role many times. His reflection is the Queen’s valet [Kristóf Horváth], who is a man, but feminine-like and dandy – his singing voice is soprano too.)

One of the buttress of the directorial conception is the three dimensional creation of the hierarchical relations of the text by Genet, to make it concrete. The lessons which come from this solution are valid all over the performance. Among these the most important one the viewers cannot accept the scenes as in the case of the traditional performances (All these are in connection with the given genre by the writer [clownerie, so clown joke, fooling]: as in the case of Zoltán Balázs’ “black mass”, here the appearance of the viewers and their more or less active participations are important part of the performance.) The whole alienation is impossible, when the ringmaster is played by the director, Archibald talks to us many times, gets us into the play and comments on our situations now and in general. (“You are white. And viewers”). With his remarks, which are told on middle voice, makes us – and the actors! – accept that everything we see they are “just games”. Many times tells us that what is the right behaviour in connection with the things we can see (other times he does not let us lean back peacefully and enjoy the actions; he intervenes impatiently the “Litany of the pales”, the scene which is performed as an obscene dance by Bobo [Réka Judit Kiss] and Snowflakes [Éva Bakos], he thanks the contributors’ efforts, and turns us from this interaction back to the original topic of the performance. However, we would like to be keen on the “silly exotic things”, the director does not let us indulge in this illusion.)

Besides these well-known gestures he leads us to a “more emotional” interpretation; I think about the relationship of the Village and the Virtue which becomes very important in the final too. The details of their relation are not told by their staccato, restless, circularly built words, during their scenes we can feel that the performance “let us closer” (especially in the case of the end: when the actors taking off their wigs, sitting around the bier. The Running Village and the Running Virtue finally reach each other, their goal. Genet himself “offers” in his author guidelines to the future director that the Village and the Virtue would leave their reserved and polite behaviour during the rite and in the end of the performance “show themselves human like beings, who honestly love each other.”) So in spite of our first impression we do not watch a sterile, for us ununderstandable ritual theatre which works with symbols, but an extremely powerful, total theatre which effects our senses, thoughts and feelings too.

To be able to understand the basic message of the hardly accepted performance, we should remember one of the leading members of the anti-colonial movement, the half-breed psychoanalyst who got away from Martinique, Frantz Fanon’s patient’s story. In the Peau noire, masques blancs (Black skin, white masks) which was published in 1952, Fanon talked about the reasons of colonization and the process how the conqueror whites cancelled the subject of the subordinate blacks, depraving them into objects and pushing them into nothing. He tells us that he has known a black medical student, who believes deeply that he has not been handled on his own right – he referred not to his studies but to his human values. This idea became his obsession and he became more and more sure that neither his European patients nor his colleagues would take him seriously. When he became paramedic in the army he had one wish: he did not want to work on the colonies. His biggest dream was to have some whites who were working under him: he wanted to be their commander, who they honoured and they were afraid of him. According to the explanation of Fanon the doctor wanted to take revenge on those who “created” the imago which always tortured him, the image of the intimidated and trembling black person who had to come to heel in front of his white commander.

The story has more than mental lessons. It reveals that the black and the white, the other way: I and the other one cannot exist without each other, the two suppose and complete one another. If it is that way than the edges of their role become transparent, the irreconcilable-like opposition get eased by the changing (it is like the facts about the reflections). Zoltán Balázs’ vision of Genet carries this idea up until the end. In his circus the blacks imitate as they would be according to the stereotypes of the whites, the embodied blacks. On the other side those whites are standing, who has the same stereotyped idea about the blacks, as the later ones would think about it. Among the two sides the interdependence is hardly fateful like, but the real understanding and trust is missing, so that way any of them get into a leader position his aim will be the sudden subjection and destruction of the other one. It is proved by the scene when the two sides change places during the performance: the sudden incomprehension from the whites’ faces disappear soon when they realise that nothing has changed. The possibilities of the mirrors and reflections which have begun in Genet’s text are used perfectly by the performance, and that way it makes us impossible create an obvious value judgement, and separates itself from any didactic final conclusion of the topic.

What kind of prejudices are we talking about? The Court (and the Judgement who is searching for the responsible of the killing of a white woman) is played by the whites – they have all the power and all the legal and illegal tools of suppression. Not only their movements are similar to the movements of marionettes, but their mentality is without any individuality. We cannot take them too seriously: they could not get their present position by their brain and competence, the aristocratic position is because of their skin tone. Their petty and selfish plays are well symbolised by the opening scene, where their argument resembles the seven elves in connection with the missing “tiny chair” and “tiny bed”. The over active and always interrupting Queen cannot understand the actions around her, so she has to rely on the other members of the Court, on the Judge (Rodrigó Balog), on the Valet, the Missionary (János Balog) and on the Governor (Zoltán Oláh). The later ones are the protectors of the interests not only of the Queen, but of course of the whole Court and of the Empire too. According to them the blacks are not human beings, they are some kind of weird insects, who besides the sudden fulfilment of their biological and sexual interests cannot do any clever actions. The courtiers are trying to force the action, but they are the biggest barrier of the progress; they many times stop and slow down the actions with their incompetent interrupts. (Must be added that in those literary texts which were written from the point of view of the colonizers the blacks are handled like a black mass without face, name, to emphasize that way too their wide, uncivilized, non-individual existence. In Genet’s play it turns upside down; the blacks get – symbolical-allegorical-magical but at least individual – names, and the whites form a group of uniform, hardly separable members.) The picture of the blacks is not better anyway. According to the whites’ words and the blacks’ own acts their figures are rude, impolite, instinctive beings. Nobody was surprised by the fact that the white woman was killed by a black man; the motives of the action are less obvious. According to the black Bobo, the Village was in love with the woman (the instincts again!), according to the whites he hated because of her colour (would it be the reflection of their own desires?). When the black women retch because of the smell of the dead white woman (“it is very different of ours’”), and they start smoking because of it, the whites are immediately thinking about some kind of tribal rite, and they accuse them with cannibalism.

The peak and most memorable scene of the performance is the repetition of the killing. In Theomachia Zoltán Balázs put the most variable and distant elements of the cultural inheritance of mankind next to each other from the Hungarian folk songs, through the baroque contra tenor arias to the Eastern martial and theatrical arts. The different, well-known signs with their overall effect were astonishing and thought provoking: the constellations offered new possibilities of interpretation. In case of The Blacks the idea of concentration, which can be understood from the formation of the area, can be found during the interpretation of the play too: the costumes, which have been mentioned, the almost combative makeups, the “solo plays” which are performed by the fans, the Village and the others’ reactions which are full of emotions and followed by angry gestures, are pointing towards the same direction, towards a group with Mediterranean atmosphere, and southern mentality. During the reconstruction of the killing the podium of the circus turns into suddenly the arena of bullfighting. Diuf because of Felicitas, has to play the role of the deputy victim. The black women tight a skirt from red scarves on Diuf (who is acted by Artúr Kálid that time) who dances a fiery flamenco on his own bier. Diuf with her lecherous dance teases the Village who is breathing and stomping like a bull, and when he almost jumps on his “victim” the story stops again. It is similar to be frozen in case of photo taking, at the moment of exposure, and we can think it over again, whether we would like to see these and that way on the photo, as we have expected it. After the intermezzo at the moment of killing we get into total darkness, during it, happens the changing of place between the Court and the blacks as we have mentioned it. The “dead” Diuf (who is played by Hermina Fátyol that time) is talking to us from heaven after it. The characters accept confused everything that try to move their view of world, which was built on exclusive polarities. From the celestial sphere we can her Diuf’ sentences that cancel harmful Manichaean logic: “First of all I must tell you: they whether lie or do not know it right. Because they are not white, at all, but they are pinkish...”

It is hard to emphasize any actor in case of a performance where the most important element is the continuous interdependency between the characters, the absolute trust in the other, and the attention of one another which cannot get lower. Meanwhile we cannot leave without any words the most outstanding performances. The Village by Balázs Dévai is the wild, restrained ancient power itself, who can demolish the whole stage with the power of a tornado and then can be unforgettable sensitive and sensual in one of the most beautiful theatrical love scenes of the past few years. During the second one the fragile Nóra Parti, the embodied femininity herself, who acts the Virtue is his perfect partner (“her Hungarian voice” is Apollónia Szolnoki’ wonderful alto). Artúr Kálid as the Town of Saint Nazaire or as the victim, Diuf performs an outstanding suggestive act; hardly anyone can forget who has seen the fire in his eyes. Erzsébet Soltész as lady Felicitas with her authoritative silence that forms an atmosphere all through the performance one of the bests of the night (she can surpass it when on Szabolcs Hámori’s beautiful bass voice starts “singing” a Gypsy text). – she is the perfect counterpoint to Kamilla Fátyol’ non-aristocratic Queen. Éva Bakos and Réka Judit Kiss are perfect couple, but the male members of the Court have memorable moments too. (Kristóf Horváth is excellent again).

Janet Suzman chose a black actor to play the leading role of Othello by Shakespeare in 1987. The director with this decision overwrote the interpretation of the play of more centuries – the interpretations were about the man’s jealousy and the woman’s vulnerability and self-sacrifice, but Suzman instead of these and besides these turned the attention to the racial problems which are in the play. Zoltán Balázs performs the play, which was originally written to black actors, by mostly Gypsy actors, by the member of the Maladype Theatre. The Hungarian audience maybe less sensitive to the existed or once existed problems between the black slaves and white oppressors which can be hurtful to the western viewers. The director can connect interestingly with this idea two topics which are seemingly far away from each other and cease the boarding line between them. He does it with the help of that ritual theatre which has been becoming his brand, which is based on fine arts mostly and musical effects, using the divine and trivial elements at the same time. It is not an ordinary performance and not with ordinary actors and with non-ordinary attention and acceptance, which are required from the viewers.

Tamás Jászay, Criticai Lapok, 2005

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)