On metal frames with sharp risen auditorium, which is similar to the one Judit Gombár designed into the middle of the Bárka Theatre, they keep cockfights in Dominica and here they perform Jean Genet’s clown joke-like play, The Blacks. The play is 40 years old, the juvenile delinquent, the pick pocketer, pederast prostitute, jailbird author wrote it at the age of 50. They started playing it at midnight. Genet marked his play as a clown joke. Zoltán Balázs with double meaning refers to it as a black mass. The original premier was in Paris and acted by black skinned actors of the Les Griots troupe. In the Bárka Theatre now the Gypsy actors of Maladype have become the blacks.

The play is not about the question of the blacks. “We are those you want to see us to be, and in an absurd way we will remain the same till the end.” In the lace net of the text the obscenities are the knots. Besides the suffers of the outcasts and stigmatized the dialectic of attraction and push, love and revenge, the desire of act and sexuality is much more emphasized, where the pollution is the creating and the creation is the sexual fulfilment. And the death too. The scenery is very ornamented. It is the theatre of a poet. It does not fight for acceptance. It is provocative. It is rough. It is brave and wild. The wild men speak sophisticatedly. The Black is the death like a clown joke in a circus. It is brutality with Racine’s sophistication. It is a Pirandello-like drama with restrictions: it is like the Midsummer Night’s Dream or together with “play within play” by Corneille in Illusion comique. Everything is different from what it seems to be. But the illusions are real. Stench is mixed with taint. In 1967 Károly Kazimir asked for the performing rights of The Blacks. Genet denied it. He insisted to black actors. Fortunately.

Zoltán Balázs changed the reflector in Genet’s mirror game. Here the Gypsies play as the whites put on themselves Gypsy masks. In Genet’s outrageous theatre which centre is the penis, the audience can meet the prejudices against the Gypsies. The dialect of hate and love works. The Gypsies in the performance stand in for the Blacks. Everything is doubled, tripled and multiplied in the arena.

Éva Bakos (Snowflake) mouth her lines with the mannered gestures of the success oriented soprano opera singer, with plastic excitement, while her voice is given by the singer, by Beatrix Fodor in black cowl. The charmed enchanting magician, Lázsló Sáry composed an independent opera from Genet instead of a background music. It is a ceremonial mass with rich musical jokes. The one-man orchestra is Kornél Mogyoró with well-known and unrecognisable percussion instruments. Kamilla Fátyol’s Queen with mouldy eyelashes gets her voice from Zoltán Gavodi’s contra tenor. Gavodi gives voice at the same time to Bobo by Judit Réka Kiss.

Erzsébet Soltész (Felicitas) is a great actor and her silence is very meaningful. She looks from above to the earth like an Empress. From her face we can read the passions which are inside. When the gitana in her black lace sounds on Szabolcs Hámori’s flexible bass, that instead of Gyula Tellér’s perfectly working Hungarian text, gives sound to the Gypsy translation by Gyula Vámosi: the stage insanity that cheats our eyes, ears and senses is ready.

The bon vivant by Balázs Dévai (the Village) and László Böröcz’ tenor voice merge. He sings with voiceless movements of his mouth. Böröcz like the cooing one of the Japanese theatre gives the actor’s speaking soul in black, invisibly. The beautiful Nóra Parti (Virtue) gets her alto voice from Apollónia Szolnoki. She sings the text of the comedic, grotesque Missionary, who is performed by János Balog. The Valet by Kristóf Horváth can be heard on Beatrix Fodor’s soprano voice. The Governor, Zoltán Oláh with his strong personality uses Szabolcs Hámori’s bass voice. Rodrigó Balog’s missed Judge gets László Böröcz’s tenor. (The coaches of the singers and the silent prose actors are Bánk Sáry and Dániel Dinyés. They have formed the ear-cheating soundings.)

There are fans in hands. Their nuanced flutter, closure tell us processes and describe. Hermina Fátyol reflects eroticism like optical lens that focused the desires. In the two opposite gates of the auditorium Nóra Csizmadia and Dávid Csányi run during the two and quarter of an hour in the same rhythm, in the same place, dynamically into the unreachable infinite. The over composed systems of movements were composed by András Szőllősi to his assistant, with Ildikó Lavro-Gyenes’ the training. The singing merge together with the rattle, spittle and movements and with Gombár’s rococo, wigged, transparent, suit-like, cheeky dresses, which mix the Spanish, French, tribe-like and Haiti culture.

Artúr Kálid (as the town of Saint Nazare) has magic power. He is walking around on the overhead podium as a shaman planet. Kálid has a magical solo scene, when the masculine actor with the French ballet-like pose of his right wrist turns into a female victim. Then covered with red clothes, with many skirts on him he is turning around on the top of the coffin like a shaman. Here the different elements of the performance are changing one another. The music is dancing, the dance is making rhythms, the actors are the sets, and the giant construction of the set plays that it is identical with the universe.

In the dome the hanged Nóra Parti is flying. Is she a vision or reality? The audience can watch the final like a dream caused by drugs, where the ceremony gets a logical, modern political sign: the subordinates and tyrants change their costumes. They change their places. The changing of power does not bring anything new. The tyrants are interchangeable. The anguish of human remains forever.

The two hours long performance in Bárka Theatre gets wild, it is an adult infantilism. Nobody can understand the performance, but it is a theatrical wonder. Do we have to understand the theatre when it cannot be? Trying to get closer to the unexplainable with thoughts: we do not know why some are keen on something, which makes the others run away. We would like to understand art forcedly. Because of the attacks towards us we try to keep our common sense, because we are coward to face up with it. We send the unsettled confusion to the sense to check it.

"Poetry is the only place where we can do what we want” – Archibald Absolon Wellington the master of ceremony tells it in the play (who is signed with three stars on the program, but who is performed by the director who is sitting between the viewers). "We play so that we have something to be reflected in, then we can see as our water surface absorbs us, like a big black daffodil."

Péter Gál Molnár, Népszabadság, 2004

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)