...this year more than eighty foreign critics took part on it, the offer was fourteen performances from ten countries, and many following events could make the picture more colourful.

They have organised for the twentieth time in Nyitra an international theatrical festival. They organised the first one in 1992, immediately in the year of the divorce, after the independent Slovak Republic was formed. During the press discussion, which evaluated the anniversary, Andrea Tompa mentioned, that we had missed the occasion, the moment of the changing of system, when we could immediately form, that representative international meeting, which we have missed painfully since then. Since then, the Slovakians have practiced well their own one, the festival of Nyitra has got its place between the counted events, and this year more than eighty foreign critics took part on it, the offer was fourteen performances from ten countries, and many following events could make the picture more colourful. One of them is a three-year long project, which has started now, with the title of Parallel lives, which measures the effect of actions of once existed secret agencies on the performing arts. (The main partner organisation is the Observatory of Budapest.) The topic of the festival of this year is connected to this programme, which main aim is to refresh the memory, on the level of slogans too, which has chosen the title of do (not) tell your secrets, and declares the importance of facing up with the past. Darina Kárová, the director of the festival in the introduction of the programme, emphasised the responsibility of theatre to reveal secrets and sins, and the importance of asking the unpleasant questions in connection with our identity and conscience. I would be interesting in the fact that how many (festival) directors are there in Hungary, who would talk about the mission of theatre that way.

Not all the performances – I have seen all of them except for one – can be connected to the announced topic. The level of the program was complex too, there were exciting and excellent, and there were weak and useless performances too. The aesthetic level was worse than the spiritual one. This latest one was enviably European, in the spirit of its opened, accepting and liberal thinking, which many of us try to ruin in Hungary in the theatrical world too. They held two, sometimes three performances a day. The large auditorium and chamber hall of the Andrej Bagara Theatre of Nyitra, and the two performing places of the Old Theatre were full for all performances, many times people were standing by the walls too. Comparing it to the foreign guest troupes’ many times half-empty houses in Budapest, I really envied it from the town of about eight thousand inhabitants.

Wojtek Ziemilski, visual artist and theatrical person with his one-man theatre, titled the Short story, which is connected directly to the reveal of the past, processes his grandfather’s story, whose past as an agent was revealed in 2006. Wojciech Dzieduszycki was an aristocratic famous person, he was an opera and cabaret singer, he was the well-known inhabitant of Wrocl/aw. The story makes us remember Péter Esterházy’s family story, and now we can regret a lot that nobody could bring to Budapest form Vienna the performance of the Burgtheater, the Harmonia caelestis, which was a theatrically exciting staging, it was praised a lot and directed by Dávid Márton. The Short Story is nothing else than an honest staged reading, followed by video recordings, it connected personal memories, documentaries and cultural quotes, which tried to find the answer of the motifs of the real sin and scapegoating. (The social metaphysic of mass psychosis and exclusion, if with other meaning, have been worked out resoundingly the performance of Hunting Scenes in Lower Bavaria. Róbert Alföldi’s staging was very successful in Nyitra too. Alföldi has gained his name with his earlier works in the festival. Otherwise from the twenty season in Nyitra, we have been presented on eighteen wit twenty performance altogether.)

Between those performances, which were from the self-awareness type, the most interesting one was the performance, We are well together by Dorota Masl/owska. The young author is well known in Hungary too, the Kamra performs his play, The two poor Romanians, who spoke Polish. His facing up with the past, is one of the important motifs of the contemporary Polish drama, which was made special by the author’s age, who is in his twenties. If we can listen to his generation with the help of him, then he tells something about the Polish society, which can make us jealous again. In the play, three generations live together, next to each other – metaphorically too – these are the generation of the war, the adults of the “existing socialism” and the contemporary young ones. This play is more text-centric, than in the case of the play, The two, who spoke Polish. It was not easy to follow neither with the English subtitles – partly because of the size of the letters and the bad position of the monitors – but it could become clear, that its texture is strongly reflected and sarcastic. (Soon it will be performed in Bárka Theatre.) Masl/owska could handle with sarcastic irony the stereotypes of thinking and way of life of the generations one after another, and he stated a sharp critic in connection with the Polish nationalism. In the funniest part of his performance, one of his characters “proved” that everything in the world is polish, but it had been stolen, expropriated and made for themselves their inventions, symbols, discoveries and even their colours. I could imagine, how would this kind of manifested ironic critic of the Polish achievements be accepted in its Hungarian version at home. TR Warszawa Theatre ordered the play from the author, and the internationally respected Grzegorz Jarzyna directed it, with distinctly anti-naturalist style, with grotesque clichés, in a stylized place, with computer graphics, with sharply made performance. (In the end of November because of the invitation of the National Theatre, they will perform it in Hungary too, differently from the version of the book, with the title of: Everything is in order.)

The performance of Cool and dupe ones, by the SkRAT Theatre from Bratislava, was made according to the example of the performance like the Top Dogs or the Push up 1:3. Middle leaders, mostly women are in the focus of sketch episodes, there are managers, yuppies, official faces, with their own ordinary personal and social affairs, stereotypes and banalities. The cliché like nature of behaviours are directly proportional with the performance, its grotesque nonsense humour, which turns into absurd, can be sensed in the best moments. The contrast of employer-employee and women-men (in both cases mostly with the emphasis of the female supremacy), can appear in a kind of lazy, life-like, in a style far of staging, the set was made according to the program of black and white block of flats. We could not deny that the performance had some kind of insular humour, in the end, the (female) guard, with disadvantage outlook, who represented the scorned “lower class”, left alone on the stage, which was noise because of the axe blows, as it was done in case of Firs in The Cherry Orchard – but most it was all about this.

If we have already mentioned clichés, than the Forced Entertainment’ parodic meta-theatre with the title of Void story (we can say: Not any kind of story) was more interesting and entertaining. Four actors were sitting on the two sides by the control desks, as they were sitting in radio or recording studio. In the middle, the pictures are on a projector screen, the actors partly gave their voices to them (they read up the characters’ texts), and they created the noise effects too. The scale of pictures, and the “film”, which was made of them, mixed the style of photos, drawings, comics, graphic collages, animated films, and told a story that way, which could be called mostly a surreal horror (we can say that with the mood of Lynch and Kubrick). There was a boy and a girl in the maze of urban surrounding. They were walking, travelling, escaping (from some kind of murderer) on the street, in the channel, in the hotel, in an elegant meeting – anywhere. Tim Etchell, who is the animator, script writer, photo-shop maker and director of this performance, with this radio-play, subbed film and theatre, could create a performance that was favourable to creators and performers of post-dramatic theatre theory, which the ordinary humans could enjoy too, if they did not get bored before. As all kind of style performance, it could be figured out soon, and later it could keep only a few surprises. It could last any time – in reality it was one hour and twenty minutes long – it was mostly technically surprising, than a sensual experience.

Between the performances of the festival, we could watch two Slovakian “remake”. One of them had put in bracket to the title the word of remake, to mark that their performance was the ironic interpretation of Jozef Holly’s Kubo, classical and legendary comedy. The story, which took place in a surrounding of a village, showed intrigues of love, and the main character, who was thought to be partly silly but he was clear and innocent, became the part of them, somehow. The mostly simple story, the director, Dodo Gombár performed stylised, loudly, he coloured it with tiringly monotonous and repeated mannerisms. He duplicated the figure of Kubo, with a middle-sized marionette puppet, but he did not explain well its meaning. The other “re-performance” was The Graduate, which was the renewal of the more than forty years old film by Dustin Hoffman, which we know by the title of Before Graduation. The stage version of it was made totally indifferently and unconvincingly, which was put obviously into the programme, because it is the performance of the local Old Theatre.

Another performance of the Andrej Bagara Theatre of Nyitra, by Wesker, showed a more favourable picture, it was The Kitchen, staged by Zoltán Balázs. He formed the studio tall domed place into a podium of a circus. The viewers were sitting in circles around it. The podium was covered by fine, white, sand, which was similar to the sand of the seashore. There were copper plates hanged from above – like mine upside down turned cymbals – they stood in for the equipment of the kitchen. In front of the “chefs” many “plates” were hanged on different levels. They were “cooking” sand, which was held in bags next to the chefs. The waitresses were filling the bags continuously, and they were bringing up and down the piles of empty plates. In the middle there is a big pool of sand. By “mixing” with the little brooms of “cooking” and pushing-salting-forming by hands the plates became clear by the sand – the portions were made in this way. The chefs hits the hanged up metals, and gave a sign to the waitresses that way. All of it happened according to the composed choreographed order, which we have known well by Zoltán Balázs. The chefs’ and waitresses’ Japanese costumes were made according to the director’s favourite far-eastern style, between the colours of black and white, the owner of the restaurant, Mr. Marango’s – in this performance he was a woman – red dress came up. He was sitting all through the performance on a podium, by the “main entrance”, he was reading popular magazines, and according to his role, he only at some points of the performance, got involved in the performance. (The set and costume designer of the performance is Péter Polgár, he got both awards as the two best ones of the previous season in his both categories. The national awards of the Slovakian theatrical seasons are usually given on the opening gala of the Festival of Nyitra, it happened that way now too, it was followed by a nice, intimate and pure performance.)
The Kitchen was the best performance I have seen by Zoltán Balázs recently, in which the verbal texture of the play was connected to the director’s skills of choreography and to his visual stylization. Carefully composed effects of movements and sounding gave the base of the visual aesthetics. The actors fulfilled not only the physical requirements, but they were experienced in the category of dramatic theatre too, so they not just had phrases of the performing as a profession, but practice of it too. According to my taste, there were too many artistic things in the performance and too little articulated ideas, I could tell that there were too many beautiful orders, and there were too little simple statements (and according to it sharp surprises), but it was a subjective question, but otherwise I appreciated gladly the accepted and fulfilled theatrical level.

The Weissenstein performance of the Comedy Theatre from Prague was an aesthetic pleasure. Earlier they had performed Kafka too, and this time – during their German season – they made a performance from the one hundred pages long prose by one of Kafka’s peers, by the less well-known Johannes Urzidil. He was the member of the expressionist movement of Prague between the two world wars, whose play was about a third peer of them, who was the main character of the play too. Karl Weissenstein, who is a well-known member of café of literature in Prague, he is strange, egocentric, shy, he was a figure, who could not take responsibility for his actions, who “always wanted to become someone else, as he could not be himself”. As he got involved in others’ fates, he caused their death somehow – according to the play, three people’s too. This version of the play was made by the director, by David Jarˇab. It is a miniature play for studio stage, with only a few, marked set, fine, bittersweet humour, irony and intimate atmosphere. The main character was played by three “similar” actors, in the same dresses, with the same “empty heads” – Weissenstein was suffered from the illness of hydrocephalus – that way he divided the character into three parts. The three figures got into vivid communicative relationship with one another, they followed their thinking and decisions with tiny comments and gestures, they almost shared it between them as their things to do. It is a very tiny, micro-realistic and elevated staging at the same time, the effect is humorous and tragic at the same time – it is a real elite artistic theatre, and it is very entertaining from this point of view too.

The two most interesting performances of the festival were (besides the Hunting Scenes, which must be on the podium) not accidentally two theatrical performances of directors by Oskaras Korëunovas and Kama Ginkasz. Korëunovas put on stage The Lower Depths by Gorky, however, this latest one was all about exaggeration, as there was not any stage. The characters were sitting behind a table, which was put an arm long distance from the first line of the viewers – as during The Last Supper – only some of them stood up, changed their places, or told something to the viewers. The actors told, during the next day meeting, that because they did not have enough time, the rehearsals were kept during the common tours of the troupe, for example after breakfast, they stayed by the table in the restaurant of the hotel – and the “scenic” of the performance was formed that way. The constraint became a natural conception, the civilian, those figures, which were made Russian by only some properties, seemed to live on their ordinary lives, they talked with that kind of natural directness, and they behaved according to it too. This manner, which was “without any performance”, theatrical, and was hardly different from the civilian existence – their “own voice” – stood in for a special trend in theatres today. Gorky’s characters could get rid of not only the natural formalities that way, but of the poor romanticism. In the “depth” – the original title of the play – it meant the hopelessness of existence, and the moral rise of weaknesses, which came from this position. There is something beautiful and tragic-comedic in the ethos of these people on the edges. For example, the actress, who performed Nastya, talked to a handsome young man in the auditorium, and almost begged to stand up from his seat. Just to stand up. This direct searching for relationship tried to be the manifestation of that latent try that they tried to perform in the direct closeness with the audience, almost breathed into their face. The one, who performed Satin also came to drink vodka with the viewers in the name of the “brotherhood”. The emotional saturation, the Slavic passion could be found in the performance too, the drinking could solve the anger – there were many vodkas on the table – the singing and dancing, which began in the narrow place, was filled with repressed energies. The Actor, who drank his “organism” too, and tried many times with efforts to find the lost words, he came back after his suicide, and told the inspired lines from Hamlet’s mixed monologues.

The biggest format of the festival was an originally Lithuanian, but Russian director, Kama Ginkas who made from the Medea by Seneca – with the usage of the texts by Anouilh, Brodsky and others – a special, powerful and impressive performance, in the Theatre of Young Viewers from Moscow. The premier effect itself came from the vision, which is a surreal collage on the stage in the stylized “bathroom”, which placed on a really big area – the actors had to get through the pool, which was risen to the level of the floor – and with the kitchen tools, between the other together with a cooking and baking properties, which were placed on the hill of lava, which rose in the middle, and formed like stairs. The performance both visually and textually, and with the distant alienation of actors’ speech, could offer typical “postmodern” interoperability between eras, stiles and ways of thinking from the mythological until the profane ordinary things, from the pathetic ones to the grotesque, from the tragic elevation to the reflexive didacticism. It could take us into some kind of connection of thinking and style, and then ruined them all in any moment. It shocked and disenchanted us. With its accepted eclecticism could always raise surprise. Medea first appeared as a Muslim terrorist, she was dressed like this, with her baby on her back, there was the equipment of suicidal act on her belt, maybe because the director could not let the costume designer’s well-made costume, who insisted to his own idea (As Ginkas himself told it during the meeting of the following day), or because he wanted that the assassin’s attitude effected the main character’s similar “murderous” mental terror too. (In his civilian speech, Ginkas was characterised with that same kind of mischievous, partly provocative characteristics, as the director was on the stage.) The Nanny was reading a magazine in the corner of the “bathroom”, however Creon entered with giant, frozen, installation of power signs, with that royal decoration, which he left in the middle of the pool, and it remained there “crying”, and the suited, civilian office worker with his bag, the old man, got out of under it.

The mental central point of the performance was the spoiled marriage, the reason of which was the irreconcilable difference between Medea’s aggressive desire of possession, her creature that was built on the desire for completeness (that later expression came from Ginkas himself) and Jason’s ordinary character of an everyday person. (The handsome husband, with greyish hair, arrived in ironed suit and with shopping bags, he seemed to arrive from the closest plaza.) The most exciting parts of the performance were their typical dialogues from The Scenes from a Marriage. In front of Igor Gorgyn’s Jason, who was elegant, simply muscular, who desired only shy and trouble-free life – tidy flat, outings at the weekends and holidays by the see – there is Jekatyeri-na Karpusina is Medea, who was frighteningly unpredictable, explosively womanish and wildly aggressive. She connected the childish flattery and the rude pushing on, sometimes she is lyric, dramatic, lost-like crying, than angrily arguing. She is an extraordinary actress. She was chirping soprano and dark alto from the depth one after another. She could change capriciously the tone and the mood. Her restlessness could be seen as she could never stay in a place, she walked hectically on bare foot, up to the hill, into the water, she laid down, curled up then jumped up again, she kicked the objects in her way, she put here and there the papers of her voluntary exile, which were waited for signature. At the dedicated points of her reflexive playfulness, she left her role, she pointed at her singing partner, “here is the tragic Russian actor!”, said it sarcastically, then she read demonstratively from Brodsky’s poem. During the ending sequence she unwrapped and dressed down her two babies that were “made of” pink plastic, she cut their throat with a knife, and in a transparent plastic bowl made them swim in the pool – where they fell off it. She lighted up the water, poured with petrol, then put on an elegant dress, and tided into a strap, she flew over the stage.
It was a recklessly, brutally and openly provocative performance.

Tamás Koltai, Élet és Irodalom, 2011

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)