When we enter the room, twelve of them are sitting around a low, oval plexi table, which is half surrounded. They are singing ritually. They are seemed to be priests, monks and shamans. They are celebrating a ceremony. They are wearing the same kind of robe and cowl, their faces are enlightened by cunning rays which are coming from under, their features are divided into shadow and light. Meanwhile monotonous Latin melodies are repeated. Strong guttural voices can be heard. The long, common singing beams that they are dedicatedly together. They stop singing and change to a sharp, pointed and articulated prose. Each word can cut. A vivid, polemic communication is formed, in Latin language. I was learning in a human specialised class, I learned Latin, so it cannot be expected that I could understand it. Immo vero, Erika Molnár repeats it many times, in stressed way. Immo vero etiam in senatu venit, I automatically remember the compulsory memoriter after about forty years, from Cicero’s speech of Catilina. The actress is arguing clearly and talking with a strong belief. Her dark shaded, hoarse voice commands. The others replicate. They are arguing. From time to time, they ask something mockingly. Two tinkling voices persiflate repeatedly. They make gestures while they are speaking. They turn towards each other. They stand up and sit down again like a wave, like the audience of a football stadium. There is tableware in front of them. There are plates, cutleries, napkins, colourful liquids in giant cup-like glasses. They get musical sounds while rubbing around the rims of the glasses with their wet fingers. Both the speech and the movement have music character, rhythm and dynamic. They play frantic tones by pushing the cutlery into each other and their body. We become a part of a séance, which is sacral and tribal-like at the same time. We can feel ourselves involved in, because they let us between them, and we are outsiders at the same time, because we do not know the content or the subject of the ritual. We are privileged and profane doubters. We are insiders and civils too. We are floating between confusion and dissolution and do not know which one to choose.

From time to time theatre tries to get back to its ritual roots. As I am watching School for Fools by Maladype in the Szkéné, I remember Oedipus by Seneca, which was directed by Peter Brook. The National Theatre in London performed it, in 1968 in the Old Vic then. As soon as I entered the dark auditorium whispering, hissing and chanting sounds came up behind the columns, from the base floor and the balconies. The members of the choir, who were everywhere in the corners, improved progressively the murmuring chant into complaining, wailing and raging which are followed by stronger and stronger drumming. The players - John Gielgud was between them- told, declaimed the text as it was noted down, and the choir followed it with orchestrated moan, cry and groan. Esslin mentioned that Oedipus is an "experimental performance, the importance of which steps over those trivial thoughts as opening night success or the satisfaction of the audience”. We usually talk about rite when the junk, business-like theatre overflows.

"All overused conventions are really ugly for most of us.” stated Brook who directed Seneca. In his book, in The empty space, which was published in the year of Oedipus, he wrote that "with the help of arts we would like to grab those invisible processes which define our lives”. The invisible has got materialized during the rite, that’s why Brook who has felt the depreciation of words, not long after the Oedipus, directed a performance in which the actors spoke Ancient Greek, Latin, Avestan (Old Persian language of rites), and the artificial language created by Ted Hughes while they were performing the myth of Prometheus, built on Aeschylus. This question was the work – hypothesis of Orghast: "Does any language exist beyond the language of words, with the help of which the author can express his thoughts as precisely?" This is partly the language of gestures, and the meta language, which effects clearly sensually, of scales (texts) partly without any conceptual meaning. Because of his belief, which Brook put into practice, some people thought him to be dilettante. Brook started working together with a group of actors, who had different education, background-culture, they did not speak each other’s language, with the aim to create a clearly spiritual, ritual theatre on the ruins of empty conventions, a theatre without any conceptualism.

Without comparing Zoltán Balázs, the director of School for Fools, to Brook, I have to mention that he creates a heterogeneous group with the help of the language of gestures and rites – and there would be some people who think, that he is dilettante too. However what he (and they) does (do) is impressive. The original Ghelderode’s play, which is quoted by its title, which is really mysterious in itself too, has become just a starting point as Aeschylus was for Brook too. The rebellion of the handicapped, medieval fools – pupils before their „exam” against their master, who are searching for the secret of profession of art, with the help of which they compensate their social isolation and live up to their repressed instincts. In the performance of Maladype this rebellion becomes the attempt of outbreak and of self-liberation of the community. The eleven „seminarists” who are closed to their monastic impersonality, have an argument with their leader (Erika Molnár), and after it, they take off their robes and cowls. The chrysalis become beautiful butterflies, form spiritualised, committed bodiless creatures become players who can validate their corporeality and individuality, who can free up their repressed personalities with the help of psychophysical plays of group therapy-like movements. In it, their master is their opponent, who is a really spry, genderless and ageless elf-gnome (Erzsébet Soltész), who they finally kill ritually – with the cutting of the strings of his marionette – and that way they can win their freedom.

I decode the story that way, others may do it on another one. The verbal language of the performance is changing between Latin, Gypsy and Hungarian; its gesture language is a light and accurate group-movement. (Choreographer: András Szöllõsi.) The sensual feeling is more important than the conceptual meaning.

The actors – Oszkár Nyári, Balázs Dévai, János Balogh, Artúr Kálid, Nóra Parti, Krisztina Sárközi, Hermina Fátyol, Kamilla Fátyol, Éva Bakos, Zoltán Oláh, Kristóf Horváth – are dedicated to teamwork and they perform the commands without giving up their own personality, according to László Sáry’s musical structure, a punctual spring and the common fantasy game. Erzsébet Soltész’s achievement is very special: her sharp-monotonous voice, the material lightness of her thin figure, as she is floating horizontally on iron-cramps on the wall, these give the lifelike but surrealistic symbol of the scholar – artist – dictator who keeps the secret. As the elf with high forehead. as a magician climbs on the mouldy wall, unfolds her hair and body and becomes a woman, the curtains fall down at the same moment from the windows – set and costume: Judit Gombár -, and show us the nighty scenery of the town, that is the cultic moment: the sensual metaphor of freedom.

Tandem of Quousque, Cicero started that way; how long is it going on? Like our patience. After watching the performance the question can be asked in two ways. There are some who will sit through hard this one and half an hour, and others will do the same in case of the conventional, dead theatre. I am between the others.

Tamás Koltai, Élet és Irodalom, 2003

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)