"It's very interesting to search and explore with crazy, adventurous people. As long as I have that opportunity, I will be able to endure everything."

Maladype, one of the defining companies of contemporary, experimental theatre, is celebrating its 15th anniversary this season. We spoke with the company's equally defining and exploratory leader, Zoltán Balázs.

Your website states that Maladype is "a company that has been able to constantly reinvent itself over the years." You have already undergone several transformations. Where is the company headed now?

We are now halfway through our fifteenth year. We have two seven-year periods behind us, and they were completely different from each other. Both periods had their defining performances, including Theomachia, The Blacks, and Leonce and Lena in 2008. The actors rehearsed each of the twenty-five scenes of Büchner's play in four different variations, resulting in a total of one hundred versions available to the audience—and, of course, to ourselves. Due to the structure of the play, we never performed the same show twice. This process of deconstruction later formed the basis for King Ubu and then Egg(s)hell.

After our time in Bárka Theatre, we found our current venue, a bourgeois apartment on Mikszáth Square, where we can work at our own pace and according to our own expectations. The characteristics of the Maladype Base's spaces also determine the performances we play here. It was in the context of our performance of Don Carlos that I came up with what is perhaps the most characteristic description of the performances created at the Base: "minimalist monumentalism." We staged large-scale pieces, but due to the minimalist nature of the tools used, acting, creativity, and improvisation also played a major role. We fly out into the world from the Maladype Base, and we return here. In addition to the rehearsals, performances, and multidisciplinary programs that take place here, more substantial projects and performances will once again take centre stage in the life of our theatre.

To mark the centenary of Dadaism, at the end of the summer we will present Matei Visniec's play Dada Cabaret in co-production with Gábor Gábriel Farkas and his band, which the author wrote for the centenary of the birth of the artistic movement. We bring together the world of cabaret and protest songs in an internationally co-produced, musically, visually, and verbally exciting, artistically coherent production. The use of language, playfulness, and the strange interplay of verbal and non-verbal signs all form the essence of Dadaism.

After my guest production in Chicago, Sándor Zsótér will begin rehearsals for Shakespeare's Richard III at the Bázis at the end of March, and a production by András Jeles is also under discussion. Both directors are close to the spirit of Maladype, because they are searching, researching, obsessive directors who are not afraid of redesign. Experimentation and delving deep into things are part of our theatre, and this continues to define us.

It seems like a new, distinct artistic direction is not to be expected at the moment.

We are continuing on our own path. Over the years, through our open and introductory rehearsals, we have opened up a multigenerational channel that can only be created through continuous dialogue, so that the audience is not only affected by intuitive experiences (based on whether they like something or not), but dares to think aloud, form opinions, and debate about what they have seen and heard.

Do your theatre-in-education programs work the same way as before?

The open rehearsals are still running, as are the various introductory programs, such as the Chamber Concerts and Numera! Our latest and most current project is The Kravchenko Case, a complex, anti-communist, multi-phase book publishing/theatre/education project that is primarily related to the themes of freedom and democratic values. Free from the usual "tribal wars," it integrates many sides with different identities and value systems in the spirit of professionalism. In the year-long theatre-in-education program, we meet nearly 400 disadvantaged and exceptionally talented students and their teachers, mostly from underdeveloped regions, from Pécs to Alsózsolca. The team is completed by sociologists, social psychologists, literary and art historians, historians, lawyers, and other legal experts. The program builds on the importance of personal and collective responsibility, so that young people can be aware of their own future and their legal responsibilities and make responsible decisions.

Speaking of changes, several actors have recently left and new ones have joined the company.

This season, Kata Huszárik and Zsigmond Bödők joined the company. I had worked with Kata before, and now we felt it was worth strengthening our collaboration. Zsigmond recently graduated from the University of Performing Arts in Marosvásárhely, so I am at the start line with him. He is an extremely talented and motivated young man. In addition to them, Erika Tankó, Ágota Szilágyi, and Zsolt Páll make up our permanent cast. It is also an organic part of our development that people change and spend different periods of time at Maladype. Unfortunately, we cannot afford to have more than five actors financially. We work on a small budget and always have to rethink our financial strategy.

At this year's Night of Theatres, you auctioned off the sets and props from your previous performances.

Yes, it felt really good.

Was it a kind of closure with the past?

Definitely, beyond the fact that it made financial sense. The idea was born out of necessity, as we received less public funding than in the previous application period. We started thinking about how we could obtain the missing amount so that we could sign our permanent actors for at least one season and ensure the daily operation of the theatre. Therefore, we decided to auction off the sets and props of nearly thirteen of our productions, which had been in our repertoire for several years and had been performed over a hundred times at home and abroad. The auction was a financial success, but perhaps more importantly, it allowed me to let go of something I no longer wanted to carry. This way, I can focus on our new productions and the new company members. Of course, I would be happier if I could plan with greater financial stability.

What do you think can be done about the situation?

Work. There is no other option, we have to work.

What opportunities do you see for asserting your interests in the current climate of cultural policy?

There comes a point when you can no longer remain silent about what is happening. Especially if you are a leader and responsible for people's lives. You also have to respect the audience, who have grown to love and expect the quality offered by Maladype over the years. You need sensible, predictable, plannable working conditions. And, of course, a good sense of humour, good company and integrity. These are the three motivators for the coming period.

Tell me about your relationship with Maladype! Can you specify what you want to achieve with Maladype, and how long you think you can keep doing it?

As long as I find joy in this relationship, for sure. As long as I can provide the necessary coverage for basic operations not only intellectually, artistically, and conceptually, but also financially, that is: as long as it is sustainable.

If the situation was better, how would your work be different?

For example, we would not set the financial framework for performances in the spirit of reduction, but according to unlimited imagination, creativity, and bold artistic concepts.

Is this how things work abroad as well?

In the places that I have worked, if they promised me something, I got it on time, so that the rehearsal process was all about the creation. Of course, I don't want to generalize that everything is rosy and beautiful abroad, but since I live in Hungary, I would basically focus on that. Over time, every decision-maker will realize that independence is not a bad thing, but a motivating and fertile opportunity in the long run. Not only in theatre, not only in art, but also in everyday life. I believe in the human spirit, that not everyone gives up and not everyone's brain cells wear out. Of course, I am neither a missionary, nor an educator, nor a prophet. I don't want to formulate general visions or change Hungarian public opinion, but I would like to believe that people can be made receptive. I don't have a recipe, just as I didn't have one for Maladype and life, and probably never will. But it's very interesting to search and explore with crazy, adventurous people - my playmates. As long as I have that opportunity, I will be able to endure everything.

Zsuzsa Szabó, 7óra7, 2016

Translated by Lena Megyeri

The road to Maladype Theatre is unusual, as we approach the venue, which is a large bourgeois apartment, through the stairwell of a bourgeois house on Mikszáth Square. Upon entering the theatre, we find ourselves in a completely extraordinary, yet extremely welcoming foyer. It is a space where it is clear from the very first moment that the theatre is finally letting us in. At Maladype, the audience becomes privy to the process of theatrical creation through shared thinking with the actors performing in the plays. A lively, authentic, dynamic, and fresh spirit within the walls of a bourgeois apartment. We spoke here with actor-director Zoltán Balázs, artistic director of Maladype.

Being this close to the audience is not a natural thing. What is the secret of the magic of theatre in an apartment?

Although several theatre companies around the world are working to eliminate the classic relationship between stage and auditorium by placing the actors and audience in a shared space, few have managed to take possession of the space as organically as the actors of Maladype have done at our Base, in a large bourgeois apartment. One of the keys to this is "shared, all-encompassing attention." Through direct and personal acting, the actors unobtrusively enable the audience to focus on several things at once: the text, the movement, the rapidly changing relationship between actor and audience, or the external noises filtering in from Mikszáth Square, which are incorporated into the performance of the day through the sensitivity of the actors. We have worked hard to build a stable and regularly returning audience base that understands Maladype's unique vision and way of thinking and can interpret it for others. Our unique theatrical approach offers our audience not just one-off experiences, but processes: introductory programs, open rehearsals and regular discussions.

This must be the result of a very conscious development process. Did you shape and select the entire company according to this principle?

Those who perform at Maladype must have above-average determination, as choosing the life of independent theatre makers is not an easy path. Motivation can come from the spirit of the theatre, the concept of the artistic director, its professional credibility, and its recognition both at home and abroad. The company's members are actors who are curious and open to change, unexpected situations, and mischief.

Are young people open to your world? Do you think the stereotype that Generation Y is less receptive to offline activities such as theatre is true?

It is often said that the youngest generation is more interested in the internet and cinema today. This is partly true, and looking at the reasons for this, I think that theatre representatives and creators are in debt to them...

What is this debt?

That theatre makers are rarely in sync with the everyday problems and everyday transformations of Generation Y! The creators themselves do not really share their insights and experiences with each other, so their theatrical offerings and stage solutions—to use Bulgakov's words—remain secondary in their freshness. Thoughts that are often abstract and shrouded in mystical fog, as well as direct statements and artistic messages, stand in the way of integrative, sensitive, and controllable joint development that is also open to young people. The theatre, as a space for the creative possibilities of shared insights, often represents an isolated and barren surface for young people who want to transpose the reality of everyday life into a new truth. We theatre people, unfortunately, have not been able to pass on certain fundamental theatrical values to them in a timely manner and with valid solutions. In this sense, theatre is most similar to native horticulture, where the experimental young generation cannot expect to breed new species, novelties, or exotic plants.

What can all this lead to? Where does collective change and redesign lead overall?

I believe that if theatre arts can be revitalized with human and professional values that we draw from the diverse and rich anthropological and cultural treasures of the world and incorporate into our own development and open-mindedness, then much more complex, extreme, and dynamic solutions can emerge in our theatres.

Leaving your comfort zone and introducing these new elements is not always risk-free. Aren't you afraid that your imported exotics will become invasive and suppress the original roots?

Every change involves risk. If a creator—no matter how skilfully they juggle their existing knowledge—does not maintain their willingness to experiment, they will inevitably begin to live off their past achievements. The relics of the past, the "things we have brought with us," are extremely important for human development, but we also need change, uncertainty, and the thrill of discovery that comes with the unknown. In Schiller's play Don Carlos, when Philip II questions change, development, and progressive thinking, Marquis Posa responds with the following sentence: "I may seem dangerous because I think above myself!" It is difficult for me to formulate a more accurate and timely answer than this. If everyone chose only the safe path, conformism associated with reduction would prevail in every case. If everyone chose only the safe path, conformism, with all its limitations, would always prevail.

How can the innovative new generation work together in the theatre with experienced, older, and perhaps more traditional artists?

I read a valid answer to this question in a book by actor Ferenc Bessenyei, who, when asked how the younger and older generations can work and create together, replied:

"We, the experienced older generation, are strong enough to carry the young people who, standing on our shoulders, tell us with their sharp vision where we should go together."

Maladype sees the directions quite clearly! What are your goals?

I would like to believe that every night we manage to add something to our audience's perspective and changing outlook. I don't think what we do is "terribly important" or "indispensable," but generating "little sparks" is a serious responsibility and challenge, and of course a joy. That's what makes our work worth doing.

Rita Jánoska, &U Magazin, 2017

Translated by Lena Megyeri

There are tall glass cups between the regular setting on the oval plexi table. Stolen beams of light from the glass plates enlighten thirteen pairs of glasses. There are excited looks. There is very tense self-control under the cowls. The bodies which are huddled up around the table, are hardly moving. They have not got faces. Only their eyes are shining. Their personalities beam over the half-light of the room. They are rocking. They are seemed to be branches which have been destroyed by storm. It is a weird, barbarian ceremony. There are weird voices. There are animal sounds of a jungle. An understandable prayer can be heard. Maybe it is Latin. They are singing a Latin psalm. There would be a secret ceremony in an underground casemate. Are they pursued early – Christians? Is it a barbaric tribe? May the satanic congregation of Huymans’ from Fleming’s novel, titled: There down, start their occult black mass? Are there thirteen people at the table? This is the last supper. Who is the Savior between them? Who is Judas? They use the cutlery in a ceremonial way. One of the monks/apostles plays a pagan rhythm with two spoons. The others start to do the same. An elf with glowing eyes appears at the middle of the table. He is similar to the hermaphrodite of Satyricon by Fellini. It is a deformed, gothic, bald forehead. Is it a man or a woman? Is it a child or an Oldster? It is enigmatically motionless. Later he jumps like an acrobat and dances solo as a ballerina.

It is School for Fools (L'école des bouffons) by Michel de Ghelderode (1898 - 1962), who is the Belgian theatrical experimental, it is the performance of Maladype Encounters Theatre by Zoltán Balázs, who is the director. The troupe has worked successfully in the Gypsy Parliament in Tavaszmező Street. They broke up after performances of The Blood Wedding by García Lorca and Jack, or the Submission by Ionesco. They are reorganised in an extended version now. They are tenants in Szkéné Theatre.

This ceremony-like play mesmerizes the audience. Once in a lifetime, magical series of actions happen in the black and yellow robes. They show us reverently and inspired the holiness of theatre. We get back the pure theatre, which is vitalized by souls who believe in game. They get their magic from the hard work, which they do together, and which has a cleaning power. The performance in Szkéné Theatre from the point of view of its power is similar to Bob Wilson’s theatrical dream-play, Letters to Queen Victora and to the orthodox choir performance, Jeremiah’s Lamentations which was directed by Anatolij Vasziljev.

The non-informative but musical, rhythmical, sensual and emotional usage of the text helps us to understand the performance of Maladype Encounters Theatre. They sing Latin (translations by Imre Pálfai), the Gypsy and non-Gypsy performers use Gypsy language to tell most of the text of the drama (translation by Lászlóné Varga and Piroska Szõcsi).

There is not any stress on what they are talking about. They do not tell a story. The ceremony is captivating. It is theatrical rite. Its philosophy is not verbal but visual. The dynamic or crawling movements enfold the room. The explosive dance interludes are stomping. Then they are moving composedly on the cramp irons on the wall. The mostly unprofessional dancers carry out András Szöllõsi’s imaginative, changing choreography. László Sáry composed the music of the mass, and accepted to do the musical direction with his enormous theatrical knowledge. Judit Gombár designed the set and costumes.

Music and text, dance and music, performance and dance melt into a unit. The coordination of different theatrical elements gives a strong experience. The cooperative troupe is a strong experience. By name: Erzsébet Soltész who has matured into a great actress, the soloist in the first part of the performance: Erika Molnár, Oszkár Nyári who sacrificed his theatrical routine, Balázs Dévai the safe one, János Balogh(during his ecstatic turning we can see that he has got dance training), Artúr Kálid, who could serve humbly, the wonderful Nóra Parti, Krisztina Sárközi who shares herself from performance to performance, the twins Hermina and Kamilla Fátyol, the strict, monastic Éva Bakos, Zoltán Oláh who plays magic rhythms with his tin pot, and Kristóf Horváth who gets immersed into the play.

During the seasons of shabby theatrical routine, when some self-flattering and self-asserting people make the performances in theatres fussy boredom, a group try to dance through a mass with great inner concentration, sing through a dance-play, take part in a wonderful, common ceremony while taking care of each other, continuing the others’ breath, initiated movement. The group is playing with an imaginary ball. All of them touch the ball differently: according to the actors’ power of fantasy and concentration, the audience can see the imagined things as real ones. The ball can fly with different dynamics, push into bodies or roll away, get its aim or not: it is charged with the invisible symbolic weight. It will be a desired arrival. It is success. It will become value. It is priority. It is power. The radiation of the troupe is getting stronger as the performers are resigning of their self-assertion and they can melt on behalf of their common aim. Who knows since then we have not seen so many considerate looks in a theatre, shining eyes because of attention to working together?!

People do not think about the fact during the performance, maybe just after it, that Gypsies and non-Gypsies in a perfect agreement working hard for art together. It can be accepted as a symbol: they are locked together in the dirt.

Algae may settle at the foot of the walls. There is minced polystyrene rubbish with weird colour. There are industrial trash, vomit, faeces and dirt. The moral and material dirt which surrounds our life. Erzsébet Soltész climbs up to the top of the wall. She gets naked. Her bald wig disappears, the young woman’s hair unfolds.

We can hear Giordano, the victorious love aria from the opera by André Chénier. The drape falls down because of its weight. There is darkness. We can see the enlightened riverbank of the Danube in Pest through the two big windows. The fresh winter air comes into the smelly room. It is not accidental that the greatest achievement of our present national theatre art was born outside the walls. It is far away from the theatres which are over supported without any control, from self-satisfied art directors without any achievement, from economic directors who operate suspiciously, and from actors who act as the representatives of companies with limited partnership.

School for Fools is a great celebratory performance.

Péter Gál Molnár, Népszabadság, 2003

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)

A school is a life-threatening institution. It is a miracle that we have survived it. If we have survived it after all, and did not leave something really important there – even if not our tooth but a similar important one, our unrepeatable possession: the unruly and incomparable individuality.

The final products of those „moulds” which are suited – forced – to us can appear as an individuality and above it: it seems to be that we would call this product as ourselves, the uniformed desolation of which can be seen when we have come up against something which we have given up, the given up of it would become the educational process itself – similar to freedom.

To the fools. To the artists. To the Gypsies. Maybe to children and the little genius too. Whose strength, fate or destiny is that they cannot do anything with these moulds, because they do not want to be poured into them as a hot and flexible something, and being stigmatized or a deviance that is cared with self-awareness, can become the last chance of something, which has been the rare privilege of human existence.

All of these cannot be known of course – knowledge is the work of schools – but we have to face up with it, and School for Fools in Maladype Encounters Theatre does this confrontation, it breaks through those barriers and gates with effortless force, which are about to form a riverbed for this strong, unconditional, mostly organic, sensually human flood. Which would be this performance itself: with its thick one and half an hour, with its incredible intensity and almost archaic strength: not a mysterious play, not the hiding Ghelderode and not even some background institution of the Spanish Escurial is shown but maybe the inarticulate, common and heavy experience which Dionysia meant.

The theatre. Before it was educated.

It is a moment of grace between the theatre evenings in Budapest, but as in the case of every grace, here severe conditions have to be fulfilled too. The first – and maybe the most important one – that a real community introduced itself, which was able to „celebrate” this aesthetic orgy. And they did it with that self-confidence, that its dynamism, strength, cohesion – but not exclusively, and because of this, it is even more fertilizing – come from mostly the artistic traditions of the Gypsies, from the wonderful treasury of it, charming sense of rhythm and form, which feature and virtue can be the fact that it has not got into any „common” or consensus-like ones.

And here – whether we want it or not – have to stay for a while: because a really important turn can be felt in the performance of Maladype, which points towards a social hope from art, however nowadays our discourses and social institutes are talking about to give it up. After all, here „Gypsy theatre” (of course Maladype is not about it) is not about how to make a ghetto into a cosy place, and it does not serve the absolution of the majority, with the fact that it can fulfil this „condition” too, it has not broadened the panoptic of the so called „decoration Gypsies” at all, and we have not daydreamt about the flavours of late romanticism, not even „those who make us to catch up” are improper, or the hopelessly likeable liberals polemise with the „huge” intuition – but here someone can see from inside simply with talent, understands and interprets the light and shadowy parts of this self-willed world –as the whole world. Finally, it is not about – mostly likeable – surface, but about the depth. Not the strange and isolated one, but that one which is connected to common existence and tradition with thousands of threads. Not the „human one” which is found in the „Gypsy”, but the anthropological illusion, which is valid and endangered, which existence can be felt not only thanks to them, but finally it can be hoped too. For one and half an hour.

It must be between the conditions that a young man from Máramarossziget can do it all, who had to see from out- and inside at the same time, that what could majority and minority mean, how could thousands of mental crossroads cross each other on its connection points, and that it could be not only the possibility of melancholy, but as its inverse, from it, it could become inspirational power which deepened up until desperation, from need to virtue, or even more: a theatrical performance.

From which the young director, Zoltán Balázs was locked during his growing, as much as many conditions of spiritual and financial freedom, but there must have been something, which could stand in for theatre for him, or even everything that theatre could become – adventure, dream, risk, trick and community -: the travelling circus. In that way his fate and ménage could save him to „grow into” the common ones easily, because of his experiences, to think about the conventions as the synonym of theatre, to get educated in the school of „normal” as the follower of the norms – and it could establish his decision that when he could finally decide, he chose School for Fools instead.

Finally it belonged to the grace that he could become an art apprentice of important – even brilliant – norm bakers: Wilson, Vasziljev, József Nagy, next to them he could go on to get to know something, that had already attracted him irresistibly in the ménage, but the attraction of which in theatre could not be as unconditional – at least on those stages, where the masters started to teach Balázs in the college. Maybe that is why he would like to direct and set School for Fools at first there in Vas Street, with their form teacher, Miklós Benedek in the role of knight Folial, just to tell the secret or die. And while the plan could not be fulfilled then and there, meanwhile the talented young man was „forced” into the course of directors too, and in that way the school itself provided (and back) the artistic legitimacy for him.

After all the school which was created by Maladype has become more than just one chapter of an artistic „improvement novel”, however it has still been wearing the mask of Ghelderode, but in front of wider and more important horizons.

But to turn both the play and the original association of the theatre backward, to the basic tone of the production the performance starts with a picture of a serious rite. The monastery which is indicated in the play, here is not only a set, but almost the community itself – twelve cowled, singing, strictly moving actors summon that something, which Ghelderode – not with a little irony – flashes in different types of „human waste”, which is the ingredient for the fools, and feels and hints the one and only God behind different types of images. The choir, the black and yellow tones, than the strange humming made by the cups create besides the rite, the atmosphere of the weird ceremony, which the number of the fools – fewer than in the original play – interpret perfectly: if two of them are deleted, twelve remain there, in that way the archaic reference of the Master and the pupils - the last supper – fleshes the „school” which can be felt at the origin of the rite.

Maybe its silly up until the blasphemy, brave paraphrase can be the fact, that from the bowl or under the bowl the thirteenth, who has been waited for, climbs up: the Teacher himself, who must die, as if the sacrifice is made the other way around – here the food and drink have become a body, and not backwards. The incorporation gets a new meaning, the archaically familiar, extremely strong rite of self – adaptation, which, after it, follows the performance up until its end, then on its peak, when they get the secret, when they grab and give it up, digest and vomit it, gives a punctual meaning to that, what the verbalism is about – as the tool of teaching, but as the text of play too – become visibly insufficient. Can the secret „be told”, and the „transfer” does not need a more drastic and unconditional form, meaning – not an explanation but appearance?

Since words are less suitable for that, they must be the most necessary ones – and when Ghelderode talks about „language”, he must refer to it. His pupils try to kill their master, Folial with „language”, because, he has made a promise which could not be held. May language have any work with words there? As the language of the performance is not about words for sure, not an occasion to understand it verbally, and it is not even about the play which opens on a traditional way – which is indicated punctually by the fact, that here three languages become the only one (and one becomes three): Latin, Gypsy and Hungarian. The importance is not about the language of speech because its meaning does not come from it. The performance summons the dead language of the rite as a chance of understanding, the Latin language, which is the „lingua franca” of the traditional European culture, but the Gypsy language which is composed organically, can counterpoint it, and it happily and continuously brakes the fixed rules of its usage. When the dialogues are Hungarian, finally the cognitive understanding can begin, so we can follow „what it is all about”, if the word itself does not make us to understand that it is not the tool of understanding and do not leave it to inform us.

Since neither the education, nor the secret, neither the silliness nor the theatre - so nothing which is important – can be told and (or) explained according to the performance, but it can be accepted, lived over and passed on. The fools’ wish to be understood, to have the secret stated is as pointless as the audience’s – always fulfilled – wish for verbal „clear”. It is not enough. If there is something to be studied, then its imperfection – or its limited nature at least – it has to be studied, and the other „language” can help it, and makes this recognition experimental. The music. László Sáry, with his inventions, which create the dramaturgy of the performance, can complete and counterpoint the acoustic features of the three manners of speech, and he creates the dramatic surrounding of the sounding with visual effects which seem to be improvisational. Then he stretches it all again and again to the last, and the musical instruments playing on the stage help him to ensure the authentic sounding. The spoons. And the tin pot of water.

Of course the virtuoso of these instruments is needed too, who becomes the main character and companion of this organism studying process both with the spoons from the table of the last supper and with the pot from the heaven. (Zoltán Oláh). First of all he helps the audience to understand and follow all of that start to happen besides the words.

The three lines of the performance become ritual, sacred and banal that way, which are melting into each other: the almost religious elevation blesses the banal things many time, while rite always becomes individualised, gets separated from the its basic form, in its personality there are beautiful faults – and because of this from time to time many humour and playfulness, stage invention and wonderful associative system interlace the progressing happenings. The human victim of it finally – as the pawn of the pupils’ rebellion – fixes the performance, which tries to stretch out the frames, into archetypal ones.

Its dynamism is captivating because of this, then it is increased and composed the whole whirling, manipulated by the servant, who almost became a victim: Galgüt (Erika Molnár), thanks to his working. Because with his virtuoso and tireless conducting he gives opportunity for whirling again and again – whether it is about dissatisfaction, disgust, carving, rebellion or its hopelessness – but he translates it into the language of the performance, and that’s why he becomes the orientation point, energy source and weird interpreter of the whole whirling. Above it: thanks to an astonishing poetical intermezzo we can see, that he gives the birth to the Master, Folial too – since who else can be the Instructor than a creature by a pupil? This reason and possibility are enough to kill, whom he gave birth to: the strings of Folial’s marionette have to be cut, to fulfil the fools – pupils’ wish and fear as the discharge of the incomparable tension. And his dark purposes too.

Ghelderode characterize the fools with names, masks and determined features too – according to the categories of teratology, the subject of freaky ones -, but the performance is more resigned and braver than him in case of description. Here a creature can be seen, who becomes barer and barer, an individualised soul as it gets away from the common, uniformed black-yellow, gets bare, takes off his clothes (however he is a little bit awkward in his pants and bikini), and shows us that if the plain personality takes off everything which is conventional and uniform, it can become the place of silliness, which can have as many kinds as many people there are. That’s how the dark skinned and the pretty one, the one who speaks sign language and the similar siblings, the one with big ear and the other one with oily look are formed – all of us – the pupils of this school.

The school introduce itself as growing out of case studies, and with the help of virtuoso etudes, as the place of the extremes of the individuality, in action series, which are built on one another, in episodes, which flash up and paraphrase dramatic happenings. Between these, there is the fatal seriousness of the play: the strict and wide playing with the invisible ball of the „secret” – but there is the fatal narcosis of the sensuality, as it gets away from a woman’s (Galgüt) lap, than flashes up the crying which gets into blindness: the drama of the red eyes, than the archaic cure of it too, as Galgüt licks over the pupils’ eyes: in that way she shows us what we have to know, that with the help of the tongue we can see.

Although all happenings belong to the community, the only case for the appearance of the individuality is: the community, in its cohesion and absolutism, in its grabbing and warmth. This archaic absolutism of the coexistence somehow keeps the „natural warmth” of the Gypsies, which has mostly slipped away from the structures of the modernised and common society. The ingenuity of it evokes that in this world there are no meaningless moments, so anything can become a tool, equipment, metaphor: in that way moss, pot, cramp iron can get filled with soul – as the world once populated with souls, can become memory and archaeology. In which people are presented in a different way with their own bodies, and between other bodies too, the space, place, closeness and different meanings of which is also looking for the edges of the individuality: in a holding, hugging, rolling together, going head-to-head.

The thickening air of sweating, panting and closeness, the energy which is hardly tactile, the appearing Dionysia show relatively, that – normally – the theatre has meant for us so far, the hiding and styling of it all. The school. The individuality.

The schoolmaster appears as the expressive metaphor of it, the main character in black, the stitched elf with Ghelderode’s words, the owner of the secret – Folial.

He opens the horizontally filled place of the performance vertically randomly: as he arrives into the actions from the deep (under the table), and then leaves the room to look down from upstairs – somewhere between the iron traverses beyond the stage. With his unexpected – and virtuous – backflip gives meaning to this vertical division – our world can be completed only with its depth and height – banal things can frame sacral ones.

The play tells us that the art of silliness is raised up to the level of science by Folial, and this pale gnome with his deformed, longed forehead is seemed more to be the elf of the theory than an artist, however both his flip and his whole movement indicate that, once he has been pushed off the art. His power is absolute and embarrassing, which appears here only reflexively: mainly the waiting, starving for the secret and desire flash up something in the performance, which is followed by Folial’s never-ending monologues – which are there to cover the information, to put something off, to avoid it, as speech does it too.

Galgüt does it differently; he has the strongest identity both on stage and in school, who is ready to take his master’s place. In the play he foresees that they would like to kill him – while in the performance they show it by cutting the strings of his collapsing marionette figure. At the same time he turns it into the drama of the past: this was Galgüt’s original sin, his servant killed the Master to take his place. In Ghelderode’s text Folial gets another life, however he hardly dies because of the memory quoted in the drama: because of the lively pain of heartbreak, but after, he has come to, he tells what he thinks to be the secret of art: the cruelty. The marionette of Maladype will not move again – not like the elf, who lives and moves, and tells us the secret: who we are watching as Folial is his daughter in reality: Veneranda. She took the place of her father as becoming the Master, and lives on because of it to tell and express what the importance of art according to her is: the suffering.

All of these cannot be anything else than the replacement of one type of melodrama with another one, the exchange of an always risky one-word conclusion with a more useful one - if the performance itself does not make a stunningly rich sense to this banality which is over of all these verbal statements, „secret”, conclusion. Then come the „deconstruction” of the elf immediately, followed by the claimed release of the secret and with the shock, after Folial’s death – first the longed forehead can be seen as a mask, then the charmingly thick and female hair unravel under it, then the black magic robe loosens, unbuttons, and as the gentle commander „Master” is getting back to his home height, from the gnome becomes a girl, from the elf comes a woman (Erzsébet Soltész). As she is hardly stretching with her back into the iron traverse on the wall of the Szkéné, and evokes the modern Christ with his fear of heights by Dali – meanwhile the fragile, strong body of a girl flashes and the darkness of the stage answers suddenly to the light coming from her skin.

At the same time the drapes fall down, and at the end of the magic the reality can get in through the large windows: the river Danube, the bridge and the illuminated building of the Economic School across the river, during the late night of Pest. There is not any secret. There is not any Master either. There is School, orphancy and danger. There is loneliness – and there is holding on to each other, once again, during the applause.

There is Maladype.

András Nagy, Színház, 2003

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)

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)

E. Ionesco: Jack or the Submission; M. de Ghelderode: School for Fools

An important theatrical value was born again on the periphery. An occasional troupe of professions, amateurs, Gypsies, and non-Gypsies (which represents a rare level of cooperation) has shown two performances, which use a very different language than any other, which we have got used to in Hungary. Zoltán Balázs, a really talented director made both of them.

The Maladype Gypsy theatre has drawn the attention of the public with two important and really valuable performances. Zoltán Balázs – the young director with a new voice – started working out the interpretation of the play from the point of view of the characteristics and relations of the environment in which the performances were made. In case of staging he speaks about the personal and social problems of the Gypsy identity, both in Jack and in School for Fools – in a way that he avoids the danger of any kind of didactic and publicistic aspects It comes from greatly the fact that the director’s thoughts are precisely over thought in case of both performances and they use a theatrical language which combines many kind of sensual effects.

Who tries to be himself

Jack or The submission - as most of Ionesco’s plays – is built on a series of linguistic absurdity. The banal situation - in this present case the family argument, and the purpose to make the boy to marry – is reclassified as the parable for the absurdity of existence with the help of a text, which is full of word transformations, linguistic idiocies and logical absurdities too. The family is about to disinherit Jack, because he is unwilling to state that he loves the fries with bacon. Then when they finally made him to tell his confession, they immediately want him to marry but according to Jack „his beloved one”, who was chosen by his family, is not ugly enough, because she has only two noses and not three. Fortunately, the girl’s family has another „only daughter” too, and the woman with three noses – with her vision of the foal with flaming mane – really enchants Jack.

Zoltán Balázs’s direction is not built on the verbal jokes of the weird text, mainly because the greatest part of the performance is in Gypsy language. The director searched for scenic solutions which can be associated with the linguistic effects of the play, but which can function independently of them too. He builds mostly on the rhythm, on the rhythm, which works in symbiosis with the speech and stage movements. (The basic for both of them is created by the pot – playing sounds, which come from outside of the scenery.)

The speech, which is sometimes slowed down, made faster, broken up, prolonged, is connected to special movements, sequences of movements, which in their complexity form a really grotesque and weird world.

But the director translates not only the mood of the text in to the sensual language of the theatrical effects but with the help of them makes the interpretation of the play clear too. The first part of the performance is built on the contrast between Jack and his family. The family appears as a group of amorph beings in white wigs who are – usually moving together – flickering back and forth in the area. They are making stranger and stranger movements, all of their words are followed by annoyingly rank gestures. Jack watches them calmly, essentially he is stationary. As if, his existence has a different rhythm. As if, he is closed into the shell of his minority report and resistance. We can feel it from the text of the play and this feeling is visualised by the performance too: we can see Jack mainly in a glass cage throughout the play. It can show that the only constant thing is his frailty and vulnerability, the shameless one is put on stage. At the beginning, Jack is calm, he sits on his knees, and later he reacts with different kind of posture changing and movements to the scolds, reasons, provocations. Once he relaxes and then clings to the wall of the plexiglass cage. Sometimes hands in gloves reach into the cage, as if they tried to make a harsh operation on him, then they tense strings as if they tried to pull the rebellious child as a marionette.

In the performance of the Maladype, Jack is well seemingly a Gypsy boy, who has no other special features than he tries to be himself. He does not have green hair, as Ionesco wrote it, his movements are natural, his gestures are really human ones. His defiance and anger are those too. This also forms a sharp contrast between him and his family members, who try to make him similar to them, and each members of which has something disgustingly strange in them, weirdly puppet-like something. Their lumpy, torned, repeated monotonous movements give this feeling. The mother (Erzsébet Soltész) who leads the family with energy, for example, carries a puppet child on her back throughout the play. The father (Balázs Dévai) speaks with echo. The grandfather (Árpád Bogdán) however never tells anything but many times conjures table tennis balls from his mouth. The younger sister (Nóra Parti) is pregnant. Then she lays in front of the cage with straddled legs, and the jellied, sticky rags, to which she has given birth, throws onto the glass wall, while she is repeating the word: chronometrability. The scene gives meaning to Ionesco’s weird misstatement: Jacqueline warns Jack because of the disgusting rules of decay, according to which the rebellion is as meaningless as a protest against death.

It seems like Roberte, the bride (Erika Molnár) brings the message of death too. „My basic nature is very happy” - she says it on a sepulchral voice. All through the play she speaks dry, and in that way she forms a contrast between her sentences which are full of passion and visons and her speech.

Her movement is slow mostly: weather she stands statically or moves gracefully in her highly decorated bride dress from the 19th century, and her head appears from time to time through its lower or upper cracks. (The earlier one is like an elf, who looks out onto the world.) Roberte is the prisoner of the bride dress as Jack is of his own cage. The girl’s vision about the burning horse which is galloping in the town, signals the message of death too, but in a paradoxic way it frees the strengths of life: Jack himself is galloping together with the story, then gets out of his cage, goes close to the girl, then starts ecstatically playing hide-and-seek with her: the two childish beings disappear, they are getting themselves, chasing each other through the cracks of the dress, which can stand on its own too. Finally, the lovers meet in the cage. The strange words of the Gypsy and Hungarian dialogue can meet each other repeatedly in the word of cat. Everything is cat: for the two distant people, who have got out the similar lifeless world, this would become a common language. But unexpectedly the members of the family get into the cage too, they fill the entire place there, as if they do not even let this relationship breath, which could hold out the hope to a new life.

The last day

The latest performance of Maladype goes on the way, they have begun. In case of School for Fools the accurate (defined by the environment of the troupe) interpretation of the play creates the form which is built firmly, used consistently, but it is more complex, and plays in a wider register than in the case of Jack. The grotesque plays stay there too, but the musical forms are strengthen and scenes are fulfilled.

The performance starts as if we got into a ceremony of monastery. Beings in robes are kneeing around a glass table, there are glass plates and drawn, fragile glasses in front of them, the faces which are flashing out of the robes are enlightened by the lights, which get though up the plates, these are drawing the faces a little bit ghostly and frightening. They sing in Latin language spiritualized, with piety and otherwise for some reason strangely too. The feeling of a monastery is broken by weirds elements: first the beings in robes start playing music on the glasses, then on the cutlery too. Than as if, the showing up of the cutlery became the part of the liturgy.

The ceremony if led by the Master’s servant, by Galgüt (Erika Molnár). He is speaking – still in Latin – to the students about the dirty life from which Folial got them together and how he has been teaching them over the years. But he still owes them with the greatest secret. This is the final day in the school and Galgüt promises that the Master teaches them today the importance of any art, gets the veil of the great secret finally. However, Folial (Erzsébet Soltész) is nowhere. Finally, his head appears from under the lid of the bowl in the middle, from there comes out this strange, bald elf.

His weird appearance interprets strangely the Latin ceremony: it looks like as if, we see the last supper – thirteen of them were sitting around the table – where the Master himself was served as the main course. Galgüt and Folial’s Hungarian dialogue strengthens this grotesque parallel: the Master is talking about a bad dream, he has a feeling that his students will kill him today.

Galgüt, the eternal second one, this harsh being who is tempted by the attraction of power, is really preparing a conspiracy against the Master. He warns the students because of their origin, tries to rise up their anger because of their derogatory fates. The robes are put down, and with it the students have become naked: under their yellow-black hoods, colourful pants and bikinis are flashing up. A tin pot falls into one of their arm, which he begins to hit intuitively. A strangely moderate, hesitant Gypsy song was born from this rhythm. The performance changes language too, from now on the students are speaking Gypsy with each other (and with Galgüt too). These simple ideas make it clear that they are really Gypsies, who have not even known anything about their origin, and were brought up in a sophisticated culture which is totally different from their roots. Galgüt conjures an imaginary ball and throws it into the surprised group. Slowly they start to play with it. The grotesque chasing, which gradually starts, indicates the born of individualism in fact: who has the ball always gets out of the others, stays on his own, realises himself, but the others jump on him all the time, try to get the imaginary toy. Finally, the freed anger turns the Gypsies against Galgüt: chase him up on the wall, there each of them throw him with the imaginary ball as a weapon.

Galgüt tries to turn against the Master these freed anger. In the original play the servant provokes the Master with the play which is performed by the fools: tries to brake his soul with that they play again the death or his daughter. Zoltán Balázs’s direction thinks again this turn bravely. Here Galgüt wants to exposure the Master in front of the students, to show that he is not the one that he is thought to be. For the “performance” Folial’s marionette gives the basic tool, which gets into many sticky situations – walking through the symbolic stages of life – then finally Galgüt cuts the its strings. Folial cries up, frightens then: my dad! It is not a game anyway but the reproduction of a crime: earlier Galgüt killed the original Folial, but her daughter, Veneranda – to bring on her father’s knowledge – gave up herself and lived on in Folial’s skin. This exposure is shocking for all of them: Veneranda takes off her gnome dress, lets her hair down and looks down the students from the top. The secret – she begins and falls into the deep before she can tell anything else. Her fall takes the whole scene too, the stage of Szkéné gets naked too, we can see the windows, through them we have a view onto the River Danube and the city. There is no secret anyway, that is the life itself, which even though falls into death, is going on and on forever.

The group of wonderful pictures, musical flows, ceremony-like elements and grotesque plays form that complex theatrical language, which is used in the performance. But these are not the only ones which make this performance a special one. But the group, that plays with whole devotion, that gives the impression of a coherent troupe, despite of the fact that the actors come from many different places. The secret of the secrets is that: how can such an important theatre be born from hardly nothing on the periphery?

István L. Sándor, Ellenfény, 2003

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)

When we enter the room, the students are sitting around the table. There are twelve of them, the thirteenth, the master is not there with them. In the middle, we can see his servant, Galgüt, with his leading the others get into the ceremony. They, the table, the glasses of different colours (or filled with different liquids) on it are enlighten with filtered lights. The devotional seriousness of the ceremony can be felt. There is tension in the air, the audience can feel the silence before the explosion even thought they do not know Ghelderode’s play.

Ghelderode is a hard writer, not only for the Hungarian theatre which is based on realistic traditions, but anyway too. Its „hardness” cannot be explained by traditional stage patterns. However its poetic strength is fascinating, the lack of its scenic experience is obvious, anyway this night does not belong to the poetic genius, who is dilettante from the point of view of the stage. Ghelderode’s play has dramatic accelerator, glowing tension in them, their metaphors and symbols have their meaning on stage too. However, their theoretical mind-set can make their situations complicated sometimes, and can make some pictures and scenes didactic, but it can be cured by bigger and smaller dramaturgical interventions. The main problem is the layering of these plays; in case of Ghelderode everything can be led back to ontological reasons, but they appear only in the deeper layers of the drama, their illustration is a hard exercise, without them the meaning of the play can become really simplified. Most of his plays (the short and closed Escurialra as much as the long and opened Barabbas, or even in the present performed School for Fools) typically show a ritualised world, in the depth of it the uncontrollable, magical instincts live, and they break open and explode the disciplined world of the forms. Therefore the style and the tone is really eclectic, and only one layer (one tone) can appear in the play, which does not only simplify the meaning of the play but can easily make the play incomprehensible (mostly this happened with the second performance of Ghelderode’s play: titled The Grim Reaper is roaming, the play with its new translation became a partly funny satiric performance, which could not get its meaning).

One of the important worth of Maladype’s performance, directed by Zoltán Balázs, that they could find a form, with the help of which the layering can be shown properly. Of course, I do not think that the director would want to solve the Ghelderode-issue, because obviously he did not search a troupe for this play, but a play for the troupe. Moreover, the play itself appears in the performance as a material, a starting point. However, the troupe turns to the text with the awareness, indicated by multilingualism. For outsiders there is not any importance of the fact that the Maladype works as a Gypsy ethnic troupe. (If the performance in a direct way, despite of the theatrical forms uses the ethnic identity, it can be interpreted as folklore.)

Their Gypsy identity (or its symbolic meaning) otherwise gets an emphasized function. The community of the play is locked of the world, and they form a Gypsy group, the members of which are cut from their roots, who were raised up in a culture, totally different from their genes. The riot against the Master, is the riot of the instincts too. Which is, in case of Ghelderode, the conflict between the monastery life and the desire for the worldly existence, here is the clash between the elevated but strange culture and the instinctive one, their own, mostly eradicated identity. Its devastating force is even greater because it happens inside the person (and the community), so it is against not only Folial but the community too.

According to the basic conception the performance uses three languages. Only the Master and Galgüt’s dialogues are in Hungarian, the ceremonies, shown at the beginning of the play, use Latin, while the rebellious fools speak Gypsy. Besides the verbal appearance of the layering, the director can change the mechanism of acceptance: the audience is unable to try to understand all the little moments of the play, they have to feel the direction of the play instead: the strength and devotion of the ritual ceremonies, the strength of the Gypsies which can explode it, the process of raising up gut feelings, the enthusiastic joy of the play, the shocking feeling of the lack of secret. All of it is mediated by a well-built gesture language, and musicality which penetrate the whole performance. This musicality can be felt in the verbal speech too: Galgüt and the students’ dialogue is made live and tensed by the changing tones and different accents. The musicality of the speech is completed by real music: the voices made by the glasses indicates the later free music and rhythm. After the students take off their uniforms, there is a colourful group in front of us: from there on with the release of identity the play and music release too at the same time. The rhythm is given by a pot, used on a virtuous way, the monastery movement and speech which are strictly structured are replaced by movement and speech which are self-oblivious, freely and personally applied. But with it not only the group but the individuals too can become conscious. Besides the taking of the uniforms, it is indicated by the playing with a (invisible for the audience) ball: who gets the toy, immediately get out of the community. From now on, we can understand the ending of the play, which indicates that there is no mythical secret, people can find this secret only in themselves. The real secret is not that Folial is not that one he seems to, but the confrontation with the reality, which finally resulted in the fall of the Master (but probably not that way, how Galgüt planed it before), it does not reveal anything; everybody has to come up against their own secret, like Folial does it. This ending may be a little bit commonplace (which is not Ghelderode’s, but Zoltán Balázs’s invention) but has an exceptionally strong theatrical effect: after being confronted with the puppet show, Folial (who according to Balázs’s version, is Folial’s daughter) falls of the platform, gets the curtains with himself too, behind them there is nothing, more punctually we can see the Danube-Bend at night.

The well-built theatrical language would have small effect, it was not for the actor group, who can use it on a high standard. The play has effectively two characters who rise up from the group: Folial and Galgüt. The earlier is formed by Erzsébet Soltész with sensitivity towards the grotesque and tragedy, without any frills, the other one is played by Erika Molnár with her intensity and vibe. The group of the fools is played by eleven actors - Zoltán Oláh, Balázs Dévai, Oszkár Nyári, Éva Bakos, Nóra Parti, János Balog, Artúr Kálid, Kriszta Sárközi, Kristóf Horváth, Kamilla Fátyol, Hermina Fátyol – and they form a heterogeneous troupe from any point of view. Between them we can find actors of prestigious professional theatres, and amateurs who are starting to practice theatrical playing. During the play the professional differences cannot be felt, the actors on stage show a perfect interplay, from which any of them can step out significantly from time to time. They take care of one another, build on each other, it can be felt that this play is important for them, in that way the identity of the play can get through the strictly constructed form.

Personality and technology, constructive invention and performer strength, intellectuality and passion are connected really fortunately to each other in the performance, which stands out the offer of the season because of the building of a theatre language which differs from the common ones, and the formation of workshop of the troupe, and which can prove the possibility to perform Ghelderode’s plays.

Balázs Urbán, Criticai Lapok, 2003

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)

Maladype – Encounters Theatre – solved the accepted exercise. School for Fools, which was performed in Szkéné Theatre, is proved to be a permanent experience. The actors play Ghelderode’s play in Latin, Hungarian and Gypsy language. Because only a few of us can understand all the three languages, the performance can show that theatre still can be as much as ceremonial as a mental exercise.

The students in the school for fools would like to know the secret, about which all education should be. To learn the secret of life they are even intended to kill. They want to kill their master, the best of all the fools. They think – maybe that is why they are still students – that the secret can be told by words. In the parallel story the medieval mood is changed by the air of our everyday life: the castle walls of Judit Gombár’s set are mossy and suddenly they are turned into mouldy cottages, and the Gypsy children, who are playing with a ball, are searching for the secret. And what is the secret? It turns out too at the end of the play: the veil, which covers the glass wall of Szkéné, falls down, and in the dark background suddenly enters the city with its lights, rivers and bridges. There is a human body in front of it. The secret is nearer than we can think.

The two main characters’, Erzsébet Soltész and Erika Molnár’s strong and suggestive performances suit well into Zoltán Balázs’s concept as a director: the theatre is more than group of words told on the stage.

Csaba Horváth, Válasz.hu, 2003

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)

The most well-known theatre critic of the country told that the performance of the Maladype Encounters Theatre, School for Fools, is the greatest achievement of the national theatre art nowadays.

I have not written theatre reviews for many years, so I do not want to give a professional rating. I can only tell modestly, that the dynamism, the movement, the music and the specific, original rite of the human voice in the performance had a great effect on me too. For the Hungarian theatregoers Michel de Ghelderode’s play is mostly unknown. According to Zoltán Balázs’s direction it melts into one rhythm and vision with the usage of the Latin, Hungarian and Gypsy languages, and people can hardly get away from its effect. In autumn I watched Ionesco’s Jack or The Submission, performed by this troupe, which they played mostly in Gypsy language in the theatre hall of the Gypsy Parliament, which has really limited sources. (School for Fools is played in the Szkéné of the BME) I felt that time too that this troupe speaks a different language in the full and figurative sense of the words, than most of the national theatres, and it deserves the attention of the audience, who got enough of mass manipulation.

Normally nobody cares about the actors’ origin in a theatrical group. Maladype Encounters Theatre usually plays their performances in Gypsy language, for a long time they had performed in the building of the Gypsy Parliament, so it cannot be accidental that most or the players are Gypsies too. Women and men who bravely accept not their origin but their ethnical affiliations. More notable that others of them are Hungarian. Known about the conditions of the national theatre life it is not secondary that in this troupe professional actors, educated dancers and amateurs perform together. The secret of the original and successful theatrical language is that Maladype is really the theatre of encounters. Gypsies and non-Gypsies, professionals, half-professionals and amateurs meet in the performances which composed liturgically.

Even the roughest nationalist usually tolerate the minorities’ folk-performances. The members of the groups are strictly come from the given minority group, their programme consists of traditional songs and dances. The audience of the given majority group can see calmly, that nobody hurts the minorities, as in their traditional costumes they can bravely care about their folk art. The protection of folk traditions has its importance, but in connection with these performances I have a ghetto-like feeling. People sit down with different expectations in case of a national ruten folk night and for example in case of a Hamlet performance. Maladype breaks up with this sheme. They bravely undertake its possibility to from a production in Gypsy and Hungarian language, with Gypsy and non-Gypsy actors’ common work. Which does not want to become a simply good Gypsy performance.

Besides self-expression, its aim is to show a new voice and to renew the universal Hungarian Theatre Art. It is possible that Páter Gál Molnár exaggerates good-natured, and there can be better alternative or theatrical performances in Hungary. But Maladype is truly one of the best, on its own right and not because it is good to be tolerated with the Gypsies of the troupe.

In Hungary, the Gypsy public figures in public life or in media appear mostly because of their Gypsy origin, in typical Gypsy roles. Besides the traditional musicians, nowadays mostly as minority politics, who care only about Gypsy cases and report in connection with minority questions. Of course, their job is very necessary. Great that the greatest opposition has three Gypsy politics, who got into the legislation office. Thanks for their oppositional roles they have great possibility to ask their voters professional questions and besides this the interests of those Gypsies who vote for the right with their active work in the parliament and in the committee. Unfortunately, the most well-known Gypsy politics of FIDESZ has not appeared so far in the work of the Parliament, with all his efforts he tries to get back the leading position of the minority council. Good to hear that the earlier Gypsy political woman of the Horn government is a deputy state secretary now and does not deal with minority cases but with the social conditions of the old ones in the ministry. It is a modest beginning, which hopefully will have an impressive continuation. When more and more Gypsy politics care about usual political and professional questions instead of minority ones, we will get closer to the normality.

After all we should reach that the presence of Gypsy public figures would become natural on the field of culture and other aspects of public life too. On the level of everyday gossips it is whispered about from singers, winners of the Olympic Games, up to high levelled politics and so on that they have Gypsy origin. According to the free choice of identity everybody has the right to accept or not any of their ancestors’ ethnicity. There can be thousands of reasons why somebody would like to fit into the majority nation, and no outsiders have the right to questioned it or argue about it in public

For the collective emancipation of the national Gypsies it is necessary that more and more professional and successful public figures accept their own Gypsy roots. Even more important to see the public success of those communities in which Gypsies and non-Gypsies work and play together naturally. After the win of the National French Football team even the silliest rassistic French people thought about to exile the black top scorer from the national eleven. There is still a long route in front of us to become natural the presence of the well-trained, successful Gypsies on the fields of Hungarian political system, culture and economy. Those fulfil the greatest part of it, who try to create equal opportunities in the educational system of nursery and primary schools for Gypsy children. We have to be happy if others in case of high-levelled art, now with the renewal of the theatrical language, create real equality for Gypsy artists. To use the phrase of the modern public language of our political system: Come on, Maladype!

Gyula Hegyi, Népszava, 2003

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)

The effect of an evening in a theatre always depends on two of us: on the play and the audience. In case of failure, we can never exclude that maybe the later one is wrong. (However, I cannot swear it.) I would like to state it in connection with the performance, School for Fools by Maladype Encounters Theatre, because I hardly anything understood from the performance. I simply could not understand what is going in the deserted theatre room of Szkéné late in the evening. Therefore, in my report I would like to write down the performance, because as an experience I can share only the sense of helplessness and exclusion with the Nice Reader.

Maladype performs Michel de Ghelderode’s, the Belgian writer of the XX. century, play School for Fools with Zoltán Balázs’s direction. But those, who do not know this play, will not know it after this performance too. Maybe they can foresee the story, which is going on in Flanders in the XVI. century, where the students of the school for fools with Galgüt’s, – tell this way – the teaching assistant’s, leading play conspiracy against their master, against Folial, and with the help of an evil play would like to kill him. The dark, poetic play reports from an extremely and fatally bad world. From it Zoltán Balázs forms, maybe a little selfish and self-serving, but truly artistic and warm theatrical evening.

When the audience walk into the room, and sit down on the wooden stairs, on the so-called auditorium, the actors have already dived in the playing. They are kneeing around a plexiglass table, in front of them there are plates, cutleries, napkins and long stemmed glasses, filled with colourful liquids. There are twelve players in similar costumes – they are wearing black and yellow, stylized, hooded robes – and their faces flash up from the black. The merging and overlapping figures are intoning droningly on an ununderstandable language, which they are speaking later on. I can hear densely and understand some Latin words, but people hardly understand that it is really Latin; that actors can use a dead language so vividly, on a gabbled and slubberer way. This strange ceremonial choir murmurs, recites and polemizes for nearly half an hour, they follow Erika Molnár’s commands, told on her assertive alto voice, who seems to be a chorus or cult leader. And while they are getting background music from a pot, from glasses – later from the fallen tin pot – the different characters are slightly separated. One of them cannot speak, but signs (Éva Bakos plays it). There are two little, chit-chatting girls (Hermina Fátyol and Kamilla Fátyol). Oszkár Nyári hiss at those who try to interrupt all the time. Nóra Parti is seemed to express disapproval always on her deliberate alto voice. But it is not known what they are talking about.

The properly choreographed ritual is finished by the act of taking the tableware off. Then in the middle of the table a bald head, with elongated skull and bloody eyes, appears which is going on in a small, fragile body. He is Folial, the master, who is played by Bözse Soltész, she refines perfectly the buffoon professor’s physical, emotional, spiritual tortures. (As the young actress appears as gnome old man is acrobatic too: en passant she shows two handsprings.) Folial and Galgüt’s dialogue is in Hungarian, from there on we can feel where we are, and against whom we are. The graduate fool students are preparing for a good-bye party, and they are talking again ununderstandably. (As I learn it later, from there most of the performance is on Gypsy language.)

The set, designed by Judit Gombár, is widened immediately by the lights. Mossy and mouldy walls appear, on is the students are climbing up from both sides, while Galgüt is giving a birth to a marionette, a Folial like figure, in the middle. He hangs this puppet on the doorframe and under it the group is leaving the room. When they get back, they throw down their robes, and in red swimsuits, surrounded by colourful veils, and they arrange themselves into different shapes. They are climbing, running, turning, laying, concentrating, playing with the invisible ball with bloody faces. Finally Galgüt gets them together to play the celebratory theatrical performance to Folial, at least its version by Zoltán Balázs. The master, hanging on the wall, is watching the sinister play performed by the puppet, at the end of it Galgüt cuts the strings of the puppet. Folial fall crying on the dead puppet, so on her father, because at that time turns out that Folial is not Folial – he was killed a long time ago – but she is Folial’s daughter, Veneranda, who puts her father’s form and role on herself. Soltész climbs on the top of the wall, during it she gets naked into a woman, and in the pose of the crucified Jesus she is about to tell the secret, the secret of high-levelled art, when she falls down. The black draperies, which close the area, fall down with her, and they open a view through the arced window onto the dark Danube and the picture of the evening bund of Pest. Maybe there is a secret too, but it is an impressive stage effect too anyway.

In case of School for Fools by Maladype, many things are enigmatic but it is obvious that the actors (besides those I have mentioned: János Balogh, Balázs Dévai, Kristóf Horváth, Artúr Kálid, Zoltán Oláh and Krisztina Sárközi) are presented with extreme intensity, attention and discipline, devotion, belief, on a transfigured way. It is good for them.

Andrea Stuber, AmaroDrom, 2003

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)