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)