A mystical atmosphere welcomes everybody who enter the Bárka Theatre on the performance of Theomachia, from the strange deep-like area dusk and whispers arrive, while we find our seats on the podium. Stadium and church – I like this kind of profane association, because they exclude each other. Devotion can be connected to one of them, and applause to the other one. Both of them have cultic meaning too, both of them are built on mass psychosis, at the time of the ancient Greeks they could live side by side. Just the new era laugh at them, in one of them the suppression in the other one the enjoyment without limits of the instinct count. That is why the theatre feels to warn the entering people to behave well. This is the sad reality of our life: we are thought to be incompetent to the ceremony that is made for us – and made with us. It is not enough if we are different at the end of the ceremony, we have to enter as initiated ones before our initiation. There are chroniclers, who would cover theatrical speech with purple fog. We are looking down and wondering. Zoltán Balázs, the director of Theomachia tells, that he wants a theatre which is “understandable to Mary and Rose too”. Why is it important to make them understand those things too, which clever people tell about them? Do not wish the impossible.

The young Sándor Weöres’ oratorio dramatic poem from 1938 works off one of the stories of the ancient Greek mythology, in which Kronos the youngest titan eats his children, because according to his fate, one of his child is about to take over his power. Which will happen anyway, as instead of the child-Zeus, the executor father-god, who was hidden, he was fed by a bundled stone. The poetic story is as dramatic, as any text should be and it is as much as a tragedy of fate as it is personalised by the people (actors) who try to show it. In the middle of the black padded area, the symbol of the infinite time and power as a black motionless monster: Ilona Béres as Kronos. He is without body in his mass being too, neither a man nor a woman, it is an allegorical creature, it recites its text gutturally. It is a fantastic artistic achievement, because of the physical and mental concentration too. The symbol of the eternal world order falls apart in front of us: Béres leaves her black robe, pulls out in clumps her messy hair, from the shapeless eternal god she becomes deformed mortal being in her white nightdress, bare feet and bald.

Everything is moving around her. The ageless gods and the orphan Zeus’ armed guards (the choir of the Curates) play all over on the plain stage, the drop, the net and the balcony above. Oral and physical demonstration broadcast the “actions”, the birth, the fight, the battle of gods. The thin Gabriella Varga, as Gaia the “wide breasted Earth” in a choreography with a stick (András Szöllősi), which is similar to the movements of dancers from far-eastern area, can build her monologue. Andrea Spolarics (Rhea) and Rémusz Szikszai (Okeanos) on a narrow beam of light opposite to each other try to “balance” the bridge of the dialogue. Typhon, the fire-breather Giant with hundred heads, Erzsébet Soltész is a muscular Indian dancer. The Curates (Róbert Kardos, Attila Egyed, Róbert Lucskay, Erik Ollé, Balázs Dévai) are the cult fighters of the angry human tribe. A boy (Kristóf Horváth) sometimes is similar to the Egyptian dog-god, to Cerberus. A greedy eclecticism – form of an ancient egg, rubber-baby and crumbled bread – they over lined and connected together the performance, László Sáry’s music which is full of noises and human sounds, Judit Gombár’s spectacular stage with eastern-like patterns of costumes, with the sign of the fallen red draperies, the ancient disc of the universe, which broke up and that way on its flat tribune the characters solve the end of the ancient chaos with the harmony of Weöres’ poem, (The drum and dance) which is about silence and piece. We can think about historical allegories in connection with the drama of fate, but it is disarming and impressive without it too.

*

Why do you have to be so cruel, asks one of the character in the performance, A Lie of the Mind by Sam Shepard, which drama was translated by László Upor, and the other one answered: “The fate is so cruel.” It is another drama of fate; from nowadays, on the modern, American Wild West. Two people, two families. A young couple. Jake and Beth are far away from each other, both of them with their own family. Because of jealousy Jack nearly killed Beth. The woman’ brain suffered damage, her cure is slow and doubtful. The man made himself believe, that he has killed his wife: his brother travels to Beth’s family to make it clear, but the girl’s brother shoots and captures him. Both families are full of secrets and lies. Jake and his sister cannot face up with the real surroundings of their mother and father’s death, Beth’ parents escape to their own selfish and painted world from the reality. The couple will meet once more, but Jake has been ruled by catatonia, and Beth by her madness – their last meeting is a fatal one.

Shepard’s play is suffocated, tensed and grotesque. His dramaturgy is missing, like in the case of antique tragedies or the modern psychodramas. To ask why it does not follow the traditional realism - why they have not investigated the domestic violence, why they do not arrest Jake - , is similar to ask, why the three sisters do not go to the train station to buy tickets, or why Hamlet does not hire a private investigator. It is not necessary, the world of the drama does not need it. A Lie of the Mind – I would tell it as a Fake Sense – is the drama of unconsciousness, its characters have lost their connection with reality. This is the well-known topic from the overseas, the inheritance of the American dream. Shepard honestly without any sentimentality, forms sentences in a cold way, with rising irony, he shows simultaneously the fate of passion and narrow-mindedness.

The performance of the Új Theatre is really good. The director, Árpád Sopsits does not build rooms into the studio, Péter Horgas put into the crossed place the two main (and the other minor) places. Only the necessary objects, some effects of movie-like lightening and the phantom characters like ghosts behind the walls are needed, to make (not because of the author’s aim, but not against him) the deformed world appear. The passing from the opposite sides at the beginning and at the end of the performance is the atmospheric frame, however Sopsits from the actor, without any help, can form a strong atmosphere. Anna Györgyi as Beth can show not the mental case, but a technically perfect human medical history. Zsolt Huszár is a profit to the theatre, in the role of Jake he brings the pure power towards its fall. Mari Nagy is perfect as Beth’s mother, she is Meg, who lives between the smiley illusions of the pink dream. Levente Király is crazy about hunting and the American flag, frighteningly selfish and ridiculous as Baylor. The others also do their best: Ildikó Bánsági and Kata Pálfi are the mother and daughter who are about to destroy their past, and Zoltán Géczi, is Frankie in trap and Sándor Almási is Mike, who is vengeful. In this performance there are as much mythical as much casual there are in Theomachia. Who after these two wants to work with psychological realism instead of rite and back, that one does not understand theatre at all.

(Sándor Weöres Sándor: Theomachia - Bárka; Sam Shepard: A Lie of the Mind - Új Theatre)

Tamás Koltai, Élet és Irodalom, 2004

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)