Zoltán Balázs’ theatre has an outstanding paradox. If we think about for example, that they performed Ghelderode’s play The School for Fools on three languages, but not one way here and the other one there, but they mixed in one performance the Latin, the Gypsy and the Hungarian, from this the fact it would come that the young director does not appreciate much the text. Since between the audience of the Szkéné Theatre there were not many people who could understand well all the three languages. The text lost not only its primer status in this performance, which has not been new thing for many years, but it has lost the importance of its meaning. It could take part in the performance of a story which is built on a ceremony, with its rhythm and music. (It would be really paradox too to talk about the telling of the story, however the stories about the rebellion of the pupils and their fight with their master were told well-followed.) The incomprehensibility of the text did not mean the demotion and degradation of it. The actors acted out and used the incomprehensible text very well-developed, concentrated as a very important element of stage. Nothing else has happened for more than twenty minutes, than the pupils, sitting around the table, recite Latin texts of ceremonies and play music with wine glasses. For the audience the incomprehensible text becomes the central element of the staging effect. With the help of sounding, rhythm, musicality reports everything clearly and understandably which is necessary for the understanding of the importance.

In the Bárka Theatre now, the performance of Theomachia exposes this paradox better. In the powerful performance we can hear one of the most important Hungarian poet’s important work, finally in a worthy and powerful way – in a way that it is not told mostly. When it is told, it happens as one of the element of a total theatrical world, then when during the final scene of the performance we can hear Kronos’ text backwards, it is not a question at all, that it is Sándor Weöres’ poem too or not. So when we think lightly, that finally, after six and a half decades after the writing of it, this text cannot be right for a stage, this dramatic poem, this oratorio drama is performed successfully, and we can feel that the Hungarian theatre finally lives up to the poet, reaches the flow of the poet’s fantasy from the middle of the last century, we does well if we try to specify this enthusiastic idea a little bit. Of course the perfect performance of the Bárka Theatre is a great joy, and it is obvious too, that it could not happen without the inspiring effect of the text by Sándor Weöres. But we cannot forget that the adequate appearance of the dramatic play or the oratorio, where we can enjoy all value, beauty and the musicality of the text is the podium play, oratorical recitation so the stage of literature, which existed in the 20s and 30s, and it was really popular in the 60s and 70s. István Keleti tried to do it, but as I could not see it, I cannot tell why it has not become successful. Maybe because of that why the whole genre was pushed back: it had an important role, it was an opposition to the naturalistic theatre, and the one with empathy, but could not become the most important one of the new theatrical ambitions. It was too puritan for it and did not offer many formal variabilities.

Zoltan Balázs’ theatre is the opposition of it: it uses hardly everything, which can be imagined in theatre. The audience is enchanted by music, dance, noise, movement, magic and by really magical scenic during two hours. Of course, we do not talk about those, who during the first minutes, by self-defence, fall asleep, because of the too powerful and stressful stimulus, or the other way, they react with rigid rejection. This kind of rejection is always an important sign of the fact that something has happened in the theatre.

Something has happened for sure during Theomachia, maybe not the most important thing in it, but a wonderful and valuable text is finally put on stage. That is mostly covered by László Sáry’s music and Judit Gombár’s set that dedicates the whole place into the location of a ceremony, and her suggestive costumes, which offer culture-historical sights and András Szöllősi’s choreography. In the wonderful visual theatre the philosophical content of the text has become less emphasized. We cannot hear loud enough those which are seemed to be really important during the reading of it, that three phases of creation appear during the fight of gods. Uranus created the world without life, Kronos rebelled against him, because he wanted to make it alive, he would like to fill the universe with living beings, then Zeus the rebellious one, who was sent by the fate, a new murderer of a father, would like to create intelligent creatures.

In Zoltán Balázs’ direction this theological, ambitious process cannot be seen well. Instead of it we can hear and see with fantastic ingenuity and sensitivity the eternal fight, the battle which is always repeated, the chaotic waving of life in its unchanged order, its flood, its highness and horror, pathos and pain, ugliness and beauty. The sensual world, the sounds and visions which are thrown to the auditorium make us believe that we are in a world below us and before us, that the gods, who are played by human-like actors, even if they are in strange costumes and masks, cannot be similar to the ordinary mortal beings of earth, and that their feelings and reactions are the same with ours. We are at the same time in the 21st century and in the time before history. Ilona Béres’ mask, posture, voice, as she is standing, forms the god motionlessly, the motionless mover, she is a supernatural and purposeful being and an ordinary, determined tyrant. It is the miracle of the presence on stage, the concentration but mostly of the personality. It is the creature of man-power, who can rule everything and the creature over the genderless being at the same time. Anyway it is seemed that she is held together mainly by the mask and costume, so the function, the task, the determined will, and the attachment to power. Andrea Spolarics maternal suffering is fallibly human-like and archaically huge. Rémusz Szikszai as Okeanos is the stubborn clerk of fate, Gabriella Varga, as Gaia brings ethereal news about the pains after life, Erzsébet Soltész’ Thypon gives sound to the pains of a helpful fossil in the wonderful costume of a ritual dancer from the Far-East. Kristóf Horváth is the boy, who is like an alive prediction, is there at the feet of the father, a small and shy person between the great ones.

If the viewer gets into the charm of this theatre, he can feel like meeting up with the totality of existence. The analyst sense stops, because the totality cannot be touched, taken apart and analysed. In the background, a little bit further from the audience a figure in grey-white clothes is going up and down with steady slowness on a spiral staircase. As he is measuring the time, as they are turning a sandglass. However he does not measure anything of course. Who knows that how many times he does his way, while the performance, the fight of gods, the human history are not over.

László Zappe, Kritika, 2004

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)