The audience can go into the fencing hall of Bárka Theatre after seven. We have never felt it so cathedral-like wide before, thanks to Judit Gombár’s master knowledge, who knows thousands of ways so she can choose the easiest one. Half-light. We can hear instead of see. We may arrive to a performance directed by a speech therapist: vowels are sounding, consonants can be heard, they are snarling, growling. Ominously. Mysteriously. From above, under, near and far. From the working gallery and the cellar. Figures and forms can be seen. Which is the set, who are the actors? They are merging in the shadow. There are red columns from clothes rolling down. In front of black painted walls there is a giant black (Aztec) disc. In front of it, the most important part of the set: Ilona Béres with Japanese-like, white painted face. She is a barbaric idol on a small, black podium. She has black wig of a samurai. She is Kronos the father-killer god. His dying father, Uranos cursed him, that one of his son would do the same with him. Because of it, Kronos has eaten three of his daughters and two of his sons. Ilona Béres is a male god. Nowadays she, the very feminine actress, plays men characters brilliantly. She leaves the pleasant feminine theatrical behaviour of the decades. She uses the pure strength of her personality. She uses her deep alto, which is against all vocal cords, and deeper than any alto before. It is like a voice of a machine. She is creaking vowels. She is stressing syllabically. She controls the bloody actions to keep the power. He is a motionless, cruel god. He is motionless all over the performance. His emotionlessness is terrifying. To cheat him, he is fed by bundled stone instead of the new-born baby. In his madness, the loser Kronos is tearing out his hair. He is standing there with crumpled (tinker), bald wig. He is tearing up his clothes. (Velcro can be heard). Then the man idol like Niobe, Béres climbs up onto the platform. Above him instead of Eros, there is the Boy: the new power (Zeus). It is a victorious ending. They beat the tyrant. The flags are falling down one by one. The draperies are not teared down by rebellious hands. They are just getting on the ground. Howe many falling flags form gables, demolished emblems have we lived over so far? Is a happy ending coming? Will better times come? Meanwhile from the beginning of the performance, on the left side of the place, on an iron spiral staircase, a faceless, genderless, creature without personality is going up and down. (Judit Réka Kis) It is an enigmatic perpetual mobile. She is just going up and down. She does not have a rest even at the time of apotheosis: the historical circulation is going on: against the old killer rebels the new one. Zeus will be frightened to lose his power by his child. “Then he will be pushed into the shadow by a better one.” The continuous bloody soap opera of humankind is going on.

The 25 years old, Sándor Weöres wrote Theomachia (The fight of gods) oratorio-drama in 1938. It was published in 1941 in Pécs in the first copy of Sorsunk magazine as an extra issue (the title is by his uncle, the newspaper editor and science historian, Nándor Várkonyi). In 1970 István Keleti (who did not hear or see the drama, but read it) directed it in the Szkéné Theatre. This was the first play by Weöres, which has been put on stage. This was the poet, the Vörösmarty-like saviour of the Hungarian drama literature and this was his first appearance in public. István Keleti experiment is explained by the genre given to Theomachia. The oratorio drama was fashionable in the 70s. In the 20s Ödön Palasovszky, Jolán Simon Kassákné, in Székelyföld Antal Szakács worked with it. The oratorio drama is the rebellion of words against the over used naturalism. Instead of anecdotes, it is asking the cosmos. But not only working choirs or choirs of churches can sound, many of them on the same voice. And it is not the Man, Man!’ cry, who calls to account the Neue Sachlichkei. The romantic Byron used this melody above in Manfred who is fighting with power over man. (The motto of the oratorio is by Shelley for The freed Prometheus. Weöres would translate the whole play in 1961.)
Theomachia is smouldering in Bárka Theatre as a divine war of succession with cannibalistic resolution as a modern political poet.

The direction is childishly innocent and full of charm like an Albanian mountain burglar. (to use the nice statement by Kálmán Nádasdy). Wondering innocence is together with theatrical intrigues made by strictness. The sound system of the performance is from crying babies by cherishing babbling through inarticulate sounds, which are suppressed by anger and enchanting magic rhythms to wild noises and cries of deep alto. The baby crying of the stolen pretender is hidden from Kronos by the noise crowd of supporters: “Baby of water, baby of fire, / do not torture us! / baby of water, baby of fire, / save us! / hey ho, hey ho” Where the raised noise it earsplitting: there is always a political crime.

In the performance, Weöres the poet, Zoltán Balázs the director, Gombár the designer of sights, set and costumes, László Sáry the composer, Kornél Mogyoró who plays the percussion instruments, Zoltán Gavodi’s singing, Adnrás Szőllősi who shows the rhythm of poems, and he is the choreographer of movements which are in connection with the story of the drama, Károly Lendvay who designs and creates the light, Éva Kolontáry’ s masks and the actors who made concentrated the physical and mental movements, with unusual talent in our theatrical life, with their common aim, create this extraordinary artistic experience.

In his earlier works, Balázs played Ionesco in Gypsy language, Ghelderode in Hungarian, Latin and Gypsy. They recital Weöres in rhythm, breaking it up into sounds, sometimes backwards. The text is used mainly to express feelings, be musical and rhythmical, it does not need to tell a story or to teach us. The choir changes rhythm. The rhythm of dancing is coming. Because here not an oratorio choir, as we know it from our theatrical knowledge, answers to the antagonists if the drama, but a singing, dancing, ranting crowd.

The working of the director is not arbitrary at all. We have known since the nursery school the rhythms by Weöres, and his breaking of sounds apart from “understanding”. His poetical knowledge, which aim is the dream-like reality, and ununderstanable by ordinary people. Weöres left from time to time the ordinary phrases. He did not want to shock with it, but to bring up rhythms, which chase the curse, and magical texts, which can get closer to reality. (Zoltán Balázs also got into the repetitive trap of the staging of plays by Weöres. He cannot leave the poets overrunning poems, they are magical in books, the flow of words, which are too hard and slow us down in a performance.) László Sáry’inspired music not just warns us because of the Hungarian-style Sándor-poems, of the changing dancing rhythm of the poems, but he decorated the performance with ancient mourning and folk song imitations, where Rhea, who is worried about her new born child (Andrea Spolarics) is a tragic opera-like singer, Okeanos (Rémusz Szikszai) is similar to an implacable ronin, and the daughter of Uranos who got white haired as the accessory of killings, the Mother of Earth, Gaia (Gabriella Varga) is moving during her virtuoso vocal actions, as she is coming from a no drama. The dancing demons, who have saved the child, the Curates: Róbert Kardos, Attila Egyed, Róbert Lucskay, Erik Ollé and Balázs Dévai are sounding from Weöres’ early drama experiments, from the Scythian. The barking Boy in loincloth (Kristóf Horváth) is coming down from the dome of circus as a fabulous acrobat, hanging on one of his hand like a god from any Egyptian tomb. Typhon appears as a god from the Balinese island (Erzsébet Soltész), he is similar to the monkey king of the opera drama in Beijing, (unusually) with his professional dancing. We would not connect to any other poet or author this mixture of culture of different places and eras. Weöres with a conscious simultaneity used the culture of humankind as a public value. "I do not write to myself but to others" – said the poet. "So my aim is suggestiveness. It is not important to understand it but to raise their senses, like the stretched string in the wind. "

The Bárka Theatre with the staging of Weöres creates the great treasure of the modern theatre life.

Péter Gál Molnár, Népszabadság, 2003

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)