The Maladype troupe (which is changing now), led by Zoltán Balázs has made four different variations of Büchner’s Leonce and Lena. Each occasion (can we call it a performance?) the audience can see tricks from this “set”.

A clear, white area, which is surrounded by the audience on its longer sides, and by the performers on its shorter sides. There are bamboo sticks on the pre-fixed holders in the flexible ground and the already usual musician: Kornél Mogyoró, surrounded by percussion instruments. Zoltán Balázs is not “the viewers’ guider master” now, but a performance master too. He invites us to play a game, the rules of which have not been well developed yet. (The actors – differently from the announced situation – do not fight with each other for the scenes, the director makes an offer that which scenes the audience could watch from the variations of the scenes of the performance. We may feel that Zoltán Balázs composed the performance there and then. Of course the viewers say yes enthusiastically, when the director offers the variations, so that way they take part in the composition.) The situation could be solved if the performers offered a “menu”, which contained all the prepared variations. Not only because of the working titles of the scenes have strong drawing power on their own, (“Jacuzzi”, “Britney”, “Czechoslovakian robot”, “Mission impossible” and so on) but also for the reason that we could experience better the idea of the whole performance that way, and maybe we would like to choose from the missing scenes the other time.

I can state one thing for sure: the actors of the new old Maladype (the members of the troupe have been changed partly) have made and extraordinary valued performing art with the scenes of Leonce and Lena. Obviously, different solutions were made stylistically, which reflect on both the musical trends of our present and other silly things of it, but they can strengthen the feeling that wonderfully used artistic sequences, with some unbelievably creatively used bamboos sticks (forest, bed, Jacuzzi, paddle and many other things are formed by them), are more than enough to express some performing ideas; and all of it can be completed by the viewers’ fantasy, who are involved in the play. I emphasize one scene: Valerio’s (Ádám Tompa), who is on his way, only bag, which he is carrying with great effort, is Leonce (Zsolt Páll) himself, who is helpless like a baby boy. When firstly in a difficult way he gets to the ground, he starts crying loudly, his mate can hardly calm him down: then later, when Valerio tries to lose his weight more carefully, we can see a baby-man, who is getting to meet the ground, or the first touching of a reincarnated angel. I have never seen any scenes before, where the distance from the ground can create such a great weight. This solution is important during the progression of the performance too, it is a gesture with deep meaning: we can see the last stage of a maturing process, before the main character can meet his future love.

The performance makes me – unlike the others – remember not the Hamlet in Bárka Theatre but the Mozart-marathon by Kovalik. Its interactivity (besides the exemplary involvement of viewers in the last scene) is mostly an inner characteristic: the actors on the most traditional way, with the unique quality of their play, if we like it, with the showing of different points of views (with the effects of possible roles on each other too), which they have accepted, they can influence basically with the help of their artistic power and the virtuoso variability of their experience of playing, they can pull us into the performance with it. The responsible and stable presence, which is similar to the pureness of children games, can make Kovalik and Zoltán Balázs’ performances relatives to each other. In the two performances besides the artistic decorated solutions, the simultaneously appearing understandable (plebeian) humour can resonate too.

The word, marathon is not an accidental metaphor next to the performance of Maladype: the sporty competition for the roles, which was mentioned during the audience discussion after the performance on a pejorative way, gets a very different quality, if we understand it: potentially the actors’ have two, two and half more scene-interpretations with themselves besides those we could see during the given performance. The two and half, three hours long performance, which is formed from the chosen scenes event by event, requires an extraordinary physical stamina. During it the actors fight mostly with themselves, they are pushing the boundaries of their own capacity: similarly to a marathon runner.

Together with all I hope once, there will be a real Leonce-marathon too, when they would show all the scenes. It can create an obvious situation for the viewers too: with a full version, which can be performed during two or three evenings they can put their own load-bearing capacity of acceptance to the trial too. At that time, they would be able to choose from the menu, offered by Maladype, but – they have to try out the whole menu.

I would return to the performance longer than and that way, if I stepped into the line of the viewers of the marathon, when I have seen the all scenes.

Gábor Pap, Ellenfény, 2008

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)

Zoltán Balázs gave a hard task to the actors of Maladype Theatre, and then we have not mentioned the viewers and the critics; Leonce and Lena, which he directed, requires a unique concentration from both the actors and the viewers. In the Studio of Bárka Theatre, 8 black dressed actors greets us. The viewers can follow the play sitting on the two long sides, which is going on, on a wrestling mat like, rectangular area. On the two shorter sides we can see bamboo sticks with different length, the performance does not use any other set, costume or properties.

The director appears at the beginning and tells us the rules of the game. From him we can learn that the text of Leonce and Lena by Georg Büchner consists of 25 scenes, but all of them have three more versions, which have been made by different casts. Therefore, the scenario consists of 100 scenes all together. The public can choose between them, they can tell that beside the version, which was chosen by the director, which one they would like to watch. If we get lost in the story, we can ask for help from the director, who follows the performance from the background.

Georg Büchner’s play according to the interpretation of Maladpye Theatre is about the practice of power, and about the unavoidable nature and impossibility of choice based on love. They are bored youngsters, the descendants of two neighbouring little principalities, who have escaped from one another, tried to avoid marriage, up until they have run into each other’s arms. Par excellence it is existentialism some decades before Kierkegaard’s eternal sentences: “Get married, you will regret it; do not get married, you will regret it too; get married or not, you will regret both; whether you get married or not, you will regret both of them. Laugh at the silly things of the world, you will regret it; or cry because of them, you will regret it too; laugh at or cry because of the silly things of the world, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the silly things of the world or cry because of them, you will regret both of them.”

The main aim of the performance is not to interpret its text (of course, it cannot be missed), or to help us follow the happenings. Who is interested in Leonce and Lena by Büchner had better get the book from the shelf. The performing is determined more by the director’s aim that want to get the human body involved in the actions on stage. It is similar to the watching of a dramatized album of anatomy: all parts of the body from the foot, through the anus and groin until the top of the actors’ head have their roles. It is natural if the actors tell the text sitting or standing on each other’s neck, balancing with a stick in their hands. The showing of spiritual processes happens with the set of properties of culture of movement: in one scene, young Leonce sticks like a leech onto his master’s back, thigh and stomach to escape from the unwanted marriage. The body is the important one, and its tools and aims are the humiliation and love, the love desire and rejection, rudeness and devotion. Leonce monologue was the top moment of the version, which I watched, which was said by the eight actors at the same time. This performance requires a physical readiness, which is rarely to be seen on Hungarian stages, from Éva Bakos, Kamilla Fátyol, Hermina Fátyol, Katalin Simkó, Ákos Orosz, Zoltán Papp, Zsolt Pál and Ádám Tompa.

Maladype left the traditions radically behind: they reject the interpretation with the text in the middle, instead of it; their aim is to create their own individual theatrical language, which is similar to total theatre. This language is sensitive as well as to the smallest movements of human bodies as the songs by Péter Máté or Britney Spears, played by Kornél Mogyoró with the help of eastern-sounding percussion instruments. One of the merit of the performance that it can make viewers accept the roles of the bamboo sticks, which can help the actors’ concentration, stand in for the sets and properties, as much as we would see a well-furnished salon on the stage.

Zoltán Balázs may have chosen Leonce and Lena because its story is clear and easy to follow, because of its poetic dialogues it is a perfect material for a performance, which imagine theatre as an action of interdisciplinary art. Moreover, it is not too well-known, so they do not have to take into consideration the viewers’ prejudices in connection with the play. The direction is based on singing, text and movement, and from them the latest one become the most defining one. The first one between the equals. In a lucky situation, the material above would be in harmony with each other, but there are scenes, where the acrobatic and artistic tricks suppress the text and the dramatic situation.

I think that the present location is not the most suitable to fulfil entirely the director’s conception. Meanwhile not only the actors’ work leave the traditions, but the side of acceptors gets a bigger freedom and possibility of choice. As the performance is long, the viewers can go out anytime in theory to get some fresh air or get a drink, and then they can return if they want to, but in reality, it does not work. In the airless Studio of Bárka Theatre only the leaving would work maximum, in this crowded place, followed by the others’ look, we are afraid of disturbing the actors, I do not think that anybody would return even if they liked what they had seen.

We can see an inventive, adventurous try, the fate of which is influenced mostly by the audience’s reaction, which changes from evening to evening, and by the fact if they managed to find that location, where the relationship between actors and viewers can happen in a more intensive way.

Szabolcs Szekeres, Kritika, 2008

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)

Who needs the provocative behaviour towards the citizens if there are not any of them? The theatre goers have already got used to stunning beginnings for a while, those who get there by chance cannot know anyway what they want from the theatre, which they should get used to – and from what. Leonce and Lena by Maladype can be seen from the point of view of this duality for the first time. It is not good enough for theatregoers, it does not tell what it should for those who get there by chance. Anyway, we can blame Maladype for the fact that it is not consistently wonderful. Sometimes the viewers stand in for the quality of the performance, when they let them direct it in a classical way. This happens here too. At the expense of the performance.

The acceptance of the play by Büchner is high between many circles of people, which can be thanked for the fact that it is blurred enough to take the dream of greatness (and of the stupid boasting of course). During the common dream together with the viewers the tiring naivety of the youngsters can be formed again, of the others anyway, and of the freshness too which cannot be got bored, so the picture of our own young ages, which we carry inside. The play is usually seemed to be brilliant, however it is bad in a heady and lovely way. The inside organization of the play cannot to be told to be beautifully formed, and Büchner rises the distrust from time to time that behind the beautifully told idea there is only an idea, which is told beautifully. The story of the play is a symbolic travelling, which have been told thousands of times, which would like to be about growing. The play is odd too, as much as the performance and the troupe is too. Who is growing during it? The troupe would like to wake us up, while the play would dream instead.

It can be a last minute travel towards the inside parts of a country which is more truthful, towards the lower parts too unfortunately, which cannot be avoided. According to one of the interpretations of Leonce and Lena can talk about the visceral antipathy against any engagements, so against everything, which does not serve our immediate needs and we can hate this hysterical monster that suffers in the hysteria of self-love, the charm of which is disappearing with every minute. The curse of the alternative theatre that for the performance a good audience would be required. In case of the performance by Maladype as there is a lack of dramaturgical focuses those things cannot happen that should, so that the viewers are socialised and they can live through those parts of knowledge, which would be connected to prohibition. Why do we need the experience? Because different kinds of knowledge contents can be integrated only as results of experimental happenings. We can blame the Maladype troupe for one thing: the knowledge contents cannot be integrated as the projection is not safe and it is a big problem.

Two types of experience would like to be formed and both of them remained behind. As the viewers get the director’s power, they are forced to stay in control, which has two catastrophic results. One: they cannot use it for anything. Two: they are captured in a state of mind, which cannot make possible what is the importance of theatre – it does not distil or concentrate and it hurts the experience nature of it. The projection of our own ego and control system is disappointing, we have seen it many times and it is never a great experience.

Therefore, this was the biggest problem with the performance. It did not put me off. This audience? The accidental placement of scenes could not draw an individual interpretation, neither to the others as we can see it. If it is true then we can find a configurational problem. We can witness a thought-provoking scene and some brilliant moments. Maybe alternative theatres should use the techniques of different types of filters for viewers.

Into the accidental order of scenes of the performance on 6th October two obscene scenes were got, meanwhile both of them were strong scenes, the idea itself, that they would like to effect with the violation of norms – it seemed to be really boring. What can the view of the perfect and voluntary vulnerability mean besides itself? For those who go to theatre these are just clichés, for those who just come here sometimes, it is not good if they confuse it with the theatre. Can the two obscene scenes bring more than the attitude that some people cannot rest until they have the edge of their mouth dirty with shit, as Hofi said it in a little bit different situation. I do not know.

Let me tell the magical part of it: first of all, in spite of all these it was a perfect performance with excellent actors. The more experienced lady of the trope, Éva Bakos was the only one in whom I could see the moving youth. The others were just young. There is something extraordinary wonderful in the fact, that the artist, who got a little bit of attention and appreciation once has become a real master, and she is similar to a fruit tree, the branches of which lean until the ground because of their sweet weight. Éva Bakos has become this natural set table with that only wish that we could grab those things, which she can offer. She played Rosetta the smart lover, with whom Leonce got bored. Leonce can kill love with merciless methods. Rosetta goes around her own axle, Leonce goes around in front of her and puts seeming heavy (bamboo)sticks on his former lover’s body. More and more sticks are put on Rosetta’s shoulder, arms, breast, who can go around with more and more effort, and cannot move her crazy face of pain and love away from her lover, who works on mercilessly. These are wonderful moments of dying love: the eternal Eva is begging, but she does not ask for anything, as the joy is enough that her lover kills her. It could create an extremely strong dramatic atmosphere in the performance, which beginning, as it was forced, became a little bit weak, and during the introduction of the story and the characters of it even the captatio benevolentiae (the winning of goodwill) could work properly.

The whole play, because of this situation, was made of dramatic breaks and pitfalls, and of some very strong scenes: the Swedish king’s methods to form his successors, King Peter twice, Leonce and Rosetta, Leonce and Virgilio’s high qualified and masculine negotiation about the beauties of life. Lena and her nanny are the main characters of one of the scenes, who are really fresh and kind, as the original situation is: “the wide” but really shy girls leave into the great world to eat from life with big spoons, but they are afraid even from their own shadows, so they cannot live a big life. The very strange and differently talented scenes were ended with a forced marriage. It is an awkward ending. Two young, strange people, who are chosen randomly from the viewers are guided towards each other between two bamboo sticks and followed by the actors’ encouraging teasing, they have to arrive to each other. It is hellish.

The most important projection of any kind of citizens’ social function that we can laugh at them. During this evening, there were not any viewers who would deserve to get involved or even to be laughed at. The artistic diversity may let actors choose not only from sequences of scenes but also even from conceptions. Maybe it is better to sacrifice infinity for a conception, which gives borders. Nevertheless, courage is needed for a person to dare to be able to remain closed. Freedom is not the place of existence, but only the freedom of decision, with which we can choose between the situations of existence: we can choose the flexibility of walls, the horizon, the matrix, we can even choose the padded cell, we can anything, but we choose a border. For me it is more and more obvious that the experimental theatre would die mostly on badly interpreted fields of freedom. In the restaurant, which is titled to pork hocks, not only pork hocks are served, but I also know that they would try to form a surrounding nice for the meat eaters’ taste buds. The alternative theatres have this kind of structure, they somehow knock out both the crying and laughing, so neither vegan nor meat, as the viewers in s servile was have got used to the beans and cabbage and there is nothing to project – which makes it pathetic. Even the less sensitive ones’ backs are made flesh creep by the vision of viewers who are too eager to laugh and bow. We should go to alternative theatre with those, who can appear there with that kind of heart and head in which something is happening.

In case of the performance of the Maladype, Encounters’ Theatre the weak points were the viewers for sure, who were responsible for the meaning of it.

Maybe the troupe has to make the decision how they would like to form experiences. Two types of initiatives of experience are remained in formation. It was not clear if the troupe would like to wake up the viewers with this performance, or to let them sink into their own subconscious, and show in operation our own likable hedonist selves? To show our system of pictures of concepts, de facto what do we think about the world and about themselves on the world, and what kind of system of picture it is. I think that this decision can be made only by the troupe.

According to the behaviour of the audience on 6th October 2008, on Monday, there is nothing in their subconscious. There is no use to play in front of a totally emptied Winchester. Even Leance and Lena.

Alice Árvay, z’art.kor.hu, 2008

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)

Maribor is Slovenia’s second city, a compact town beside the river Drava that has kept much of its Habsburg heritage in the cobbled streets clustered around its cathedral. Its inhabitants, who have a healthy disrespect for the capital, Ljubljana, are proud to be preparing for Maribor’s turn in 2012 as one of Europe’s cultural capitals. An important asset in the town’s bid for cultural capital status was its fine National Theatre, which houses opera and ballet companies alongside drama in its several performance spaces. It has been joined by two more spaces in the newly created puppet theatre in a converted monastery by the Drava. Every year Maribor hosts the competitive Borstnik festival, which seeks to reward the best of the Slovene theatre season – usually choosing from over a hundred productions. In this its 45th year the festival has expanded under its new director, Alya Predan, to offer a short international season and a four-day showcase of local theatre aimed at foreign guests.

Disapproving
Slovene theatre is relatively young, and still probably best known outside the country for the extravagant fantasies of Maribor’s own Tomaz Pandur (now working mostly in Spain) and the brooding neo-fascist shock theatre of Neue Slowenische Kunst backed by the earsplitting sounds of the group Laibach. More than twenty years later, Slovene theatre still has an interest in both fantasy and shock, though whether it has matured any further is debatable. For much of this showcase I felt like a disapproving parent faced with adolescent attempts to make an impression. The first play I saw in the showcase, Damned Be The Traitor To His Homeland, devised and directed by Oliver Frjlic, was symptomatic. In a revue-like series of scenes transferred rather too casually from the rehearsal room to the stage, Frljic’s players offered us (male) nudity, foul language and actorly self-indulgence in equal measure, obscuring the very serious intent of a key few of them: to explore the ethnic hatred still simmering in the states of former Yugoslavia. One scene had the actors recalling, à la JFK, where they were when Tito died; another questioned the true ethnicity of a cast member who holidayed with his family in Croatia; a final episode brought theatre and politics into uncomfortable parity with a vicious wrangle over which cast members had ‘collaborated’ with Serbian theatres. Two of these three, the most provocative of the show’s scenes, were played by the actors in a single line facing the audience, with no attempt to give them physical expression. The evening’s second show, Flesh Or Revelation, performed by live actors on the object-filled small stage of the Puppet Theatre, showed a similar disdain for physicality, with its central character spending much of the time talking earnestly to his giant teddy bear, before reciting a series of long extracts from the Apocalypse. To use St John as your co-writer risks making your own part of the script seem trivial, which is what happened to the unfortunate Jernej Lorenci.

Rant
The next evening featured two productions from Mini Theatre of Ljubljana, winners of the previous festival for their impressive production of Heiner Műller’s Macbeth: Scenes After Shakespeare. The first, Ma And Al, was a complete conundrum, a conflation of three monologues (one of them a short story by J D Salinger) performed in increasingly violent incoherence by two actors, one male, one female. They began by circling each other warily around the stage. The actress then gained control long enough to speak and sing her piece, as the actor consumed useful quantities of alcohol – real alcohol, it would appear, since his own subsequent contribution was a drunken rant that involved climbing over the audience, vomiting copiously, violating his partner and finally encouraging us all to sing ‘House Of The Rising Sun’. The Croatian Ivica Buljan, so successful with the Műller, is credited as the director of this unpleasant shambles, although it showed no sign of directorial intervention. In complete contrast was the minimalist polish of Persona, a production by Janez Pipan for the same theatre of Ingmar Begman’s film about the transfer of personalities between a bored nurse and her silent patient.

Stakhanovite
The audience for Manifest K were surprised to find themselves completing a form of indemnity before entering the National Theatre’s grand salon. In return we were given five euro and very soon found ourselves organised into a production line making sandwiches – all part of Sebastian Horvat’s attempt, with EPI Theatre, to stage the Communist Manifesto, copies of which were presented to us soon after we had been allowed to eat the fruits of our stakhanovite labour. It’s all to easy to dismiss this show as a childish exercise in audience manipulation, but the naivete of Horvat’s approach can be seen as the production’s strength, and for those who were prepared to join in the trust exercises, the sandwich-making and the search for universal happiness that motivated that great comic duo, Marx and Engels, the evening was a warm and rewarding one – literally, in that we were able to leave with our five euro, after a final toast drunk in local spirit.

Omphaloscopy
The last night of the showcase brought a respectable production, from Maribor’s own company, of Brecht’s A Respectable Wedding and a crowd-pleasing visit from their rivals in Ljubljana in When I Was Dead, a slapstick staging of a silent movie by Ernst Lubitsch, played with great verve and little refinement. Most of the overseas visitors, however, were still reeling from a trio of performances that began our evening, under the joint title of Being Ignacij Borstnik. They were selected from a series of twelve short pieces created for the company Via Negativa in Ljubljana. Slovenia’s theatre theorists are way ahead of their performers in obscurantist contemplation of what theatre is about, and the theorists and performers of Via Negativa have collaborated to scale new heights of self-obsessed omphaloscopy. Unfortunately, they still regard the audience as part of the performance process, so that innocent bystanders are forced to watch, in this case, three events of decreasing professionalism but increasing watchability. In the first, we observe Marko Mandic, obviously a fine actor in spite of his drunken disintegration in Ma And Al, on two screens and in the flesh between them. On the left, he poses, preens, masturbates and defecates. On the right we see a selection of clips from his greatest hits, accompanied by his commentary on how difficult it is to get an erection on stage. In the centre, Mandic himself strips, enters a large plastic bag in which he perspires throughout the two films, emerging at the end to drink a glass of his own sweat. Compared to this, the actress in the second piece who rolls around the stage in her own urine, to the accompaniment of a stunningly pretentious commentary written by a real (if slightly deranged) critic, is almost bearable, as is the final performance by an actor who appears in drag to sing a series of drab pop songs in a piss-poor performance that would have him booed off the stage of any Karaoke bar, before stripping off for more crooning.

Antidote
If you want to see how theatre can usefully renew itself, the antidote to this insulting farrago lay in the one non-Slovene show I saw in Maribor, Bűchner’s Leonce And Lena performed by the Maladype company from Budapest. Director Balázs Zoltán is now working in a very different style from the ritualistic one that so attracted me to his work a few years ago, but it is just as exciting. His black-clad company can offer up to four variations on any of Buchner’s 25 scenes, according to audience choice. Whatever the choice, the spectator gets a powerful mix of flat-out physical theatre supported by considerable vocal skills, laced with wry humour. Well worth the visit.

Ian Herbert: Can You Hear Me In Maribor?, 2010

They opened the door of the Studio of the Bárka Theatre at 7:08. The director’s friendly instructions started at 7:12 and the mostly workshop-like performance at 7:16. They held one interval. Leonce and Lena finished at 10:04, until 10:11 the long lasting applause called the actors to bow. This data (9th of May, the 130th day of the year, the premiere) is punctual, but they are here just to inform.

They are informative, as in case of any other evenings Leonce and Lena can be much shorter or longer, they can hold two or three intervals, or the short, three acts long comedy can go on without any intervals until midnight (translated by Gábor Thurzó and György Rónay). According to the director’s original and shared idea the eight members of Maladype Theatre have made different varriation for each scenes during the rehearsals, and “in front of the viewers, they “fight with each other” in public for the rights of playing of the variations of scenes which they have formed together with the help of a game which needs special concentration”. However, on the premiere Zoltán Balázs, the director, pushed this possibility into the future, and based on the reactions of the viewers of the dress rehearsal a day before, he encourages them: that after the ending of each scenes if they would like to, then choose from the variations, they could watch the situations again with different actor or actors.

The modification of the orignal plan is not a shame, but the conditions are missing for the real choice. As we can hear it – we cannot even know the working title of most of the accumulated, hundred versions. Büchner’s play has been shown in its continuity. As it has been declared, Maladype is a troupe, which believes in the power of community, so the interest towards the so called star actors cannot come into consideration in case of the motivation of our choice. It is also almost impossible that the public would “order” a scene in agreement. Hardly happened anything else than the statement of hesitant individual tries. Zoltán Balázs made them concrete, other times – many times – he offered (so he chose immediately) any elements of the possibilities. The politeness does not let vote neither against the viewers’ wishes, nor against the director’s decision, and of course we cannot know what we vote against. (Because of this method came some stressed fake-dialogues and some limping arguments, in which the writer of these lined had to take part in as someone, who they asked, however he did not want to.) This new type but still unfinished conception (Balázs has not directed his own role as the “caller” and “presenter”) has turned against itself. (After 9pm the viewers did not activate themselves and the director let the performance ran “with one variation-type”.) From those we have seen we would not like to have missed the “Peeing” one, the meeting scene with its choreography-like humour, musical joy and punctuality which can see the soul too. Meanwhile the version of the “Monologue” by Éva Bakos (without any words, beautiful and effective) will remain one to be choose, as another one is needed before it with the text to make it understand.

The meeting, the monologue (and the others) have content to talk about, however it does not come from Büchner’s play mostly, but its aim is to show us the partly moving theatre-like nature of ordinary tragic poetical expressions, of acceptance, of love, of decision, and of the fight for life. There is a statement by the performers can be appreciated (however it is a false one), that Leaonce and Lena “has been put on stage so many times, that (in its whole) there is no use to do it again”, but if it is true than it is not lucky to quote and explain what we cannot see. (Namely: from the Popó-named little country – which a dog can run through – the heir to the throne, referring to the free will, escapes away from the reign and compulsory marriage than by chance, now according to his free will he finds the same woman, the princess of the Empire of Pipi, and he can hardly leave the compulsory reign of the country.)

What can we see? According to its contingency, its fragment-like wholeness, it cannot be seen through and its standard is digressive, but as a whole it is attractive and regulated (we can think that it has an “ideal” version of it inside) team work. The set is a park with a white square and bamboo sticks, which are pushed crooked into it, the actors perform barefoot in black rehearsal dresses (Judit Gombár’s nice and well-defined world of set and costumes) raise Eastern-like feelings (meanwhile it does not tell anything exactly with it). The shorter and especially the longer sticks, which can be pulled out, can turn into anything (trombone, lance, binoculars, loudspeaker, pencil, penis and so on.). The performers are continuously fighting with the tools, with each other and with themselves too. It is a fight of love, a fight for life, which questions the “whys”, this fight between bodies sweats the heroes and their partners too. The physiological and animated moods come from the names of the countries too, and the sexuality can come from the main characters’ love story (and previous lives too). We can hear the text on unknown languages, with strong accents, in a singing version, and with the help of meta-communication, without any linguistic signs (and any other ways too).

In the hot air cabin of the Studio of Bárka Theatre eight equal actors – Ákos Orosz, Zoltán Papp, Zsolt Páll, Ádám Tompa, Éva Bakos, Hermina Fátyol, Kamilla Fátyol, Katalin Simpó – and the percussion instruments player, Kornél Mogyoró, who is on the stage together with them, do their works in military order. (Unfortunatelly these actors without any tasks often get out of the play: they are watching as they are on a theatrical course.) It can be thought and felt what did they put individually into the director’s formal order which picks up and uses sometimes generously the personal ideas. Their clear and understandable telling of the text cannot enthuse me even with its key sentences, as these questions and sentences go towards the banality many times (there are too many shouts, cries, which are over exaggerated and illustrated acts of artistry). The symbolic tricks with the holding, grabbing, hugging, rising, balancing of the bamboos are more original, full of secrets. Many black sculptures of bodies praise together the director and actors too, which are formed by the melting, fighting, circling of one or more human bodies.

When the really urged “wishes by viewers” could not make fragmental this unordinary “introducing theatrical” experiment, the order which is dictated and composed by Zoltán Balázs became much more appealing (with the scene of “Giants” and the charm of the ungraceful extra ending). From the other point of view it is true: that the real interesting thing would be if we had the chance to watch the whole periodical system of the situations of scenes, and part of it, we can “read one by one” the variations, we can get into the connections as insiders.

I put the point at the end of my writing 144 minutes after the ending of the premiere. The article is there just to inform. I do not hope, that a “tiny empire” can get from the everyday work, and let many of us (as in case of the Greeks in the past) into the séance, called Leonce and Lena, about which the premier can hardly inform me, but I would try to get information about the formation of the performance in the future too.

Tamás Tarján, kultúra.hu, 2008

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)

Leonce and Lena, which was peformed in Bárka Theatre and from the new term has been played in the New Studio of Thalia, has got everything from the fighting rejection until the hot adoration. There is not anything interesting in it; that is the fate of a performance, which tells something different in a different way than the others have done it.

László Zappe can connect with laconic concision the great amount of diverging analysis, when he sums them up that way at the end of his critic, which was published in the Népszabadság: “We can say that this playfulness is just about self-serving, or that this is the end of theatre. But even that this is the beginning of it.” The generous connection of the two ending points can be unusual, however this is the whole thing about. If I want, I can see on the stage the quintessence of the experiences of Maladype, about theatre-making, which have been accepted whether by cold contempt or by childish joy from professional side and the exciting over thinking of their previous results; if I want I can find a really new direction - above all according to some professional writers not only for the renewal troupe but for the whole theatrical life of Hungary too.

And then we have not told any words about Büchner. It is not for coincidence of course: the base is the play of Leonce and Lena for sure, but the eight actors have learned its twenty-five scenes in four-four versions. The viewers can choose from the hundred variations, which have been formed that way - close to the premier still with the director, Zoltán Balázs’ active cooperation. The performance has got its greatest excuse at that point: “...there are not real conditions for the choice. We have not even known the working titles of the almost hundred versions.” (Tamás Tarján) According to Gábor Pap “the situation could be solved if the performers would give us a “menu”, which contains all the made versions. Not only because of the fact that the working titles of the scenes have strong attraction on their own (Jacuzzi, Britney, Czechslovak robot, Mission impossible and so on), but because we could live over better the idea of the whole performance, and maybe we would like to choose between the missing scenes next time”.

„Leonce and Lena is originally mosaic-like, expressive play, it is mostly poetically verbal, than full of actions, and offers itself for the process” - Tamás Koltai accepted the justification of the unusual method, about the result of which MGP talks that way: “We forget our previous experiences of reading. Whether we have seen the play other times. Whether we have known it, or we are about to know it now. We get into human electrical circles, into the center of accurate looks.”

Because if all these the human factors cannot work then the performance would fail too. But according to MGP the “fragment like whole” (Tamás Tarján) in a way of Maladype or the “accepted fragment” (Noémi Herczog) can become a “really erotic” performance thanks for the performers: “thanks for the eight performers’ concentration, their gaze, which can reach us as they are connected to one another. For the intensity of their presence.” The readers could find playfulness in the opinion of professional writers if they read them one by one: while MGP talks about the “presence” of the eight actors of Maladype, Tamás Koltai recognizes only (?) their “readiness”. “They are building worlds from fragments..., which are determined. They are vulnerable - for the autocracy by empire, director and viewers - , and they serve at the same time. They accept it with self-awareness. Poker-faced. With dignity.”

The humility is a returning and well-defined term of each analysis. Gábor Pap compares the actors, who “are pushing the boundaries of their own capacity” to marathon runners, according to Noémi Herczog we can see emotional and physical boundary situations on the stage. The vision of circus - which has returned many times in the analysis - is connected to what we could see here, as we are worrying for the tightrope walkers as much as for the actors who can cause pain for themselves too, if the effect(iveness) of the scene depends on it.

Anyway, physical pains: Ákos Török, who usually writes about dancing performances, uses the term of physical theatre as the basis of his whole analysis, which Tamás Koltai mentions too: “The physical theatre requires strong concentration, tempo-rhythm, punctuality and partnership. It is hard work first of all, it means resignation from the comfortable stereotypes.” Török in connection with the actors’ physical and mental demand, says: “There is something hardly defined, but really shocking in the way as they are standing on the side of the stage and waiting for calling, more and more tiredly, whether they are looking at their partners or backwards to them, but with blank expressions. And when Zoltán Balázs or the viewers decide that way, they walk onto the stage...”

Tamás Jászay, Revizoronline, 2009

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)

I went happily to the Leonce and Lena performance by Maladype, as I have seen Zoltán Balázs’ previous performances I do not have to ask that on what way and why this performance, which I saw, would have been made.

Instead of the tunnel vision, which is offered by most of the performances on the competition of POSZT, I got into a system of connections, where I could redefine again and again where I am. The stage is made of a white surface and bamboo sticks, which are pushed into the holes on the ground. The frame of the performance was given by the classical play, the others were brought by the performers.

As I was sitting in the first line, I could take photos of the acts, which were stressed, for me (I have asked permission for it). The interactivity was hardly more than an illusion, the viewers could ask the repetition of scenes in different genres. Leonce and Lena was a physical, mental and acting performance, which has sometimes ironic, lyric then cathartic effect. Besides the repetition of scenes - inside variations - the most important one was that the actors told about themselves. What are they interested in, which they reflect on from the world - musical trends, idiotism, theatrical techniques - and they have formed them into a performance with such a high standard, which I have never seen during the history of the IX. POSZT.

Such a clean performance on Hungarian stages I have seen by the Hólyagcirkus and Béla Pintér’s Troupe (before). During the real interactive part of the performance they involve the viewers too into the play, they choose a Leonce and Lena from them, and make them a married couple (which is relevant as according to the original text the couple get to know each other on their wedding).

It was a special joy for me that from the ones who were sitting in the first line they chose me to be the prince and I had to get married. From the left, Hermina Fátyol, from the right, Kamilla Fátyol held my hands and pulled me on the stage from here and there. The glazed eyes have come from it.

The actors would appreciate just praises: Éva Bakos, Hermina Fátyol, Kamilla Fátyol, Katalin Simkó, Ákos Orosz, Zoltán Papp, Zsolt Páll, Ádám Tompa. As the other performers did too, Kornél Mogyoró behind the percussion instruments, the assistants: Péter Tóth, Mirella Mátrai, the designer of sets and costumes: Judit Gombár, the dramaturg: Judit Góczán and the director: Zoltán Balázs.

They have got the grand prize of POSZT according to me.

Róbert Balogh Róbert, terasz.hu, 2009

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)

Colin Higgins’ film, the Foul Play starts and ends with Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera. The assassination against the pope has been organised for the premier of The Mikado. They did not choose Sullivan’s comic opera form 1885 without any aims. The composer started his career with nice music and religious music composing. He was the boy soloist of the choir of the royal chapel. From the time he was 19 years old, he wrote te-deum, hallelujahs, odes, oratories, cantatas, procession marching songs and hymns as the organ player of the St. Michael’s church of Chester Square (The most well-known one starts with: “Go on Christ’s soldiers!”).

G & S

Gilbert & Sullivan are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the literature of operetta. They formed an inseparable couple. Their well-known nature shortened their names, G & S. It was enough to write and everybody knew who they were. Between 1871 and 1896, they wrote thirteen operas together. In contrast to the habits, where the composer’s name is written first, here Gilbert is the first one. They are written in ABC order. It is unimportant, that who is the musician and who is the librettist. Their easy plays were born from a common breath.

People in London did not get bored with The Mikado for two years continuously. When the interest got lower in the Savoy, a professional Mikado troupe brought it around the whole world, including Australia and South Africa. There had been nine thousands performances after the premier during three years. There was a success in Vienna. The cholera epidemic defeated the fulfilment of their contract in the popular theatre, which had been signed for a long time. Richard D’Oyly Carte’s troupe did not dare to travel here. Lajos Evva, the director of the popular theatre wanted to replace the missing guest performance of the English troupe. He asked the rights form London. They did not give it. He wrote another letter: they did not have legal-defence contrast with the material from London, so how much was it? It was not for sale. Then he would perform it without any permission, as he wrote it. If he was able to, then did it, it was their answer. Lajos Gundlach, the choreographer form Hamburg, travelled to London. He watched the performance carefully five times. He took notes. The Hungarian version was a blockbuster.

English operetta vs. Austrian-Hungarian

Hungarian success of The Mikado could be thanked for the patriotism of the viewers. For their Anti-Austrian feelings. They would clap just for the reason that the operetta was English. Therefore, it was not from Vienna. Nowadays it is fashionable everywhere except here in Hungary. (Besides its television version, I have known about a renewal for two decades. Mária Angyal directed it in Szeged, when the theatre played in the neighbouring cinema because of the reconstruction of the theatre. The prima donna was Andrea Harmath.) During the last decades, the viewers’ taste has connected to the operetta from Vienna. They exiled the French and English operettas form their programmes. Gilbert and Sullivan are too joyful, too melodic but not from the k.u.k. bucket of melodies. The biggest counterpoint against its performance: the too intelligent script and the too witty poems. They left the honey jar of the Austrian-Hungarian joviality.

The joyful dance of death

Arthur Seymour Sullivan’s libretto puts wittily the love under the shadow of the gallows. The beheading, torturing, the death at the stake and the cooking in the hot oil are threatening all characters. It is a cheerful environment. The atmosphere is kind. The comedy can be the most liberating if its story goes around the question of life and death. The Mikado handles death as easily as love. The absurdity of dialogues have critical realistic effect. They talk about cheating, official misuse, tyranny, accumulation of positions in public, without any hiding. To talk frankly about well-known things is operetta-libretto-like absurd. Sullivan got a noble title from Queen Victoria in 1883. However, Gilbert’s satiric governmental caricatures made the queen so angry, that she denied the honour from him repeatedly. She made only Edward a baron in 1907.

Comic opera on the University of Theatre and Film Art

All roles are played by three performers.

The student from the opera course of the Academy of Music makes the singing part. The student form the puppet master course of the university moves Judit Gombár’s puppet, which wears the mask of the opera from Beijing and tells the prosaic text. It sounds easy. It is not. There is an intensive connection between the singer and the prosaic actor. With a fetishist ecstasy, they grow together with their common puppet. The puppet depends strongly and emotionally on its mover and its singer partner. The ménage à trois covers with an ironic jealousy the triangulated unity of characters.

The aesthetic purity of puppet theatre has been confused for some decades by the coexistence of the animated puppets and the lifeless actors. We can find reason for it, when a man-sized Gulliver plays between the Lilliputian puppets. More and more of them free themselves behind the screen for self-display. Meanwhile the appearance of the puppet artists when they thank for the applause, with a little bit confused face, with their puppets in their hands can be such a moving experience at the end of a regular performance of the puppet theatre. Their face shows that the blanket has been grabbed from them, while in its protection they would have dealt with erotic plays. The living actor, who intrudes between the puppets, is similar to the exhibitionist, who is wandering around the primary schools, who opens the wings of his coat and shows his naked under body to the children. It is a good feeling for them, while their viewers just stare at them. Dezső Garas, the actor, who played Prospero in the Puppet Theatre thanks for his precise instinct once, kneed down to put his head to the level of the puppets, who were ruled by him. He changed himself into an object, between the en-souled puppets.

Living puppets with object-like people

The aesthetics part of the performance, The Mikado is clear. The lyre comes from the difference in size between the living player and the en-souled object. As the tiny puppet cuddles up to the living body for protection or the arm of the puppet touches the player’s body part: an emotional connection appears. The grotesque humour of the performance comes from the same root. As the tiny puppet, while it is searching for protection, escapes into a giant black bottom. Or it sits on the head of its singing voice, overpowers it. Katischa, the princess who is searching for love, with her graceful intriguing is similar to Eboli by Schiller or to Lady Milford. Nine puppets show the singing and prosaic roles of nine students from the opera course. Who or which eighteen of them move and lend their souls to them with songs or with tortuous logical, absurd funny texts. So twenty-seven of them are connected. Not with the wires of the marionettes but with physical touch. Or with the listening to one another. The tripled egos are listening to each other, to themselves and to the others vividly. Everybody has a vivid connection with everybody. The burlesque eroticism of the performance comes from it. The singing egos of the intriguers – as the corruptness and administrative confusion in the town of Titipu (in the 15th century!) is similar to, without mentioning any closer example, The Inspector by Gogol – are crawling on belly when they follow their puppets and their movers. The stage gets filled with laying bodies in piles, most of them in uniform-like black, the puppets rise with their colours from them. It is an erotic hecatomb. It is a lyric group sex. It is a block of joy. It is a spinning little ball. A twenty-seven times schizophrenic gives the unity of world. It is the wandering of soul in public. Meanwhile the sexual joy is really healthy, the play is filled with the hardly explainable mysticism.

Zoltán Balázs’ performances rhyme with each other. He seems to direct the same performance all the time. Ceremonies come alive by his hands, these performances are similar to each other, from different writers’ different plays, which were written on different language, with different genres. In his Ionesco in the Gypsy Parliament (Jack, or The Submission, 2001) the Gypsy, French, Hungarian Languages were mixed. In case of The Blacks the whites performed the blacks, the blacks (Gypsies) played the whites. The actors moved their mouths without any sound. Their opera singer counterparts dub-sang their over composed texts. During the performance, the School for Fools (2003) by Ghelderode the Gypsy, Latin, French and Hungarian language were mixed. The director added the speech of birds to the non-verbal theatre in the Theomachia. He used and István Erdős made play the duplication with the marionette characters or the doubled appearance in Pelléas and Mélisande too. As king Allemonde he doubled himself with a marionette puppet. (Now a marionette director helps the performance of the comic opera.) In case of the drama by Maeterlinck the theatrical vision of breakdown was formed by characters who were moved in a three floors high plane set. In Acropolis (2006) by Wispiansky David’s psalms could be listened to in Hebrew as an opera aria. It is something strange.

The director is searching with the border crossing of different language systems. He puts into category the intermediate uncertainty between the dream and reality. He is searching for the answer of his question in the half-conscious darkness. Obviously, he founds multi-layered answers. His love lyre is full of threats. His tragedy is ticklishly funny. His humour can make us sad. At the beginning of The Mikado the troupe turns ceremoniously towards the viewers with their chorus that asks an interesting question. The performance would like to find out who is who in reality. Zoltán Balázs’ performances go consistently on the boundary line of irrationality. In French, this something, which cannot be described is the “Je ne sai quoi”. Something strange would be its meaning. Balázs’ performances are searching for it. And there is something strange in them. In Spanish, this is the “duende”, as a demon must work in it.

Péter Gál Molnár, Mozgó Világ, 2007

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)

That group starts with a double handicap, which wants to perform an operetta performance with puppets. A lucky constellation and lot of talents are needed for that kind of production to gain the interest of the theatre world. Zoltán Balázs could do it all.

The English operetta (light opera) which is similar to the comic opera is not treated with so long lasting, hardly dwindling but important popularity than the other important regional style of the genres are, the Austrian-Hungarian and the French operettas. That way even the twin stars of the English, Arthur Sullivan and his congenial librettist, William Schwenck Gilbert have not become our well-known acquaintances, the most successful play of the two masters’ cooperation is The Mikado, which became the object of adoration for a short time in Hungary only at the end of the 1880s. Mostly the numerous references to the Anglo-Saxon comedies make us remember the brilliant play, and the Europa of course. On the European Chanel they broadcasted many times Mike Leigh’s film, the fantastic Topsy-Turvy (Tinglitangli, 1999), which tells the whole story of the formation history of The Mikado.

János Meczner’ class of puppet artists with Zoltán Balázs, the director, performed a complicated play, which was made in Japanese style as their exam performance last year. The performance had a roaring success, and by up until now it has become a repertoire performance on the University of Theatre and Film Art from a successfully fulfilled exam exercise. The performance deserves the success by reason and law, as a dozen and half talented young artists serve with humour, singing voice and dexterity the director’s conception which is rich in ideas, and well thought over.

In the Sándor Hevesi Hall, which can be called puritan with courteous euphemism, the history of the town of Titipu is put on stage in front of us followed by the melodies played by a single piano. The stunning luxury, which is essential for an operetta, here is represented just by the puppets: the marionette figures, which were designed by Judit Gombár and made by Pál Lellei, are wonderful. These real masterpieces of handicraft do not show us only the fairy tale-like Japan but even the school-forming career of the great puppet designers of the memorable National Puppet Theatre too (Lili Országh, Iván Koós and Vera Bródy). These puppets are vivid, they are the active extensions of the youngsters, who move them to life, and the cooperation of people and the puppets are in cheerful and disturbing rhythm with the plot, which is moved on wires.

Gilbert’s libretto can caricature the changing of situations and titles, and the forcing power of the social rules – which are bloody serious in their accidentalness too. However, this Victorian satire is an action-packed comedy of love too (as it uses the popular basic formula of the opera buffa), and Zoltán Balázs’ performance can give the adequate stage presence of this thought-provoking, lyric and flirty play. Behind each puppet, there is a young mover, who performs in prose, and another who fulfil the melodic and lyric sounds. The characters are reorganised sometimes, that way Yum-Yum and Nanki-Poo’s kiss is shown unexpectedly by the puppet artists, and these kind of nice and charming ideas deserve likeability and appreciation too. The doubling of the roles, or more punctually their trial showing turns out to be a very productive solution. Not simply because the singers – in spite of their occasional indisposition – can fulfil brilliantly the voices, which would be too demanding to the puppet artists, but because this triad situation can be beneficial as a source of joke, as a special treatment that makes us forget about the lack of sets. The layers reach each other from time to time: with a gesture and puppet and a person can be connected, than a new idea mockingly counteracts the lyric weakening. Ko-Ko, the accidental but more corrupted executioner, the moralist Mikado, who becomes angry because of the cancellation of executions, and the other frivolous witty characters, can climb up on head and palms can hide in laps and bottoms.

Where is the immaculate boredom of the matinees by puppets on Sunday? Who said that the operetta could not talk about humans?

Ferenc László, Revizoronline, 2008

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)