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)