Life is a fight. The stage is a giant, rectangular, light, tatami-like wrestling mat. On the two shorter sides of it, there are pitted sticks, like bamboos, in two different sizes, standing in the circled holes. The performers (women and men) are wearing the same kind of black dresses, which are made of light material, they are loose, so they make possible the future (many) movements, acrobatic exercises, the fight that is similar to judo sometimes, and should be placed on a tatami. (The set and costumes are Judit Gombár’s works; they are obviously functional and aesthetic in their minimalism.)

With the title, I had to indicate that it has not been only about Georg Büchner’s philosophical comedy, which was written in 1836, but a special variation of it. First, I thought about the title: Leonce and Lena by Zoltán Balázs. But it would not be accurate. The leader of Maladype – Encounters’ Theatre entrusts more radically than before, the fate of the performance to the creative abilities and fantasy of the troupe during the rehearsals, that is why Leonce and Lena, which we can see in Bárka Theatre really belongs to the Maladype.

The actors have created four versions from twenty-five scenes of the play, so altogether they have made a hundred variations (the roles are changing too during each variation), from them we could see more than thirty during the premiere night. The most accurate title for my report would be: Leonce and Lena by Maladype, as it was performed on the premiere. Zoltán Balázs has invented anyway, how the director can create a different performance every night from the given set. Like a special narrator – I think according to his actual feelings and the formation of the performance on stage – he chooses from the variations, and viewers can ask for another variation too, so we can see some scenes more, in different ways too. (This method had a history. Tim Carroll directed Hamlet in Bárka Theatre in 2005, that they “raffled” every night, which actors would play different roles, and those properties could influence the performance a lot, which were brought by the viewers. Hamlet – the only fixed character – was Zoltán Balázs. In that production, anyway – in contrast with the present Leonce and Lena – there were many improvisations, and the director did not take part in the performance.)

But get back to the carpet, where life is a fight, from where the players’ wild and ordered energy flow towards the audience. On the premiere, maybe the first optional scene had the greatest effect. Maybe because it was the first one: it was unexpected and shocking. We could not understand anything from it by words, as the text is told on Swedish language, but we could feel much more. A strong man teaches, forms a fragile girl for something – with the help of a reed stick. The lessons are: hit the head to the reed, catch the reed from more and more further, cry. Zsolt Páll and Katalin Simkó wonderful intensity could raise the scale of actions into symbolic, beautiful in its frightening nature.

“This moment is the holder of my whole life” – Leonce sparks the importance of the joy of love that way with one of the most beautiful sentences of universal literature. “My God, what I did wrong, that similarly to a school boy, you make me tell the lesson again and again” – he states the boredom of everyday schedule with another most beautiful sentence of universal literature. The thinking person and the artist, who wrote all of it, was twenty-three years old. Some months later, he was dead. This young troupe shows Büchner’s wild and wise youth in an adequate way. The action which was created by Büchner they hardly do, partly the characters and in a really special way: I have to tell it too, if I want to be honest with myself and the performers (it is worth writing only that way).The scenes, which are not on the same level of quality (anyway most of them are good), remain fragments, they do not form an arc, after all the performance does not raise catharsis. Unless the expansion of the actors’ performance, the wonderfully worked-out scenes, the performers’ concentration can do it.

This kind of enormous effort, fight are necessary for the things of life? - people are thinking about it if they see Leonce and Lena. For performing, it is if you are the member of Maladype. Your reward can be the pleasure of the well-made work. It can be seen on the members’ faces while they are experiencing the great success. The already mentioned, wonderful Zsolt Páll and Katalin Simkó would deserve this acceptance, the focused Éva Bakos, who interprets Leonce’s monologue only with sign-language and movements, would do too, as well as Ádám Tompa who walks through and mediates all through the scale from elf-like playfulness until male aggressivity passionately and cleverly and Ákos Orosz, Zoltán Papp, Hermina Fátyol, Kamilla Fátyol who perform not fewer devotion and creativity. (I do not want to leave Kornél Mogyoró out, who as a percussion instrument player is a common and great participant of the performances by Maladype.) From the scale of fights Katalin Simkó’s Leonce-monologue with its obsession while rubbing the reeds to each other, Ádám Tompa works with “guest sentences” (“My baby is a has pasta-like face” – Feró Nagy and the Bikini), he balances more and more reed with his legs, arms, whole body, besides his brilliant Leonce-monologue a meaningful scene, when Zoltán Papp as Leonce can do all of his steps just on the feet, hand and body of his “servant-philosopher”, Valerio (Zsolt Páll).

The Blacks in 2004 and The Tempest from last year (in co-production with the Bárka Theatre) seem to be a more cathartic performance on the way of Maladype, than this premiere is. Meanwhile from the point of view of the construction of the troupe, of the artistic research, Leonce and Lena is an important stage too, which does not leave the viewers without experiences fortunately.

György Harmat, Tiara Magazin, 2008

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)