Zoltán Balázs does not choose for the last time a performance with normal length, from night to night the situation will decide what we can see. It can frustrate the viewers that they would miss something anyway. It is an accepted fragment, let’s see it more, this is the solution.

In case of Acropolis, it did not still work, but the way of thinking could be seen there too, which could have become a symbol in this performance, which is limitless, transformable and able to point beyond itself. There they laid down, rolled up carpets, and seemingly, they showed the deeper and deeper meanings, but it could not tell anything in the performance. Mostly it was covered by colourful clothes but seemingly worked well thanked for the well-calculated choreography: it could cover the lack in the content. In case of Leonce and Lena Zoltán Balázs chose eight strong bamboo sticks as properties that can give the inexhaustible set of transformation. The sticks are good to make narrow and vulnerable the place, as well as it is in case of Leonce and Lena’s travelling, and they are good to hit something.

This is eight cavemen’s dance of fertility with sticks. We can walk back to the origin of theatre, to the ancient past with the help of these bamboo sticks. The bamboo can be pencil, binocular, musical instrument, a blade of grass, house or penis. From the eight sticks, we can build. Every scene is a movement etude, which uses sticks as properties. They climb on them, hold them, hit them, see things in it. As the roles can always belong to somebody else, and the actors get always different roles, there is not a permanent cast.

Judit Gombár’s sets are always able to transform, so far it was not without any aim. Now it has its own function: the clothes can be used as tools later. First eight actors are standing in black dresses that cover their arms too, they are similar to eight black puppets, they are singing a song, and then they climb from it. But the puppet-like role remains: eight sticks and eight stick-like people.

We can see a circus on the white cultic stage on which can be stepped only bare feet, we can sit on two sides of it. More and more virtuoso artistic scenes come one after another, there is joy on the stage, as the actors are singing. The scenes are demanding physically too, we admire what they can do. But now the rite does not finish with it, something starts running, which has not done it so far.

I watched the performance on 9th May, which is important, as I could see something totally different from those who watch it other time. Leonce and Lena is a boy and a girl’s story. If in a troupe, there are four male and four female actors why cannot they all get the chance to play the mail role? The troupe of Maladype Theatre has made improvisations to the chosen texts, in smaller groups, so that way more valuable variations were able to be born for a part. From these Zoltán Balázs does not choose some to form one normal length performance forever, but according to the situation some of them are presented to strengthen the one-time nature of the performance.

I am frustrated all along because I would miss something. That is one reason why the viewers are working in dark when they try to control what to see. Therefore, the problem is not that they cannon choose a scene, but we do not know which couples’ versions are better or not, from which worth asking for more. The audience is not uniform too. I do not dare to speak, as they gurgle many times in the background, as they do not want to listen to this monologue once more, and of course, here is the behaviour, which is common in Hungary: let me not tell anything on my place. The law of energy saving is prevailed. It is good that somebody tries to do something against it and some good intentions make is clear that this night cannot offer the whole. There is much more work behind it, than a traditional theatrical night can offer. It is an accepted fragment, the solution is to watch it more.

Leonce and Lena’s story is summed up for us in the programme, in some lines, but even the text does not get the same important role in the etudes. In some of them we can recognise a well-known motive, a knot on the tissue, according to the original re-composition it helps to introduce the form of the infantile King Peter as a knot on a nappy. Sometimes happens that the text in the new context works in a funny and surprising way, anyway mostly we forget about it. The texts were useful as starting points.

The performance shows us wilder pictures than Leonce’s scatter-brained world. We can understand it that Balázs digs under this surface, to show us the working powers deep under the play without the glaze of kindness. But not without humour. Anyway, the basic story does not play a central role, neither do the main characters.

What we see can work because there is a genuine relationship between people. Sometimes a simple dialogue – like the Swedish Ákos Orosz and Katalin Simkó’s meeting – is stronger than impressively acrobatic elements. Anyway, their relationship can be very different too from in the original story. When we can see scenes in Swedish or without any text (Éva Bakos’ monologue is performed by sign language), they can be truer, as they have hardly any connection with Leonce and Lena. It is a much darker world with greater passions.

“As I was hit on my spine with a stick” – we can hear it in Leonce’s monologue, the other time we can hear it: “I do not dare to stretch my arm, I am afraid of bumping into something everywhere.”

It was unsuccessful in the Rite of the Radnóti Theatre, as a civil theatre was not enough to show the elemental power of a rite, I can see it happening there successfully during the best etudes. The actors load themselves until the final point. Ádám Tompa has to hold on himself eight sticks, but it is hard not only physically.

The strength of the performance is the amount of power and attention the performers put in each etudes, in it their virtuosity can help but cannot stand in for it. Zsolt Páll and Ákos Orosz’s sweat is dripping. Kamilla Fátyol’s Rosetta is crying. We can see real feelings, borderline situations emotionally and physically too. They strain themselves to the end and it raise physical experience in us too. When we can see them in danger because they hit their heads into the sticks, like in a circus, we do not even dare to give a sound. It is bad, almost painful to me too, as Katalin Simkó’s head is getting purple, but it is, which can create the truth of scenes. When they are wobbling with the sticks, they almost reach the line of the viewers but we manage to escape. The experience can catch up with us. As everything really happens with the actors and they do not just imitate it, they do not create an illusion, it becomes strong, which is happening between two people.

But it is not any kind of ceremony: it is a rite of initiation. Of theatre, life, overcoming of ourselves. Most of the scenes are long and they subject the actors to cruel trials, which they bear without any words and fulfil. Katalin Simkó hits her head to be purple and Kamilla Fátyol floats on a single hair (stick) between the sky and the ground. The troupe holds together. They hold safely each other not to fall down. Katalin Simkó visit to King Peter has very different associations than Leonce and Lena’s story. I can see Uma Thurmant with master Hattori Hanzo. I can see a cruel introduction, an exaggeration, which is increased until parody, and then finally the girl realizes that she should not grovel but shout. She should treat herself as an equal opponent. This introduction can be found in each scene. As Romeo forgets his first love, Rosa, Ádám Tompa’s Leonce also lets down Kamilla Fátyol’s Rosetta, he buries his lover like a human sacrifice. He humiliates her on every possible ways, she is stretched into sticks, she just bears it, but finally shouts and finds herself again. We can see Katalin Simkó’s Rosetta too, she spit back after she has been impaled, speared with a stick.

There is a battle of power relations on the stage, it is an elemental theatrical question. Their appearance, their ascetic worked-out bodies, the braided hair of the girls and Zsolt Páll’s baldhead can reflect their restrained energy too. Then they let this energy out. Sometimes it is a little bit exaggerated, it is made in a sensationalist way, but I have to admit that it has effects on me.

We are witnesses of a ritual game. The tempo can be beaten by the sticks, the songs create monotonous rhythm too, it is not without any humour. We do not miss Rabelais and Büchner’s humour, the world that is upside down, there is not any story or hierarchical structure, individual scenes come one by one. But there is urine and faeces. From this later one comes a rhythmical song by Katalin Simkó in the scene of nappy, when she changes kindly and humorously nappy on the shy King Peter, performed by Ákos Orosz. The rhythmical movements, the prayer wheel-like circling around a stick, all these can create a musical base-rhythm. Katalin Simkó also tells Leonce’s monologue, with her beautiful a serious voice, as we cannot see the play there for a while, the life-situation is a usual one, it cannot be connected just to men.

The stick can show us different aspects of female roles: it can be a tool of sexuality, or a baking board between two sticks, which were rubbing into each other more and more monotonously and intensively. Katalin Simkó’s love scene make us remember an old children play: “the lamb is out the wolf is inside”. They chase each other similarly during the love-scene of hawks, until the existing lamb becomes less interesting. The repressed and effusive energy is the main character of the play.

Meanwhile those, who are not performing are sitting around, they take part in the performance with their attention and help, they work as a troupe, they are similar to eight constructive elements similarly to the bamboo sticks. During the post-show discussion after the Seagull by Krétakör, somebody asked László Katona, that did he smile as Medvegyenko or as Láazló Katona in one scene, while he is sitting outside, as those who are not performing are sitting here too. He said that there is not difference. However, the base of the Seagull was the text by Chekov, the two performing style is the same. It is not a fall out from their role in neither of the performances.

We cannot see here neither Leonces nor Lenas, just virtuoso marionettes, who has become actors by concentration as they are performing on behalf of themselves. They have been made to the characters of a rite by playing maximal attention to one another. With the power of their gaze they can hypnotise the scenes, to create the necessary, magical atmosphere. Kornél Mogyoró, who orders the play with percussion instruments, as an outsider with his concentrated help can become an integral part of the performance (with Lehmann’s words), of this profane rite.

There are spectacular but self-serving elements in the performance too. Sometimes the language, which they have formed, goes on just technically and becomes empty. We can realise these things in case of Zoltán Papp’s monologue or Ádám Tompa and Zsolt Páll’s scene, titled Phobia. Altogether, it is a mostly high qualitied experiment, they draw with the sticks flexibly, as Zoltán Papp does it in his already mentioned monologue. The sticks have two ends, they can hold them upside down, with a farce-like humour, when the sticks become penises, and the girls (Hermina Fátyol and Éva Bakos) walk up on them. Some situations are tensed to the extreme, the sticks are hardly long enough, not to collided with the viewers, but when they say: “like I have been hit on my spine by a stick”, and I can see an artistic trick from a circus, my spine gets hurt too.

In the end, the actors become giants, as sitting on each other’s necks. Eight Lena, lady and Rosetta are sitting on eight Peter, Leonce and Valerio’s necks. Finally, everybody can show themselves here. The result of the night is not an equal victory for all of them, from the girls, Katalin Simkó can show herself the most, today she has become Zoltán Balázs’ favourite. But Éva Bakos was asked too, whose wide smile is an important moment of the night. From the men Zsolt Páll and Ádám Tompa get the main roles this night. They are those, and Kamilla Fátyol and Ákos Orosz, whose identity can be seen behind their virtuosity. Ákos Orosz especially as Valerio gives memorable moments to us in the scene of urine. It let us see, that the troupe is almost equal.

Is it an advantage to base on the eventuality, which scenes would be presented from the hundred? Or is it better is Zoltán Balázs chooses, in whom the intention to perform does not work the best way, does he only show those scenes, which are valid for that night? Everybody should decide it alone.

The giants, as an ending scene is a perfect choice: Hermina Fátyol chooses randomly a man and a woman from the auditorium, with closed eyes, they become the main characters of the wild finale. The performers resign democratically from their emphasized roles. This night the two viewers could even improvise in the middle of the circle: they start dancing. The performance can teach this kind of activity at least to two people.

Zoltán Papp is going around his stick while he is telling Leonce’s monologue. This motive points above itself, it highlights the structure of the performance. They do not want to get anywhere, the compact, whole performance is not the aim. If they have enough air, the audience could go on watching the “missing scenes”. I cannot see everything and I do not get a new Leonce and Lena, just an exciting performance, which can rephrase it. But what exactly? Neither Leonces nor Lenas. It is a shame that Zoltán Balázs tells us where we are in the story, however he does it, because a viewer asks for it. These scenes have already got far away from the text for a while, we can see the actors’ own stories, who are artist with stilts, who are professional performers. They get great applause. The hit of the stick on the spine has physical effect.

Noémi Herczog, prae.hu, 2008

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)