It is a creative, witty, artistic summery, which widen all kind of theatrical borders, about the way, how we can reform a dead writer’s play, which is written with one simple story. Thanks for Zoltán Balázs’ unique interpretation it is a real delicacy for theatre lovers: it is the importance of Leonce and Lena, which gets alive in the performances of Maladype Theatre in the evenings, always in a new form.

At the beginning of the performance Zoltán Balázs, director tells the viewers obviously (it is a full house, I am sitting on an extra chair), that what is going to happen that evening, and the eight actors with expressionless faces, in black dresses, standing between the bamboo sticks are waiting silently for performing real theatre in front of us. Georg Büchner classical play is about a prince (he is Leonce), who does not want to get married, against his father greatest wish; Lena is a bored princess, who lives her everyday life in the shadow of her nanny, and how surprising, she does not want to get married too. The story is about the meeting of these two people, who hardly refuse love, and how can they fight with their own inner demons.

This is the main story, Büchner’s world ends here anyway, and another dimension appears, which is full of ideas, humour, scenes that are being thought over repeatedly and many bamboo sticks. To make it clear, I try to sum up the young director’s conception. Zoltán Balázs “has made” the twenty-five scenes of the play in different variations (from each scene, four versions have been made), partly he let the actors do it, and let them build bravely in the dialogues their own ideas too. Altogether, one hundred scenes are ready, of course, they do not play all of them, to quote the director’s words: “we would sit here for three days”. The played versions change every evening, so there cannot be the same performance, the mood and the viewers can always form the content and the length of the play.

It is genius, surreal, grotesque, absurd and the most important one, thanks for the actors there are not any confusing interpretations on the “stage”. It is true, that we have to change a little bit, not to get embarrassed and desperate, when the actors are singing pop songs of the 90s between the dialogues, and to push the wider borders of the performance, the Hungarian version of Britney Spears’ song means eroticism.

The audience is laughing and get shocked by the fact how differently can each scenes be interpreted. Zoltán Balázs offers us the alternatives, and we are marvelling and staring, if the actors evoke the same scene in more versions. We can feel ourselves a little bit, as we are looking behind the sets to see how the director create the dramaturgical vision, how he can see differently the personalities and situations from his other colleagues.

The story does not get lost in the performance, the director takes care of it too, he always informs the audience, that where we are and who can be seen in the next scene. So we cannot lose the ground under our feet, and do not get into the trap, that is nowadays lurking for us, if we see those kind of classics on the stage, which is modern, and hardly drowns into the free interpretation, and we think about adjectives like indifferent and outrageously bad after the falling of the curtain. There is nothing like this here. It is a game, which can be taken dead serious, like art, and we can flirt with it similarly to nuances hidden in art.

The actors of Maladype Theatre do exactly the same: they draw nuances around us, and with their performance the content becomes a whole, even if, sometimes they get far away from the reality, which is thought to be touchable.

After we have seen and heard the eight actors in the performance we can say that Zoltán Balázs has not only reinterpreted the play perfectly, but he chose the actors well too. Which is the most important one that the four men and four women’s characters are changing from scene to scene, so it can happen that an actress plays Lena once then in the other version performs the role of the nanny. The four ladies are: Éva Bakos, Kamilla Fátyol, Katalin Simkó and Hermina Fátyol, their creative solutions of characters are in perfect harmony with the four actors, Ákos Orosz, Zoltán Papp, Ádám Tompa and Zsolt Páll’s male roles. The eight of them with the always-changing cast can make the performance even more colourful and more meaningful.

It is interesting that the director has made all the eight actors learn Leonce’s monologue, and that evening, when I have the possibility to watch the performance, he came up with that idea: all the actors, at the same time tell the monologue according to their own interpretation. The actors do not know about it but they solve it perfectly.

I have to mention some other interesting properties, which are bamboo sticks with different length, they have different function in each scenes. Once they are ships, then they form a Jacuzzi, they can symbolize a forest, but it can happen that they have to materialize some kinds of inner feelings.

Who would like to play a little bit with art, as a concept, I offer them to watch anyway, the performance of Leonce and Lena as Zoltán Balázs has put it on stage.

Zoltán Kristóf, Napvilág.net, 2008

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)