Zoltán Balázs’ (and Judit Gombár’s) creamy white stage, which is bordered by slanted fixed bamboo sticks is an inspired place: it place for thinking, the hugging of bodies, and their fighting. The performers – four men and four women – are in black slimmed tops and buggy black trousers, and they take place in the game bare feet: all through the pink feet, ankles, fingers „are playing” as well in the light area, as the arms, faces, the looks connected to one another.

The acoustic world of the performance is created by Kornél Mogyoró, the musician, who is also in black dress, he gets place at the edge of the stage: the exotic percussion instruments, which have special voices, which he plays, he can close the actual scene shortly with stress. The rite and meditation can widen the performance into the place of nice touches and harmony. There are not any sets and properties on the pure stage, just the longer and shorter bamboo sticks, which can have many functions, they can embody sometimes forest, weapon, podium, throne or even a phallus.

The basic frame of the performance is drown by the virtuoso movements for us: the performers show just episodes from Büchner’s play, and the introducing commentary by the director can connect each scenes. Meanwhile the performance was advertised with the fact that the actors would “fight” with each other for each scenes, there was nothing like this in the performance, which I saw. Instead the viewers’ wishes and asks were built in: by strong encouragement from the auditorium “orders” came to play another version of some scenes, and shortly came out that all the performers know all the roles of the play as their mother tongue.

What did we see in the experimental theatre of Maladype? Some role-play exercises with the usage of Gábor Thurzó’s translation of well-known texts? Some kind of special symbiosis of the sounding texts and acrobatic movements, which can create intensively a picture of a coherent world. It seemed to be obvious anyway, that the texts, actions, movements are not in the usual relation with one another: the order of sounds and movements can create their own world, speech has subordinate role. Anyway, the performance widens the borders of human speech too: many sequences of speech become into squeaky and whining animal sounds, magical signs of tribe rites or deformed sign language. Hermina Fátyol tells in Arabic language prince Leonce’s well-known monologue in the repeated scene; another character (Zsolt Páll) talks with emphasised dialect, and puts grotesque nature into another scale of scenes. The dramatic text is counterpointed sometimes, then it is stressed by intensive physical work: the power and drive of the performance is given by acrobatic movements, connection, leaving of bodies. This performance can be similar to acrobatic trick of a circus, as the performers do with lightness and airily movements, which require the hardest, the most complex – intensive physical power and strict discipline. The harmonised actions finally always form some kind of composition, which reports about human relations, which are lived through intensively, and about feelings. It is about the fighting and merging of bodies and transfiguration.

We can see a theatre with biological base, which is wonderfully sensual. It carries us away with itself, enchants us, even if not all moments of each scenes can have suddenly obviously evident meaning. The strong troupe of Maladype with Zoltán Balázs’ leading have been making experiments with new, organic theatrical language for a while, and now as they use Büchner’s tale as the base for it they can go on so far with the language formation. The visual picture of the performance is really unique and artistic: it is an intensive game of bodies – on the border of the pure sensuality and pure philosophy.

As episodes are going on, the play is filled with charmingly gentle eroticism and grotesque humour: “the scene of urination”, which is played by long bamboo sticks, is irresistibly funny, it uses tools surreally, the shacking and tricky operation of the polygonal throne, which is built with crossed laid sticks, the grotesque biological forms of the squatting male body (Ákos Orosz), all of them are well-worked out scenes, which can form stressed pictures. All the performers – Ákos Orosz, Zoltán Papp, Zsolt Páll, Ádám Tompa, Éva Bakos, Hermina Fátyol, Kamilla Fátyol, Katalin Simkó – take part in the production with devotion, discipline and with extreme effort. Which is an example of the fact as well, that persistent searching of form and formation of language can create not only mental cohesion but a community too.

Dezső Kovács, Criticai Lapok, 2008

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)