Many people said: “I wish there would be similar performances in the competition programme too!” Zoltán Balázs shows a play by Ionesco on a different way with the help of Gypsy culture.

Sometimes we cannot understand what they are telling, but otherwise every single word is exactly understandable. It was also similar to Eugenio Barba’s Troup that earlier guest starred in Szkéné Theatre. From their international language, I understood only the English and German parts. Then there was a performance, a solo one. A woman, I did not understand her single word. Otherwise, in every moment, any moment I knew exactly that she was talking about love. Because her facial expressions, the shining of her eyes, gentle movements of her hair and her physical movements translated the unknown language for me.

The situation was the same in the case of Ionesco’s play, titled: Jack, or The Submission. Zoltán Balázs decided that he could dream this play onto stage with Maladype – Encounters Theatre most authentically with the usage of Gypsy language, with the reveal of Gypsy traditions. And yes. He filled with nine actors and much life an enormous space. I do not understand Gypsy language but the movement with which the actors filled the space, was really expressive. It was impossible not to notice the most evident message, the alienation. As during the prologue, it happened on Gypsy language, then the outsider, who hardly forced Jack to assimilate, appeared.

Erika Molnár used Hungarian language. Moreover, all through, did not care about the others, she spoke Hungarian. Wonderful images, phenomenon and movements were interlacing the performance. While Jack (Rudolf Balogh) was trying to keep distance in a glass cage from the unmeasurable greyness of the world, he had to realise that everything has been grey really. While everything is rainbow-colored. In that way he is not different, just similar to the others. He has to accept it. He cannot be influenced neither by his dad’s (Balázs Dévai) arguments, which he performed anyway very convincingly, nor by his mother’s (Erzsébet Soltész) desperate beg. Maybe only his younger sister, Jacqueline (Nóra Parti) can bring him back for a moment into the real world, as she is throwing onto the wall of the glass cage the sticky remains of her miscarried child.

However, the intended bride, who has three noses, gave the final stab to the boy, who desires an eccentric life. As Erika Molnár appears, in the enormous bride dress, she has an enormous effect without any doubt, on confused Jack, who is leaving the prison of his solitude later, much later. Who provides the production with real tension and special range of emotions, is not other than Zoltán Oláh. With the help of a pot and microphone, he vocalizes all the sounds, rhythm, which can turn the Gypsy world into mine a little, that incomprehensible mythical miracle, which can be compared to nothing.

Before the performance, I had been counting on the terrace near the theatre that how many people and on which speed escaped from the sunset of the Miracle of new theatre but after it I did not remember anything else that I saw two types of faces, who came out of the Ionesco play. Those, who reflected witlessness, and others, who had a happy and satisfied smile.

Fortunately, the others were more. Some of them said regretfully, that they wished there would have been similar performances in the competition programme too. Maybe today...

Krisztina Szepesi, Terasz, 2001