István L. Sándor: The secret of the secrets
E. Ionesco: Jack or the Submission; M. de Ghelderode: The school for Fools
An important theatrical value was born again on the periphery. An occasional troupe of professions, amateurs, Gypsies, and non-Gypsies (which represents a rare level of cooperation) has shown two performances, which use a very different language than any other, which we have got used to in Hungary. Zoltán Balázs, a really talented director made both of them.
The Maladype Gypsy theatre has drawn the attention of the public with two important and really valuable performances. Zoltán Balázs – the young director with a new voice – started working out the interpretation of the play from the point of view of the characteristics and relations of the environment in which the performances were made. In case of staging he speaks about the personal and social problems of the Gypsy identity, both in Jack and in The school of Buffons – in a way that he avoids the danger of any kind of didactic and publicistic aspects It comes from greatly the fact that the director’s thoughts are precisely over thought in case of both performances and they use a theatrical language which combines many kind of sensual effects.
Who tries to be himself
Jack or The submission - as most of Ionesco’s plays – is built on a series of linguistic absurdity. The banal situation - in this present case the family argument, and the purpose to make the boy to marry – is reclassified as the parable for the absurdity of existence with the help of a text, which is full of word transformations, linguistic idiocies and logical absurdities too. The family is about to disinherit Jack, because he is unwilling to state that he loves the fries with bacon. Then when they finally made him to tell his confession, they immediately want him to marry but according to Jack „his beloved one”, who was chosen by his family, is not ugly enough, because she has only two noses and not three. Fortunately, the girl’s family has another „only daughter” too, and the woman with three noses – with her vision of the foal with flaming mane – really enchants Jack.
Zoltán Balázs’s direction is not built on the verbal jokes of the weird text, mainly because the greatest part of the performance is in Gypsy language. The director searched for scenic solutions which can be associated with the linguistic effects of the play, but which can function independently of them too. He builds mostly on the rhythm, on the rhythm, which works in symbiosis with the speech and stage movements. (The basic for both of them is created by the pot – playing sounds, which come from outside of the scenery.)
The speech, which is sometimes slowed down, made faster, broken up, prolonged, is connected to special movements, sequences of movements, which in their complexity form a really grotesque and weird world.
But the director translates not only the mood of the text in to the sensual language of the theatrical effects but with the help of them makes the interpretation of the play clear too. The first part of the performance is built on the contrast between Jack and his family. The family appears as a group of amorph beings in white wigs who are – usually moving together – flickering back and forth in the area. They are making stranger and stranger movements, all of their words are followed by annoyingly rank gestures. Jack watches them calmly, essentially he is stationary. As if, his existence has a different rhythm. As if, he is closed into the shell of his minority report and resistance. We can feel it from the text of the play and this feeling is visualised by the performance too: we can see Jack mainly in a glass cage throughout the play. It can show that the only constant thing is his frailty and vulnerability, the shameless one is put on stage. At the beginning, Jack is calm, he sits on his knees, and later he reacts with different kind of posture changing and movements to the scolds, reasons, provocations. Once he relaxes and then clings to the wall of the plexiglass cage. Sometimes hands in gloves reach into the cage, as if they tried to make a harsh operation on him, then they tense strings as if they tried to pull the rebellious child as a marionette.
In the performance of the Maladype, Jack is well seemingly a Gypsy boy, who has no other special features than he tries to be himself. He does not have green hair, as Ionesco wrote it, his movements are natural, his gestures are really human ones. His defiance and anger are those too. This also forms a sharp contrast between him and his family members, who try to make him similar to them, and each members of which has something disgustingly strange in them, weirdly puppet-like something. Their lumpy, torned, repeated monotonous movements give this feeling. The mother (Erzsébet Soltész) who leads the family with energy, for example, carries a puppet child on her back throughout the play. The father (Balázs Dévai) speaks with echo. The grandfather (Árpád Bogdán) however never tells anything but many times conjures table tennis balls from his mouth. The younger sister (Nóra Parti) is pregnant. Then she lays in front of the cage with straddled legs, and the jellied, sticky rags, to which she has given birth, throws onto the glass wall, while she is repeating the word: chronometrability. The scene gives meaning to Ionesco’s weird misstatement: Jacqueline warns Jack because of the disgusting rules of decay, according to which the rebellion is as meaningless as a protest against death.
It seems like Roberte, the bride (Erika Molnár) brings the message of death too. „My basic nature is very happy” - she says it on a sepulchral voice. All through the play she speaks dry, and in that way she forms a contrast between her sentences which are full of passion and visons and her speech.
Her movement is slow mostly: weather she stands statically or moves gracefully in her highly decorated bride dress from the 19th century, and her head appears from time to time through its lower or upper cracks. (The earlier one is like an elf, who looks out onto the world.) Roberte is the prisoner of the bride dress as Jack is of his own cage. The girl’s vision about the burning horse which is galloping in the town, signals the message of death too, but in a paradoxic way it frees the strengths of life: Jack himself is galloping together with the story, then gets out of his cage, goes close to the girl, then starts ecstatically playing hide-and-seek with her: the two childish beings disappear, they are getting themselves, chasing each other through the cracks of the dress, which can stand on its own too. Finally, the lovers meet in the cage. The strange words of the Gypsy and Hungarian dialogue can meet each other repeatedly in the word of cat. Everything is cat: for the two distant people, who have got out the similar lifeless world, this would become a common language. But unexpectedly the members of the family get into the cage too, they fill the entire place there, as if they do not even let this relationship breath, which could hold out the hope to a new life.
The last day
The latest performance of Maladype goes on the way, they have begun. In case of The school for Fools the accurate (defined by the environment of the troupe) interpretation of the play creates the form which is built firmly, used consistently, but it is more complex, and plays in a wider register than in the case of Jack. The grotesque plays stay there too, but the musical forms are strengthen and scenes are fulfilled.
The performance starts as if we got into a ceremony of monastery. Beings in robes are kneeing around a glass table, there are glass plates and drawn, fragile glasses in front of them, the faces which are flashing out of the robes are enlightened by the lights, which get though up the plates, these are drawing the faces a little bit ghostly and frightening. They sing in Latin language spiritualized, with piety and otherwise for some reason strangely too. The feeling of a monastery is broken by weirds elements: first the beings in robes start playing music on the glasses, then on the cutlery too. Than as if, the showing up of the cutlery became the part of the liturgy.
The ceremony if led by the Master’s servant, by Galgüt (Erika Molnár). He is speaking – still in Latin – to the students about the dirty life from which Folial got them together and how he has been teaching them over the years. But he still owes them with the greatest secret. This is the final day in the school and Galgüt promises that the Master teaches them today the importance of any art, gets the veil of the great secret finally. However, Folial (Erzsébet Soltész) is nowhere. Finally, his head appears from under the lid of the bowl in the middle, from there comes out this strange, bald elf.
His weird appearance interprets strangely the Latin ceremony: it looks like as if, we see the last supper – thirteen of them were sitting around the table – where the Master himself was served as the main course. Galgüt and Folial’s Hungarian dialogue strengthens this grotesque parallel: the Master is talking about a bad dream, he has a feeling that his students will kill him today.
Galgüt, the eternal second one, this harsh being who is tempted by the attraction of power, is really preparing a conspiracy against the Master. He warns the students because of their origin, tries to rise up their anger because of their derogatory fates. The robes are put down, and with it the students have become naked: under their yellow-black hoods, colourful pants and bikinis are flashing up. A tin pot falls into one of their arm, which he begins to hit intuitively. A strangely moderate, hesitant Gypsy song was born from this rhythm. The performance changes language too, from now on the students are speaking Gypsy with each other (and with Galgüt too). These simple ideas make it clear that they are really Gypsies, who have not even known anything about their origin, and were brought up in a sophisticated culture which is totally different from their roots. Galgüt conjures an imaginary ball and throws it into the surprised group. Slowly they start to play with it. The grotesque chasing, which gradually starts, indicates the born of individualism in fact: who has the ball always gets out of the others, stays on his own, realises himself, but the others jump on him all the time, try to get the imaginary toy. Finally, the freed anger turns the Gypsies against Galgüt: chase him up on the wall, there each of them throw him with the imaginary ball as a weapon.
Galgüt tries to turn against the Master these freed anger. In the original play the servant provokes the Master with the play which is performed by the buffons: tries to brake his soul with that they play again the death or his daughter. Zoltán Balázs’s direction thinks again this turn bravely. Here Galgüt wants to exposure the Master in front of the students, to show that he is not the one that he is thought to be. For the “performance” Folial’s marionette gives the basic tool, which gets into many sticky situations – walking through the symbolic stages of life – then finally Galgüt cuts the its strings. Folial cries up, frightens then: my dad! It is not a game anyway but the reproduction of a crime: earlier Galgüt killed the original Folial, but her daughter, Veneranda – to bring on her father’s knowledge – gave up herself and lived on in Folial’s skin. This exposure is shocking for all of them: Veneranda takes off her gnome dress, lets her hair down and looks down the students from the top. The secret – she begins and falls into the deep before she can tell anything else. Her fall takes the whole scene too, the stage of Szkéné gets naked too, we can see the windows, through them we have a view onto the River Danube and the city. There is no secret anyway, that is the life itself, which even though falls into death, is going on and on forever.
The group of wonderful pictures, musical flows, ceremony-like elements and grotesque plays form that complex theatrical language, which is used in the performance. But these are not the only ones which make this performance a special one. But the group, that plays with whole devotion, that gives the impression of a coherent troupe, despite of the fact that the actors come from many different places. The secret of the secrets is that: how can such an important theatre be born from hardly nothing on the periphery?
István L. Sándor, Ellenfény, 2003
An important theatrical value was born again on the periphery. An occasional troupe of professions, amateurs, Gypsies, and non-Gypsies (which represents a rare level of cooperation) has shown two performances, which use a very different language than any other, which we have got used to in Hungary. Zoltán Balázs, a really talented director made both of them.
The Maladype Gypsy theatre has drawn the attention of the public with two important and really valuable performances. Zoltán Balázs – the young director with a new voice – started working out the interpretation of the play from the point of view of the characteristics and relations of the environment in which the performances were made. In case of staging he speaks about the personal and social problems of the Gypsy identity, both in Jack and in The school of Buffons – in a way that he avoids the danger of any kind of didactic and publicistic aspects It comes from greatly the fact that the director’s thoughts are precisely over thought in case of both performances and they use a theatrical language which combines many kind of sensual effects.
Who tries to be himself
Jack or The submission - as most of Ionesco’s plays – is built on a series of linguistic absurdity. The banal situation - in this present case the family argument, and the purpose to make the boy to marry – is reclassified as the parable for the absurdity of existence with the help of a text, which is full of word transformations, linguistic idiocies and logical absurdities too. The family is about to disinherit Jack, because he is unwilling to state that he loves the fries with bacon. Then when they finally made him to tell his confession, they immediately want him to marry but according to Jack „his beloved one”, who was chosen by his family, is not ugly enough, because she has only two noses and not three. Fortunately, the girl’s family has another „only daughter” too, and the woman with three noses – with her vision of the foal with flaming mane – really enchants Jack.
Zoltán Balázs’s direction is not built on the verbal jokes of the weird text, mainly because the greatest part of the performance is in Gypsy language. The director searched for scenic solutions which can be associated with the linguistic effects of the play, but which can function independently of them too. He builds mostly on the rhythm, on the rhythm, which works in symbiosis with the speech and stage movements. (The basic for both of them is created by the pot – playing sounds, which come from outside of the scenery.)
The speech, which is sometimes slowed down, made faster, broken up, prolonged, is connected to special movements, sequences of movements, which in their complexity form a really grotesque and weird world.
But the director translates not only the mood of the text in to the sensual language of the theatrical effects but with the help of them makes the interpretation of the play clear too. The first part of the performance is built on the contrast between Jack and his family. The family appears as a group of amorph beings in white wigs who are – usually moving together – flickering back and forth in the area. They are making stranger and stranger movements, all of their words are followed by annoyingly rank gestures. Jack watches them calmly, essentially he is stationary. As if, his existence has a different rhythm. As if, he is closed into the shell of his minority report and resistance. We can feel it from the text of the play and this feeling is visualised by the performance too: we can see Jack mainly in a glass cage throughout the play. It can show that the only constant thing is his frailty and vulnerability, the shameless one is put on stage. At the beginning, Jack is calm, he sits on his knees, and later he reacts with different kind of posture changing and movements to the scolds, reasons, provocations. Once he relaxes and then clings to the wall of the plexiglass cage. Sometimes hands in gloves reach into the cage, as if they tried to make a harsh operation on him, then they tense strings as if they tried to pull the rebellious child as a marionette.
In the performance of the Maladype, Jack is well seemingly a Gypsy boy, who has no other special features than he tries to be himself. He does not have green hair, as Ionesco wrote it, his movements are natural, his gestures are really human ones. His defiance and anger are those too. This also forms a sharp contrast between him and his family members, who try to make him similar to them, and each members of which has something disgustingly strange in them, weirdly puppet-like something. Their lumpy, torned, repeated monotonous movements give this feeling. The mother (Erzsébet Soltész) who leads the family with energy, for example, carries a puppet child on her back throughout the play. The father (Balázs Dévai) speaks with echo. The grandfather (Árpád Bogdán) however never tells anything but many times conjures table tennis balls from his mouth. The younger sister (Nóra Parti) is pregnant. Then she lays in front of the cage with straddled legs, and the jellied, sticky rags, to which she has given birth, throws onto the glass wall, while she is repeating the word: chronometrability. The scene gives meaning to Ionesco’s weird misstatement: Jacqueline warns Jack because of the disgusting rules of decay, according to which the rebellion is as meaningless as a protest against death.
It seems like Roberte, the bride (Erika Molnár) brings the message of death too. „My basic nature is very happy” - she says it on a sepulchral voice. All through the play she speaks dry, and in that way she forms a contrast between her sentences which are full of passion and visons and her speech.
Her movement is slow mostly: weather she stands statically or moves gracefully in her highly decorated bride dress from the 19th century, and her head appears from time to time through its lower or upper cracks. (The earlier one is like an elf, who looks out onto the world.) Roberte is the prisoner of the bride dress as Jack is of his own cage. The girl’s vision about the burning horse which is galloping in the town, signals the message of death too, but in a paradoxic way it frees the strengths of life: Jack himself is galloping together with the story, then gets out of his cage, goes close to the girl, then starts ecstatically playing hide-and-seek with her: the two childish beings disappear, they are getting themselves, chasing each other through the cracks of the dress, which can stand on its own too. Finally, the lovers meet in the cage. The strange words of the Gypsy and Hungarian dialogue can meet each other repeatedly in the word of cat. Everything is cat: for the two distant people, who have got out the similar lifeless world, this would become a common language. But unexpectedly the members of the family get into the cage too, they fill the entire place there, as if they do not even let this relationship breath, which could hold out the hope to a new life.
The last day
The latest performance of Maladype goes on the way, they have begun. In case of The school for Fools the accurate (defined by the environment of the troupe) interpretation of the play creates the form which is built firmly, used consistently, but it is more complex, and plays in a wider register than in the case of Jack. The grotesque plays stay there too, but the musical forms are strengthen and scenes are fulfilled.
The performance starts as if we got into a ceremony of monastery. Beings in robes are kneeing around a glass table, there are glass plates and drawn, fragile glasses in front of them, the faces which are flashing out of the robes are enlightened by the lights, which get though up the plates, these are drawing the faces a little bit ghostly and frightening. They sing in Latin language spiritualized, with piety and otherwise for some reason strangely too. The feeling of a monastery is broken by weirds elements: first the beings in robes start playing music on the glasses, then on the cutlery too. Than as if, the showing up of the cutlery became the part of the liturgy.
The ceremony if led by the Master’s servant, by Galgüt (Erika Molnár). He is speaking – still in Latin – to the students about the dirty life from which Folial got them together and how he has been teaching them over the years. But he still owes them with the greatest secret. This is the final day in the school and Galgüt promises that the Master teaches them today the importance of any art, gets the veil of the great secret finally. However, Folial (Erzsébet Soltész) is nowhere. Finally, his head appears from under the lid of the bowl in the middle, from there comes out this strange, bald elf.
His weird appearance interprets strangely the Latin ceremony: it looks like as if, we see the last supper – thirteen of them were sitting around the table – where the Master himself was served as the main course. Galgüt and Folial’s Hungarian dialogue strengthens this grotesque parallel: the Master is talking about a bad dream, he has a feeling that his students will kill him today.
Galgüt, the eternal second one, this harsh being who is tempted by the attraction of power, is really preparing a conspiracy against the Master. He warns the students because of their origin, tries to rise up their anger because of their derogatory fates. The robes are put down, and with it the students have become naked: under their yellow-black hoods, colourful pants and bikinis are flashing up. A tin pot falls into one of their arm, which he begins to hit intuitively. A strangely moderate, hesitant Gypsy song was born from this rhythm. The performance changes language too, from now on the students are speaking Gypsy with each other (and with Galgüt too). These simple ideas make it clear that they are really Gypsies, who have not even known anything about their origin, and were brought up in a sophisticated culture which is totally different from their roots. Galgüt conjures an imaginary ball and throws it into the surprised group. Slowly they start to play with it. The grotesque chasing, which gradually starts, indicates the born of individualism in fact: who has the ball always gets out of the others, stays on his own, realises himself, but the others jump on him all the time, try to get the imaginary toy. Finally, the freed anger turns the Gypsies against Galgüt: chase him up on the wall, there each of them throw him with the imaginary ball as a weapon.
Galgüt tries to turn against the Master these freed anger. In the original play the servant provokes the Master with the play which is performed by the buffons: tries to brake his soul with that they play again the death or his daughter. Zoltán Balázs’s direction thinks again this turn bravely. Here Galgüt wants to exposure the Master in front of the students, to show that he is not the one that he is thought to be. For the “performance” Folial’s marionette gives the basic tool, which gets into many sticky situations – walking through the symbolic stages of life – then finally Galgüt cuts the its strings. Folial cries up, frightens then: my dad! It is not a game anyway but the reproduction of a crime: earlier Galgüt killed the original Folial, but her daughter, Veneranda – to bring on her father’s knowledge – gave up herself and lived on in Folial’s skin. This exposure is shocking for all of them: Veneranda takes off her gnome dress, lets her hair down and looks down the students from the top. The secret – she begins and falls into the deep before she can tell anything else. Her fall takes the whole scene too, the stage of Szkéné gets naked too, we can see the windows, through them we have a view onto the River Danube and the city. There is no secret anyway, that is the life itself, which even though falls into death, is going on and on forever.
The group of wonderful pictures, musical flows, ceremony-like elements and grotesque plays form that complex theatrical language, which is used in the performance. But these are not the only ones which make this performance a special one. But the group, that plays with whole devotion, that gives the impression of a coherent troupe, despite of the fact that the actors come from many different places. The secret of the secrets is that: how can such an important theatre be born from hardly nothing on the periphery?
István L. Sándor, Ellenfény, 2003