We can get bored even in a festive mood. During a spiritual dinner, the intellectual courses can disgust us. A pure structure can also become strange in connection with the structure.

The Maladype Theatre, which celebrates its ten years old existence, has chosen a worthy challenge for itself. The leader of the troupe, Zoltán Balázs, who – besides other complex tasks – is willingly start working with the interpretation of monuments, like Faust (however, it was mad by the Puppet Theatre of Budapest), now interpreted the most merciless, the most well-known part of The Divine Comedy, with the help of Judit Góczán, his dramaturg. They have inserted quotes from Thomas Mann and Paolo Santarcangeli into its dramatization. The special curiosity of the performance is, the sign of the activity by the viewers of Maladype, and it is one part of the ingredients of the performance too, that “The »sinful souls«, who are presented in the performance, are voluntary civilians, who did the rehearsals enthusiastically and devotedly together with us, during the last week of the rehearsing period”.

Zoltán Balázs wants great compositions of thoughts and view. He has come from the mystical-religious, judgmental moral vision of the Middle Age (together with some exact – mostly vivid in the lighting and iconographic association of ideas – usage of renaissance reflexes) until the mass questions of the moral science fiction of the Space Age. In case of map using he gets from Péter Polgár’s moderately rising, gothic tall and over-technical part of a set, which follows the style of the XXI. century, from the slow start of the performance, which is frozen to this set and suggests a centre that way, to the dispersant and splashing usage of the stage, which interprets András Szőllősi’s scales of movements as a score. In case of the leading of actors, he uses the declaiming presenter-like text telling as well as the more broken, more confronting, sometimes very dialogical performance of the scenes. According to its style, from the lyrical staging neutral diction with the help of the century old folklore, as it is marked by the modern mass culture too, until the amorphous dynamic form of speech.

That bipolar nature that characterises the experiment can be connected to the Hungarian translation too. The words of The Divine Comedy grab from two sides: with the help of Mihály Babits’ well-known older translation, and Ádám Nádasdy’s just partly published new one, this two and a half hours long spectacle flow of speech. Vergil and at the beginning Dante, got Babits, the others got Nádasdy, however the division is not so rigorous. The difference between the two text, because of their times, and horizon of language and style in case of the Inferno rises up not the question of the different quality of performing, but of the oversimplification. After all the collision is the main topic of Zoltán Balázs’ giant verbally – overwhelming visual theatre. Mostly these are the endless quarrel between the senses of guilt, the concepts of sin, the penances, the punishments, sometimes the aesthetics of sin and joy of them. The whole structures of the view of sins are against each other. The actualisation of their wild argument seems to be easy, but there is not any interesting aims, as it is not written itself into pictures and words of present time scripts: but a seven hundred years old seemingly valid, incredibly complex model would prove its validity.

Even the most experienced philologists can understand without any lack this whole giant historical, artistic and culture-historical material from this condescended and enriched interpretation. The names are going around - Minotaurus, Filippo Argenti, Brunetto Latini, Fallen Angel II, Piero della Vigna, Jesus, Ulysses, Megera, Nicholas III, Francesca, and the others – which mean a difficult lesson of understanding on their own and in their connections too, especially together with the references form Thomas Mann (anyway someone had to translate Mann and Santarcangeli too. Their names cannot be read on the programme, and I am not sure that with hard data searching back in time, we could find anything for sure.) The male (supporting) characters, they are ninety percent of the whole, are owned by women with forty percent (Judit Kovács Ligeti, Erika Tankó) and the actors (Zoltán Lendváczky, Zsolt Páll, Ádám Tompa) perform not only male roles. This so-called usual mixed cast characterises even the volunteering assistance too, very rightly, as those, who got into the Inferno are not mostly men or women anymore. They are creatures. They are souls. They are the remaining parts of creatures and souls.

Who knows why – the answer can be the habits, towards Babits and his translation, our respect, which is partly independent of the quality of the translation in our lyrical knowledge – the poetic sentences by Babits can help us guide more to understand the classical work, than Nádasdy’s does. Babits can settle thing for the modern mental state and ears, while Nádasdy stirs us up. Both of them do their work. And of course, it is significant that these helping lines with their endless lies are told by Dante’s guide from the other world, by Vergil – so by Andrea Ladányi. In her new special role, she is dressed to be provocatively feminine and masculine in a preventing way – in high-heeled shoes, trousers and coat – Ladányi is perfect again. We cannot take our eyes off the whole tension form of Modigliani, off the model of Schiele, off the picture of the human sculpture of Vergil, anyway an animus/anima is talking here with perfect inner concentration, seemingly emotionlessly (even if not according to the meaning of Jung). The farce-Lucifer, who makes us remember Vörösmarty’s imps, Ákos Orosz’s imagined over-moving can be hyperactivity in comparison with this unwaveringness. Kamilla Fátyol, as Beatrice, has got any help or instructions to form the muse into a firm form. Zénó Faragó – because of his bad luck, but not totally by accident – is the most boring character of the four. Dante, who declaims from the depth but without any real life experiences, whose fine lamentation is dispelled many times earlier by the bad acoustic of the Trafó, than it can go up into unimagined highness towards the sky.

It is not fair to talk about over-moving, where all the four main heroes have been burnt into that extravagant catapult, which rises up in the origin of the place. Instead of the half-naked clochard rocker of life, the gangster master (woman), who handles ideas, the butterfly elf in skirt and the erotic leopard (Dante, Vergil, Lucifer, Beatrice) the surrounding crowd of people, the mass is moving, without or by flashing their faces. In Júlia Horányi’s costumes and especially into Ákos Kerényi and Kornél Mogyoró’s music with percussion instruments, which can make a hole on the firmament, we can get lost for minutes, but the Inferno was successful just partly. It is a performance, which tries to solve the over complicated and harder questions of it, by another complications. Over its oratorical and static axle the lava of the guilty ones can go around and bubble moving and elevating, only sometimes. All structuring ideas keep too long and in case of the main appearances, make themselves overused too.

It is a great basic work, a great topic, a great experiment – with poor results from the point of view of Maladype.

Tamás Tarján, Criticai Lapok, 2011

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)