Dante’s Inferno is a lyrical work anyway, but it is not easy at all to grab the real depth of it visually. The contradiction can be connected to the fact that the pictures, which are created very suggestively, are drawings of situations, which would really give themselves to the visual expression, but they are less important from the point of view of narration. The story, which is told here, is not basically built on the given pictures, but on the static dialogues, which are usually made of only some sentences. The world, which Dante shows us, is just the scale of wonderful, terrible, moving or even funny pictures, which are formed by fantasy, that is why excellent illustrations can be made, as they have been done of it, but Dante’s work is not just the simple drawing of the other world, but it is a human story too. This story of improvement is hard to tell by pictures. There are only a few theatrical of film trials, which have this kind of aim, and even fewer, which can successfully achieve some kind of result.

The performance, Inferno of the Maladype Theatre in Trafó – I think very respectfully – tries to show the changing of the main character, and they outline two kind of stories of improvement. On the one hand, they make sensitive the way, as the main character becomes a true man, who likes even his guilty partners – in connection with Dante, I can say that he becomes a Christian one, but in connection with the whole performance, the humanist is a better expression – on the other hand how it can become poetic. The latest one is the bigger challenge, as it is not usually shown on stage.

But let’s start with the expressed world: the set is simple, only an inferno-like throne stands in the middle of the stage, and swivel chairs are lined up by the two sides. The sound effects of the performance are given by the drums, which are in the background, and there are three colours rule the stage: white, black and red. With the seemingly unstimulating surrounding they can create that kind of depressing feeling, which comes from Dante’s text too: there are not real colours there too, there is not any music or light. But there are guilty people, in million version and endless varieties, and there is the big question: how and why do people become guilty?

The Inferno of the Maladype Theatre, concentrates so much on the showing of the guilty man that here the real set is human too. The moving of the statists, who show the guilty souls, the forms, they create are there to serve the living background to each scenes. And the thousand faces of sin are on the stage: we can see a scale of told and performed stories, which focus on a sin or a guilty one. Everybody gets only short moments, so many times it is not clear that who appears and why. Of course, from the monologues and dialogues we can learn each characters’ names, but we cannot get closer to the recognition of each ones, if we know that their names are Farinata, Cavalcante or Pier della Vigna. Maybe those scenes are the best, which open and bring on the possibility, which is in the text, and actualize strongly the expressions by Dante: the original gluttonous Ciacco here is the funny and terrifying expression of the the consumer society, while in the original one she is flattering whore. Thais is the sarcastic illustration of the almost attracting but disgusting physicality in the play. It is important and pleasing, that the Inferno by Maladype is not realistic and tragic, but it is unrealistic and grotesque: vision and reality live in it together, its comic and insignificance, its greatness and horrible nature. With this point of view they can avoid that incorrect cliché, according to which the Inferno by Dante is the realist representation of the horror of our world: Dante himself – in case of Inferno – is more grotesque and surreal than realistic.

The representation of sins and guilty people are so fast, that we can sense only the continuous movement, but on the stage there is one, solid and motionless point, the middle, where the main character, Dante can live through this whole scale of vision. His leader is the gloomy and strict Vergil, from the back of the throne, who is always above the stage – whose figure is captivatingly formed anyway. He is similar to a clever but depressive teacher, who tell well – maybe a little bit too fast and sarcastically – the study, but he is not very interested in, what the student can understand from it. The student Dante, just seemingly depends on him in this performance: the humanist Beatrice and the clever but cold Lucifer are fighting for the soul of main character – as for Hans Castorp’s soul Settembrini and Naphta are. The guest texts by Thomas Mann are from the Doctor Faustus but they are more similar to The Magic Mountain. The fight is over, when Judas’ at the same time satanic and Christian forms appear on stage. Dante leaves his chair then, to from a vivid sculpture composition with the most sinful one: the expressed picture makes us remember the Pieta, Dante keeps Judas in his lap, as the suffering virgin one does it with Christ, who has got down from the cross, and ensures him, as a suffering one, about his love, independently from his sins. The love, which gains its victory, the humanist Beatrice can take the place of Vergil, of the leader of inferno, on the back of the throne, and that way she can express that from now on, she is above the beaten world of the Inferno.

We can hear two translations of The Divine Comedy in the performance: Vergil tells Mihály Babits’, while Dante – after his first sentences by Babits – and the sinful ones, tell Ádám Nádasdy’s new translation. The language of the two Hungarian translations are very different, but their rhythm and verse – six and half iambic or dramatic iambic – are the same. Maybe that is why I do not feel annoying the mixture of the two translations: which is a little be confusing, it is the fast telling of the text: sometimes it is so fast that it is hard to follow its meaning. Because of it, it is less hearable and sensible that in case of both Babits and Nádasdy the Hungarian language pulses strongly. (The poetic power of the text can be felt the most, when some sinful souls, get out of the continuous moving for some moments, stop and they entrust the effects of the telling of poems with the scenes, and they tell their stories like monologues. During Ulysses’ and count Ugolino’s texts – both of them are performed by Zsolt Páll – for example, we can feel the silence, which fills the auditorium.)

The parallel usage of the two translations may try to express, from the traditional language, which Vergil stands in for, a more modern a newer language can be formed with the help of experiences and walking in inferno, by Dante’s pen, who has become a poet. Maybe that is why the main character changes from Babits to Nádasdy after his first texts.

We can see in this performance as the human and poet Dante can overcome himself, and his own inferno. But maybe it is even harder to show, how he can captivate the world of Paradise. I am waiting for it curiously.

Norbert Mátyus, Kultúra&Kritika, 2011

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)