At the half of human life, a muscular, half-naked rocker leaves for the empire of the other world. He gets as his followers a silver painted seat of a spaceship, a female terminator, a leopard in lace dress and a Lucifer in frilly skirt. Dante’s Inferno starts in the Trafó with a slow swirl.

The troupe of Maladype accepted much more than that can be fulfilled. It is not enough, that by summing up their ten years old existence, they put on stage the least stage like vision of the international literature, but they use a linguistic feat too: they perform at the same time the first part of The Divine Comedy by Babits’ and Ádám Nádasdy’s newly made translation. To the lines by Babits, which sound on archaic language Nádasdy’s texts can give ironic answers, the two types of linguistic interpretation are changed lines by lines and sentence by sentence: sometimes the level of the text itself becomes a drama, as the dialogue is between the world views of the two translations.

This double nature goes on with the mixture of genders. Andrea Ladányi performs Vergil – over her high heeled shoes and tight trousers, she wears a short coat – her rigid face, sculpture-like movements, perfect muscles, can follow the poet on his way as a senseless fulfiller, while Ákos Orosz’s Lucifer is soft, weak, grotesque figure, who shows in lace and frill the inferno-like reflection of the cruel human world. Between the guilty souls, sometimes women, than men perform the mostly male roles, even their movements do not tell anything about their gender, just the text interprets them according to their own places. There are androgynous creatures, victims, who are closed into the prison of their bodies, they are those, who live in the inferno-like, desolate place of the inferno. The new place of this dual nature is opened between the actors and volunteers, who get involved into the performance, who have applied for the appeal of Maladype to form the moving, vivid mass of the “sinful souls”, with excellent choreography. (András Szőllősi, who is the leader of the movements, can rise them to be equal with the other elements of the view on stage.)

Zoltán Balázs’ staging does a lot to make the Inferno a liveable, sensible, familiar place for the contemporary viewers. He involves civilian performers and with their help he can make deeper the concept of suffering. He puts Dante’s way into a minimal set (Péter Polgár’s visual world is sometimes pop-art-like, then works with the fashions of interior design, but basically it works well), with the contrasting of the static central point and the mass, which is whirling around it, he can put movements into the scales of pictures of life. He makes the whole one vivid, with details, and makes alive the conceptual structure of a moral question. But this immersion, which is similar to space travelling, is so sterile, so similar to a robot, that at the doorstep of Inferno not only the hope bleeding but the flesh and blood reality of the man, who is walking in the inferno. Zénó Faragó’s Dante does not suffer through all his fight together with the Adam of the Tragedy. He remains untouched, he is a paying guest of an attraction on the other world, he is a pensive traveller, who sleeps well, when he returns to the earth. No more dreams can torture him, he will not remember Judas’ body, who was suffering in the pose of the crucified Jesus, the sinful ones, who spit on one another, the greedy popes, and the lovers, who try to hold on to the tornado. Beatrice’s figure does not float in front of his eyes, who Kamilla Fátyol performs with uncertain contours – it is not known, if the purity of the virgin girl, or the cruelty of the dominant woman, who takes revenge on the pain of the world, can take the stress. And Lucifer does not help either, with his own ironic and rational evil nature, just brings him on the road.

The progress and travelling are really illusive, as the spaceship, which is decorated with skulls, is a swivel chair in reality, Dante, Vergil, Beatrice and Lucifer hold on it, and they do not move during the two hours of the performance – but there are not any movements in the layers of existence, just the human stage is dynamic. The inhabitants of the Inferno are going around for a waving rhythm, as a hot pulsation from some kind of crater. The mass sometimes throw a story, a fate, a suffer onto the surface, and the actors of Maladype can express is excellently: Zoltán Lendváczky with his special moving culture, discipline and humour can rule the scenes, which become thick around him, Ádám Tompa with passionate moments, Zsolt Páll is powerful, effective monologues can surprize us, Judit Kovács Ligeti is a little bit theatrical, but she can bring well-formed figures. Next to the performance by the actors, we get Ákos Kerényi and Kornél Mogyoró’s percussion section, with the playing of the drum and gong they take power and structure into the scenes.

But what can we do with this hardly opening text? We can hear the cross-talks, the sentences, which refer to the scandals of social life, to the racism, to the untouchable nature of political elite circle. But the mythological references, some parts of the classical knowledge, which is thicken into short metaphors, the whole structured Dante-like picture of the world, which remain wrapped, untouched all through the performance. The scales of pictures, which are enriched with movements, sound effects, fine scenic elements, are for nothing, if the viewers, who are under thirty cannot decode this thick material of the text – here and there it is made to be more complex with ancient Greek and Italian letters. They cannot see in the powerless main character the poet, who gets through the pictures of the world, who is the symbol of the individual creation, they cannot interpret the vision of the creativity, which is afraid of death and forms the other world.

Eszter Götz, Kultúra.hu, 2011

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)