That unveiled, honest enthusiasm that is behind the identification can have direct effect on the viewers too.

Zoltán Balázs has become honest fanatic of Victor Kravchenko, of the emigrated soviet leader, who had an adventurous life. The question is, that we the viewer, how can share his unbroken enthusiasm. After three years negotiation he could get the rights of Kravchenko’s successful book, which the Maladype Theatre has already translated and published. After a long break he has made his return as an actor with the one man processing of this work, but it is not the end of the road at all. From the adapted version of this performance, there will be a performance for teenagers, where the young ones can decide during the hero’s legal action.

I admit, that I have hesitated if I can write a critic about this present performance. Its personality and accepted haphazard nature can be unusual even from the point of view of those performances of Maladype, which I have seen before. Its atmosphere makes me remember a friendly reunion, where during the drinking of wine, one of the boys starts playing the guitar. When Zoltán Balázs enters, he is surprisingly direct, he has a little chat, then with the help of the volunteer electrician, who is between the viewers, he can repair an old lamp to get more light into the room. The similar intermezzos, which can create familiar atmosphere anyway, and the one we have mentioned above, because of this almost touchable devotion towards the material, all these can make hard to write that way to criticise just the performance, and not the personality or individuality of the performer.

To get to save waters for a while: Kravchenko’s story is about the absolute belief in the Soviet Union and the communism, and then about the disappointment in it. So, the hero can get in touch with both the lowest and the highest classes too, with the help of them he can show us the whole cross-section of the society of his time, while his disillusionment is coloured by many personal anecdotes, loves, fulfilled and unfulfilled hopes. His parents are the victimized fighters for the overthrow of the regime of the tsars and for the freedom, their ideas are clean and idealistic. When Kravchenko in spite of his doubts gets into the Party, similarly to returning inner voices, they question their son – and that way the system too – because of the fulfilment of the won freedom. Anyway, Kravchenko can hold on for a while, but this persistence can be broken slowly with the general suffering and the torturing he has suffered in the show trial.

These kind of disillusionments from the Soviet regime have been interpreted many times before. The uniqueness of the performance can be found anyway in Kravchenko’s special viewpoint, in his both clever and naïve romantic honest, which is slowly turning into cunning rebellion. His consciousness is much more general, than to talk about just the critic of a disappeared system. Zoltán Balázs does not only set a memorial, however we cannot hear any reference to the actual political system, one and only direct gesture of social accountability is, when at the end of the performance we have to vote in connection with the fate of the present Russia.

His fast and playful first-person singular performance is in exciting contrast with the hero, who is shown to be serious and strong. He treats Kravchenko’s beginning naivety with understanding irony. His story-telling, easy style becomes problematic a little bit, when his hero remembers the terrible things: the state of the starving kids with their swollen stomach is terrible only on the level of words. He performs only twice with full empathy the shock: during the first serious quarrel between Kravchenko and his dad, and at the time of his release from the Soviet Union. With it he marks the two important turning points in the story.

The transformation on another level is really elemental. He summarises some points of the performance, which has two acts, and for a monodrama it is surprisingly long (the viewers can also decide which ones should be these). Anyway, when he does not remind us for it, then the change is almost unrecognisable: Kravchenko’s text and Zoltán Balázs’ compressing report are connected imperceptibly to one another. The unveiled, honest enthusiasm, which is behind the identification, can have doubtless effect on the viewers too. Maybe no better letter of recommendation is needed: a belief of a clever and talented man, that can show way to the world, which always derails.

Márton Hajnal, 7óra7, 2015

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)