This year I met director Zoltán Balázs again at the premiere of For Your Own Good, a production created together with the team of Odeon Theatre.

We had not seen each other for some time, but at the press conference I was pleased to notice that the passing of time had only added a slight melancholy to the features of this always cheerful artist, who chose the freedom of expression — something that inevitably comes with the financial difficulties of independent theatre.

I first met him in 2011 at the Sibiu International Theatre Festival, where he arrived with his own ensemble, the dynamic troupe of Maladype Theatre, bringing an energetic performance that was just crazy enough to be exciting for audiences. In Egg(s)Hell, eight young actors perform movements timed down to the second: with the speed characteristic of slapstick, relationships between individuals and within the group gradually emerge while the actors attempt to catch and pass on a highly valuable EGG without breaking it. But should we understand this as a real egg, or the symbolic and primordial one?

A year earlier, at the same festival, I had seen an unconventional and brilliantly choreographed Leonce and Lena by this independent Budapest theatre company, in which the audience could choose from several possible outcomes for the story. The fact that Constantin Chiriac, director of the Sibiu festival, invited Balázs and his troupe back again was probably due to the ineffable quality this young theatre-maker possesses — the thing that makes his stage vision unmistakably unique and whose boldness enriches the language of contemporary theatre.

The surprises did not end there. On the evening after the performance, when the director arrived at the filming location of an interview introducing the theatre artists participating in the festival — which we were preparing for the Romanian public broadcaster TVR — the Hungarian Zoltán Balázs greeted us in vivid and nuanced Romanian. He had, after all, been born in Romania and spent around eleven years there. And he is one of those people who not only do not hide their origins, but value them.

So in 2019, when we sat down to talk at the Odeon Theatre after the premiere of For Your Own Good, neither his openness nor his excellent command of Romanian surprised me anymore.

Based on a text by the young award-winning Italian author Pier Lorenzo Pisano, the director created a visually overwhelming performance structured around the questions raised by the play: how dysfunctional are today’s families, and how can one escape their bleakness?

Sanda Vişan: In a 2013 interview, you said that contemporary texts did not interest you. And now, surprisingly enough, your current production is based on a text written by a 28-year-old playwright, while last year — also at the Odeon — you worked on a text by a Polish playwright born in 1982. Did you take a little break to see what is happening in the world today?

Zoltán Balázs: You see, we say one thing and do another, but that also means we are open to opportunities that arise. I never thought I would work with a contemporary text when this opportunity came along. And it is no secret that I first discussed things with Dorina Lazăr at the Odeon. At the time we talked about a large-stage adaptation of La Fontaine’s fables and Matei Vișniec’s Dada Cabaret, which I had already directed successfully in Budapest.

Things changed afterward, and the theatre got a new director. To my surprise, Cristian Șofron called me and said he wanted to continue the collaboration. Honestly, this is a very rare gesture — directors usually prefer choosing the people they work with themselves and do not typically continue collaborations started by their predecessors. I was very surprised, but I told myself: why not say yes if they want it too? Let’s see what this Fabulamundi Playwright Europe project has in store for us. After that I chose the play Gardenia.

The Odeon Theatre became a partner in the European Fabulamundi. Playwriting Europe project in 2012 and, within the framework of the programme promoting contemporary drama, staged eight readings of plays from the contemporary dramatic literature of ten member states between 2012 and 2016. In 2018, a text by the Polish-born playwright Elżbieta Chowaniec was staged under the direction of Zoltán Balázs. The Hungarian director preserved the essence of the repeatedly tragic fate of four women who, from the tyrannical great-grandmother to the modern great-granddaughter, all search for their own freedom but ultimately follow the same path through the turbulent second half of the twentieth century.

The director also managed to retain the text’s cruel honesty, elevating the play — at the level of relationships between the characters — onto a foundation free of sentimentality, while channeling emotionally charged moments symbolically into operatic excerpts performed by the actors.

S. V.: In 2019 you also chose For Your Own Good by Pier Lorenzo Pisano yourself?

B. Z.: Yes. Tamara Susoi was a tremendous help — she is the heart and mind of this project and works with great motivation both on Fabulamundi and on fulfilling our directorial wishes. She motivated me as well to embark on this adventure. I never illustrate the author’s text; what interests me is how I can complement and enrich it, how I can create a personal mythology.

There is no doubt that he elevated the meaning of the otherwise overly simple realist text to another level: he created a baroque and tension-filled stage universe in which the confrontations caused by the prodigal son’s return to a dysfunctional family take place aboard a ship headed nowhere — yet one that transforms the banal figures of reality into legendary characters.

S. V.: How did you arrive — from the language characteristic of your troupe, based largely on physicality and the rhythm of movement and music — at the kind of language we saw at the Odeon, rich in a sort of profane sanctity, where movement mostly appears on the level of hissing confrontations?

B. Z.: A great deal depends on the play itself, the author’s intentions, and naturally the troupe, the situation, the possibilities, and my own vision of the text. I haven’t changed, but I want to find the right interpretation for each play so I do not repeat myself or recycle elements from previous productions.

My greatest desire — sometimes it succeeds, sometimes not; that’s life — is to observe, invent new things, important things, to discover fresh impulses that open new possibilities of expression for me as a director, as a human being, as a man. I would like to live on Jupiter, where, as far as I know, one day equals three Earth days, because 24 hours are not enough for me to deal with this source of joy called theatre.

It gives me enormous joy to find collaborators in whose eyes I can see understanding awakening; to see people connecting with one another and understanding something anew; to see two or three actors suddenly grasp the whole picture while others get lost, and still others — from whom you would never expect it — discover themselves. It is fascinating, this thing that comes from setting thought into motion.

Without thought behind it, any movement becomes false, neutral, anonymous, empty of content. That is why I am always interested in the actor’s thinking and personality, and I try to guide them toward their personal desires so they can fulfill the requirements of the play in that way. Pisano’s text is completely different from Büchner or anything else I have worked on in recent years. For example, last year at the Odeon I worked on Gardenia by the Polish playwright Elżbieta Chowaniec. At first the text struggled to find its way to the collaborators, the actresses, the audience. Then it began to flow naturally.

S. V.: Both texts you selected revolve around generational differences and dysfunctional families. Two different authors, two similar themes. Have you encountered similar dilemmas in your own life?

B. Z.: Every family has problems, but joyful things as well. I was born into an exceptional family, inheriting the traditions of a noble lineage on one side. At the same time, my father was an extremely simple man. My mother and father loved each other, but a large part of their conflicts stemmed from cultural differences between them.

S. V.: So your mother, who came from a noble family, felt she had married beneath her social rank?

B. Z.: Exactly. Moreover, the two families barely kept in touch.

S. V.: That’s understandable.

B. Z.: After a while I understood it too, but when they divorced I was still a child. My sister and I were left without a father, and we did not understand the situation at all; it was very difficult. We need time and maturity to understand such things. Family always offers an opportunity for reconsideration and reevaluation — if we manage it, if we receive help.

In this play, for example, the Stranger both helps and obstructs the Boy in making a life-defining decision before setting out on his own path. But is this the only possibility, the only answer to the questions: what is the purpose of my life, how does my father feel, what is my mother doing? This text led me toward magical realism, inspired by Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Born in 1977 in Cluj-Napoca, Zoltán Balázs studied acting and directing in Budapest and, at the age of 24, took his artistic fate into his own hands by founding the Maladype Theatre, which has since become an important pillar of Hungary’s independent theatre movement. The experience he gained in workshops abroad — with Anatoly Vasiliev and Josef Nadj, or while learning alongside Robert Wilson — is clearly visible in his theatrical vision, where music and scenography are equal to the spoken word.

S. V.: From what I have seen of your work, I sensed a consistency and an ability to create a symbolic framework for a performance. For Your Own Good is a text that, when read, has almost no chance of escaping the cage of realism. Yet on your stage the visual layers sometimes have a Wilsonian quality — you once called it monumental minimalism. The ship in which the action unfolds symbolizes sorrow rather than hope.

B. Z.: Charon’s ship does not bring much hope. I mean, one may hope that on the other shore we will find what we could not find here, but we do not know exactly what awaits us there. The ship is a space of possibilities, relationships, hierarchies, of the vertical and the horizontal, of distance and closeness — therefore it is in constant motion. Constantin Ciubotariu’s set design contains many surprises.

The text also offers the possibility of constructing a thriller that ends in a powerful metamorphosis. At least that is how I interpreted this somewhat banal text, from which one could easily have made a social-documentary production. But there are already excellent directors working in that style — for example, Gianina Cărbunariu would probably have created a wonderful performance from it. It benefits both the troupe and the audience when a foreign director arrives who sees things a little differently. These different colors, signs, and flavors accumulate and diversify the Odeon’s palette.

Zoltán Balázs directs productions in Romania, France, the United States, Slovakia, and Germany. His enthusiasm resembles that of a child marveling at the world and wanting to show others the starry sky. He is the kind of artist for whom creative freedom is not negotiable. This also means that sometimes he must face the financial insecurity that accompanies the path he has chosen.

S. V.: Now that Hungary’s political system has taken a different direction, what is happening with your theatre?

B. Z.: For the Maladype Theatre this is a very difficult situation. Eighteen years have passed since its founding.

S. V.: Meaning eighteen years of struggling against political and economic tides...

B. Z.: Against everything at once. Two things help enormously: the support of the audience...

S. V.: But no performance can survive on ticket sales alone.

B. Z.: That’s true, but whenever we enter a crisis or face major problems, the audience immediately stands beside us. They raise money and help us with their own hands. It means a lot that Maladype is internationally recognized as an independent theatre, so we can also rely on the international market. This is a great joy for us.

Unfortunately our headquarters was destroyed after the upstairs neighbor flooded us. As a result, many sets and costumes became unusable, and we cannot perform seven out of ten productions. Recently the company participated in three festivals, and I accompanied them. Now that we premiered at the Odeon, we are preparing for more festivals.

Interestingly, after the accident many people from the theatre scene contacted me to say how much they respected and loved our work. Even if they cannot host all our productions, they would gladly invite us from autumn onward. We are very happy about this because it means our presence also matters in Hungary.

To answer your previous question: I find it very sad that even after working for years, proving your worth, leading people, collaborating with emblematic actors, teaching, directing, and creating unique collaborations throughout the country, what you do still does not count. What matters are political and family connections, communicating in a certain way. Of course, this is not true only of Hungary, but such things are alien to me; I want to sleep peacefully at night. I try to stay away from solutions that may rescue you in the short term but afterward leave you unable to look at yourself in the mirror. In the performance we presented at the Odeon, I also tried to speak about this.

S. V.: So you sustain yourselves through tours and festivals?

B. Z.: Yes, through tours, performances in different countries — from Iran to India, from Albania to America; we are preparing to go to Egypt and Vietnam... Through different unfamiliar situations I give my actors opportunities to develop both artistically and personally. We have a mode of expression and theatrical language that cannot easily be absorbed in a short period of time; even if people are open, when I work with foreign companies there is usually neither enough time nor the right conditions for this kind of work. I need to know everything in advance: what kind of theatre I am going to, what play I will work on, what my possibilities are, how I can push them out of their comfort zones while still ensuring that there is pleasure in the symbolic and concrete journey we take together toward the performance.

S. V.: Although Hungary is moving in an illiberal direction politically, the country is doing well economically. Aren’t people in the business world — who are making a lot of money through state contracts — open to supporting the arts?

B. Z.: That would be wonderful, and in some form it does exist. Our sponsors, for example, help us, but it is not enough to establish long-term relationships. Besides, those who are on good terms with the state do not have financial problems — they receive support. These things are painful, and I would like to find proper solutions, especially for my team, who work day and night.

So I try to work with what I have, but naturally there comes a time when things can no longer continue this way. I must choose whether I will find a home in Hungary or in another country.

S. V.: After so many years, so much perseverance and resistance — because despite the economic circumstances your troupe still exists — do you still ask yourself this question?

B. Z.: I try to ask the right question. I believe a person should be where the world needs them. Where they are not needed, where people do not know they are needed or simply do not want them, the artist should not remain present. That probably grants us the necessary freedom as well.

Whatever fate may bring, whatever the future holds for Zoltán Balázs, one thing is certain: his encounter with theatre in the country where he was born has borne fruit. In Timișoara, Sibiu, Târgu Mureș, and Bucharest as well, audiences will be able to board the “Ship of Good Hope” at the Odeon Theatre in November to see Zoltán Balázs’s two productions, Gardenia and For Your Own Good.

Sanda Vişan, Adevărul, 2019.

Translated by Panna Adorjáni