“In everything we seek human and professional renewal”
In recent years, the internationally acclaimed founder and artistic director of Maladype Theatre has been going through what could be called his “Polish period.” At Bucharest’s Odeon Theatre, he directed Elżbieta Chowaniec’s Gardenia; after the great success of his staging of Matei Vișniec’s How to Explain the History of Communism to Mental Patients at Chicago’s Trap Door Theatre, he was invited back to direct Witkiewicz’s The Water Hen, a production later postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic. In January, together with the Maladype ensemble, he presented Gombrowicz’s Yvonne in a radically innovative interpretation at the Fészek Artists’ Club, searching for forgotten points of contact between creator and audience. In September, the company will guest-perform the production at the International Gombrowicz Festival in Radom.
During the lockdown, Tim Carroll’s Hamlet at Bárka Theatre — which he described as a “theatrical experiment” and in which you played the title role — was available online. Did that radically improvisational, interactive form of theatre-making, built on the mutual influence between spectators and performers, pave the way for the idea in Yvonne of selecting the title character from the audience every evening? What justified this unusual concept?
For example, my production of Leonce and Lena consisted of different variations, a kind of theatrical menu from which the audience could choose scene after scene. In our production Egg(s)Hell, the actors did not even know the order of the musical pieces. King Ubu, Great Sound in the Rush, and Csongor and Tünde were also based on interaction. Yvonne represents a further stage in exploring the relationship between creator and audience through direct impulses of human contact. I simply took Gombrowicz’s ideas seriously. In his highly distinctive theatrical thinking, he shows a heightened interest in the relationship between performer and audience. He strongly believed in the spectator as an active shaper of the theatrical event. For him, the figure of Yvonne embodies temptation itself — the possibility of both good and evil. That is why it becomes such an exciting challenge for the actors every evening to sensitively and effectively incorporate the unexpected impressions arising from the personality of the addressed spectator into the faithful unfolding of the story. I know of no authorial instruction prescribing that Yvonne must exclusively be portrayed on stage as some kind of degenerate creature. Our production radically breaks with the established performance tradition of Gombrowicz productions built around actresses’ elaborately composed “debilized” solo performances, where Yvonne appears bald, rolling in mud, kicked, humiliated, and ultimately force-fed at the end of the play, becoming the victim of her surroundings.
Do you feel there are no limits to interaction between audience and creators? Could erasing this boundary diminish the experience?
So far, we have had the opportunity to perform the production nine times, and I cannot recall a single evening when our temporary leading actress left the theatre with a negative experience. Audiences are surprisingly easy to “draw into the dance,” and they quickly adapt to circumstances that initially seem unusual. Just as in everyday life, they rapidly map out the stage situation and begin discovering their possibilities within the coordinates established by our actors. The spontaneous reactions arising from these “Yvonne-like” recognitions provide the cast with an abundance of fresh stimuli, enabling them to establish ever new points of contact within the relationship already formed with the spectator. In Greek theatre, audience members watched performances leaning against one another’s knees, so if laughter broke out in the front rows, its energy rippled through the entire auditorium. In our over-socialized theatrical system, incapable of breaking free from the conventions of the proscenium theatre, we have forgotten this immediacy and now look back on it nostalgically. As a company that values variety and diversity, in Yvonne we are also attempting to cultivate a theatrical garden in which exotic and unfamiliar plants from distant lands may flourish alongside the already familiar native species.
To what extent were your intentions undermined by the fact that, on the one hand, you lost the Maladype Base apartment theatre at Mikszáth Square due to a roommate’s negligence, and on the other hand, your operational funding was roughly cut in half this year?
Three things are necessary for survival: a sense of humor, good company, and inner belonging. No matter how difficult the circumstances may be, if we know our profession, we are capable of holding together. This was not the first time in recent years that our annual budget was unjustifiably reduced, nor the first time we had to rise from an apparently hopeless situation. That is why the statement we issued in response to the committee decision drastically reducing our operational funding can best be interpreted through Columbus’s words to Isabella of Castile: “The magnitude of my demands reflects the magnitude of my responsibility.” Although previous committees repeatedly proposed in their document The Committee Justifies that six companies — including Maladype — should be transferred into a highlighted category, it now seems we are moving further and further away from the logical and timely realization of that proposal. Unfortunately, this destructive problem will remain unresolved as long as there is no professional continuity among committee members and no unified declaration representing the shared intentions of the affected companies. Contradictory processes dominate the decision-making procedure, while the long-overdue clarification of profiles — which should be based on the actual achievements of years of value-creating work — continues to be postponed. Meanwhile, enormous structural and artistic damage is caused by the fact that, due to a lack of real information concerning the independent theatre sector, decision-makers place long-established companies with serious accomplishments into the same category as newly formed and still immature groups. The current situation mainly benefits opportunists and those with membership in one clique or another. This is not a new phenomenon. Maladype has always kept its distance from both political circles and insular professional gatherings. In spirit and artistic commitment we are genuinely independent, which is why we cannot accept that people with obvious personal involvement should decide on the operational funding of independent theatre companies. In this concept built upon the principle that “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” only those belonging to the category of “some animals” truly matter — those capable of devouring the most once they get close to the half-filled feeding trough. It also says much about the extent of professional hypocrisy that the committee struck our company hardest precisely when, because of losing our Mikszáth Square venue, the coronavirus shutdown, and canceled festivals, we most needed the previous year’s level of support. The loudly proclaimed slogans of solidarity and unity proved to be lies. As one of the most progressive and internationally recognized companies in Hungarian and international theatre life, our task should no longer be to prove the viability of our artistic concept and strategy. Instead, we should be striving — through proper conditions and support — to create even more varied, unique, complex, and extreme theatrical productions. Instead, because of the disproportionate and biased decision of the committee evaluating our application, we are now forced to obtain the missing 75–80 percent of our annual operating budget from alternative sources.
Besides the Fészek Artists’ Club, which currently serves as a temporary venue, what alternatives do you see for preventing the company from remaining homeless?
During the rehearsal process of Yvonne, the Fészek provided us with proper working conditions. From morning until evening, the rehearsal hall was at our disposal; they ensured the technical conditions and did not even charge rent. One of the most important tasks in the near future is finding our own venue, where we can perform for at least 100–120 spectators each evening. We must also secure the complete financial background necessary for our survival and organize the creative conditions indispensable for the premieres of the 2020/21 season.
Under such circumstances, how can one even plan a season or prepare for Maladype’s approaching twentieth anniversary?
With enormous risk-taking and optimism. For the jubilee season, we plan to stage Tankred Dorst’s Merlin or The Waste Land, a collage-like work consisting of ninety-seven scenes. Like the playwrights who have defined Maladype’s twenty-year repertoire — Hölderlin, Weöres, Genet, Wyspiański, Büchner, and Gombrowicz — Dorst is also a visionary author who, in seeking the irrational possibilities of theatre, makes maximum demands on our imagination and theatrical-human experience. At present, preparations are underway, including negotiations with various institutional leaders about the parameters of co-production collaborations. The process is usually the same: openness, enthusiasm, promises — and then the little word “but.” Many would like to host Maladype, but during discussions clarifying the conditions of ideal cooperation, that retreating “but” quickly appears. For example, when we had to cancel 75 percent of our repertoire after losing our base venue and relocate the remaining four productions among various Budapest theatres, many people offered help, including Enikő Eszenyi. We discussed our production of Richard III, which, besides regular performances at Vígszínház, would also have toured Tunisia, Georgia, and India. Enikő would gladly have hosted the Budapest performances, but once several Vígszínház actors became involved in the production, the foreign guest performances were no longer feasible for her because of the rehearsal days they would require. We appreciated the intention to help, but as a travelling company, Maladype cannot afford to cancel international invitations.
The current Maladype ensemble consists of graduating acting students from Târgu Mureș. Was this situation born of necessity? Obviously, beginners work for much less money...
Half of the company comes from Hungary proper, the other half from beyond the border. Their engagement was born of only one “necessity”: the attempt to keep a talented acting class together. We had no idea how we would secure the financial means necessary for their livelihood, but my colleagues and I knew that a company can only be developed within an ensemble structure and through consistent work. In any case, we must provide beginners with the same monthly salary capable of sustaining life in Budapest as we do for older colleagues. Rent, utilities, and other expenses make no exceptions. They are all aware that they will not buy houses or cars from their current salaries, but because of their age they can still prioritize professional investment and development. Alongside my duties as director and stage director, I am present in their lives primarily as a mentor. The good news is that two more young actors will soon join the company — actors I directed in the graduation production Alice in Bed at the University of the Arts in Târgu Mureș. Thus, from August onward, the company will once again consist of four men and four women, just as during the time of Leonce and Lena.
The theatre’s name means “encounter” in the Lovari language. Originally, you began as a Hungarian-Roma company with Ionesco’s Jack, or The Submission, presented at the Roma Parliament. Why did you eventually abandon the Roma line?
Although our first four productions — Jack, or The Submission, School for Fools, Theomachia, and The Blacks — were enthusiastically praised by critics and audiences alike, the social environment of the Roma actors could not identify with them; they longed for folklore-based theatre. The Roma members of the company were accused of having “sold themselves,” of having become “too gadjo” and “too white.” Rudolf Balogh, Zoltán Oláh, and Krisztina Sárközi all became victims of scarlet letters. They were artists of extraordinary talent and sensitivity, but because of the constant moralizing from their surroundings, they gradually became anxious and internally divided. Eventually, they could no longer participate in ensemble work according to my expectations, their own abilities, or their earlier ambitions. For example, I once asked Rudolf Balogh — the exceptionally gifted lead actor of our opening production — to remove his shirt. It turned out that as a child he had scalded himself with hot milk, leaving part of his skin marked like frost patterns. After much persuasion, in the spirit of Jacques-like self-acceptance, he agreed to reveal this uniquely beautiful texture of his skin. Yet afterward, relatives and friends who saw the performance reproached him for exposing himself and “behaving like a whore.” The stigmatizing and exclusionary reactions directed against every independent creative aspiration of the Roma actors eventually escalated to the point where their own community regarded them as traitors. We could no longer work the way we once had, and the extra time and energy required to help the Roma actors catch up began seriously hindering the professional development of the company’s other performers.
Over the years, the company has changed completely several times. To what extent were these turning points driven by your own inner needs, and to what extent by external circumstances?
The composition of the company changes cyclically, usually every seven or eight years. This is natural both in terms of my internal needs and external circumstances. It is also natural that Maladype became recognized both in Hungary and internationally thanks to the talent of those artists and collaborators who worked with us over the past twenty years, whether for shorter or longer periods. What connects the different eras is the constant redefinition of the concept of the “human-actor.” It quickly becomes clear which actors, through both their humanity and talent, are capable of giving new momentum to ensemble work and of participating flexibly in the realization of our artistic ideas. Long-distance runners and the artists of tomorrow stand out immediately. But over time, one must also take into account the everyday considerations that inspire actors’ desires for family, apartment, and car. I have always been driven by the new and the unexpected, and therefore I often forgot the importance that human factors — stability and security — hold for others. I had to learn to accept and let go. The entire Maladype phenomenon emerged from a natural and powerful will, and its end will probably be equally organic. I never intended to lead a theatre company, nor did I imagine survival would be such a struggle, but I owe Maladype extraordinary encounters, remarkable works, and remarkable artists.
Young actors and beginners clearly idolize you because you opened an entirely new world to them through circus, physical theatre, and improvisation. Those who left perhaps grew tired of your methods, which demand the whole human being.
Perhaps. Or maybe they simply longed more strongly for the additional joys of family life or fame. Nevertheless, I do not deny that I am a determined and conceptual director; I know what I want. From Robert Wilson I learned that a director must leave his mark with his very first production, because if he does not, he will not be able to do so with his tenth. Perhaps I demand more work from actors than an average director does, but my experiences so far confirm that this is what moves the company forward. Impulses lying outside the comfort zone must always be worked for. Safe play eventually softens and becomes cowardly. Theatre-making, in any form, cannot become comfortable.
Can one define where Zoltán Balázs and Maladype are heading now?
We would like to finish what we left unfinished and realize our plans for the 2020/21 season. We would like to make up for our canceled foreign guest performances and host internationally renowned masters who, in connection with our Five Gates theatre-methodology concept, will hold workshops for our actors. But as before, in everything we seek human and professional renewal. The “reimagined worldview” formulated in Tankred Dorst’s work has gained especially strong relevance in light of the pandemic situation, and translating it into theatrical form represents a complex task and new challenge for all of us. I was also deeply struck by Péter Haumann’s statement that he considers the psychology of silence to be the most valuable aspect of acting. In future works, I too would like to pay greater attention to the changing qualities of silence. And regarding the petty human behavior that has exploited the negative events of recent times, I would like to rise above it with generosity.
Rita Szentgyörgyi, Színház.net, 2020
translated by: Zsuzsanna Juraszek
During the lockdown, Tim Carroll’s Hamlet at Bárka Theatre — which he described as a “theatrical experiment” and in which you played the title role — was available online. Did that radically improvisational, interactive form of theatre-making, built on the mutual influence between spectators and performers, pave the way for the idea in Yvonne of selecting the title character from the audience every evening? What justified this unusual concept?
For example, my production of Leonce and Lena consisted of different variations, a kind of theatrical menu from which the audience could choose scene after scene. In our production Egg(s)Hell, the actors did not even know the order of the musical pieces. King Ubu, Great Sound in the Rush, and Csongor and Tünde were also based on interaction. Yvonne represents a further stage in exploring the relationship between creator and audience through direct impulses of human contact. I simply took Gombrowicz’s ideas seriously. In his highly distinctive theatrical thinking, he shows a heightened interest in the relationship between performer and audience. He strongly believed in the spectator as an active shaper of the theatrical event. For him, the figure of Yvonne embodies temptation itself — the possibility of both good and evil. That is why it becomes such an exciting challenge for the actors every evening to sensitively and effectively incorporate the unexpected impressions arising from the personality of the addressed spectator into the faithful unfolding of the story. I know of no authorial instruction prescribing that Yvonne must exclusively be portrayed on stage as some kind of degenerate creature. Our production radically breaks with the established performance tradition of Gombrowicz productions built around actresses’ elaborately composed “debilized” solo performances, where Yvonne appears bald, rolling in mud, kicked, humiliated, and ultimately force-fed at the end of the play, becoming the victim of her surroundings.
Do you feel there are no limits to interaction between audience and creators? Could erasing this boundary diminish the experience?
So far, we have had the opportunity to perform the production nine times, and I cannot recall a single evening when our temporary leading actress left the theatre with a negative experience. Audiences are surprisingly easy to “draw into the dance,” and they quickly adapt to circumstances that initially seem unusual. Just as in everyday life, they rapidly map out the stage situation and begin discovering their possibilities within the coordinates established by our actors. The spontaneous reactions arising from these “Yvonne-like” recognitions provide the cast with an abundance of fresh stimuli, enabling them to establish ever new points of contact within the relationship already formed with the spectator. In Greek theatre, audience members watched performances leaning against one another’s knees, so if laughter broke out in the front rows, its energy rippled through the entire auditorium. In our over-socialized theatrical system, incapable of breaking free from the conventions of the proscenium theatre, we have forgotten this immediacy and now look back on it nostalgically. As a company that values variety and diversity, in Yvonne we are also attempting to cultivate a theatrical garden in which exotic and unfamiliar plants from distant lands may flourish alongside the already familiar native species.
To what extent were your intentions undermined by the fact that, on the one hand, you lost the Maladype Base apartment theatre at Mikszáth Square due to a roommate’s negligence, and on the other hand, your operational funding was roughly cut in half this year?
Three things are necessary for survival: a sense of humor, good company, and inner belonging. No matter how difficult the circumstances may be, if we know our profession, we are capable of holding together. This was not the first time in recent years that our annual budget was unjustifiably reduced, nor the first time we had to rise from an apparently hopeless situation. That is why the statement we issued in response to the committee decision drastically reducing our operational funding can best be interpreted through Columbus’s words to Isabella of Castile: “The magnitude of my demands reflects the magnitude of my responsibility.” Although previous committees repeatedly proposed in their document The Committee Justifies that six companies — including Maladype — should be transferred into a highlighted category, it now seems we are moving further and further away from the logical and timely realization of that proposal. Unfortunately, this destructive problem will remain unresolved as long as there is no professional continuity among committee members and no unified declaration representing the shared intentions of the affected companies. Contradictory processes dominate the decision-making procedure, while the long-overdue clarification of profiles — which should be based on the actual achievements of years of value-creating work — continues to be postponed. Meanwhile, enormous structural and artistic damage is caused by the fact that, due to a lack of real information concerning the independent theatre sector, decision-makers place long-established companies with serious accomplishments into the same category as newly formed and still immature groups. The current situation mainly benefits opportunists and those with membership in one clique or another. This is not a new phenomenon. Maladype has always kept its distance from both political circles and insular professional gatherings. In spirit and artistic commitment we are genuinely independent, which is why we cannot accept that people with obvious personal involvement should decide on the operational funding of independent theatre companies. In this concept built upon the principle that “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” only those belonging to the category of “some animals” truly matter — those capable of devouring the most once they get close to the half-filled feeding trough. It also says much about the extent of professional hypocrisy that the committee struck our company hardest precisely when, because of losing our Mikszáth Square venue, the coronavirus shutdown, and canceled festivals, we most needed the previous year’s level of support. The loudly proclaimed slogans of solidarity and unity proved to be lies. As one of the most progressive and internationally recognized companies in Hungarian and international theatre life, our task should no longer be to prove the viability of our artistic concept and strategy. Instead, we should be striving — through proper conditions and support — to create even more varied, unique, complex, and extreme theatrical productions. Instead, because of the disproportionate and biased decision of the committee evaluating our application, we are now forced to obtain the missing 75–80 percent of our annual operating budget from alternative sources.
Besides the Fészek Artists’ Club, which currently serves as a temporary venue, what alternatives do you see for preventing the company from remaining homeless?
During the rehearsal process of Yvonne, the Fészek provided us with proper working conditions. From morning until evening, the rehearsal hall was at our disposal; they ensured the technical conditions and did not even charge rent. One of the most important tasks in the near future is finding our own venue, where we can perform for at least 100–120 spectators each evening. We must also secure the complete financial background necessary for our survival and organize the creative conditions indispensable for the premieres of the 2020/21 season.
Under such circumstances, how can one even plan a season or prepare for Maladype’s approaching twentieth anniversary?
With enormous risk-taking and optimism. For the jubilee season, we plan to stage Tankred Dorst’s Merlin or The Waste Land, a collage-like work consisting of ninety-seven scenes. Like the playwrights who have defined Maladype’s twenty-year repertoire — Hölderlin, Weöres, Genet, Wyspiański, Büchner, and Gombrowicz — Dorst is also a visionary author who, in seeking the irrational possibilities of theatre, makes maximum demands on our imagination and theatrical-human experience. At present, preparations are underway, including negotiations with various institutional leaders about the parameters of co-production collaborations. The process is usually the same: openness, enthusiasm, promises — and then the little word “but.” Many would like to host Maladype, but during discussions clarifying the conditions of ideal cooperation, that retreating “but” quickly appears. For example, when we had to cancel 75 percent of our repertoire after losing our base venue and relocate the remaining four productions among various Budapest theatres, many people offered help, including Enikő Eszenyi. We discussed our production of Richard III, which, besides regular performances at Vígszínház, would also have toured Tunisia, Georgia, and India. Enikő would gladly have hosted the Budapest performances, but once several Vígszínház actors became involved in the production, the foreign guest performances were no longer feasible for her because of the rehearsal days they would require. We appreciated the intention to help, but as a travelling company, Maladype cannot afford to cancel international invitations.
The current Maladype ensemble consists of graduating acting students from Târgu Mureș. Was this situation born of necessity? Obviously, beginners work for much less money...
Half of the company comes from Hungary proper, the other half from beyond the border. Their engagement was born of only one “necessity”: the attempt to keep a talented acting class together. We had no idea how we would secure the financial means necessary for their livelihood, but my colleagues and I knew that a company can only be developed within an ensemble structure and through consistent work. In any case, we must provide beginners with the same monthly salary capable of sustaining life in Budapest as we do for older colleagues. Rent, utilities, and other expenses make no exceptions. They are all aware that they will not buy houses or cars from their current salaries, but because of their age they can still prioritize professional investment and development. Alongside my duties as director and stage director, I am present in their lives primarily as a mentor. The good news is that two more young actors will soon join the company — actors I directed in the graduation production Alice in Bed at the University of the Arts in Târgu Mureș. Thus, from August onward, the company will once again consist of four men and four women, just as during the time of Leonce and Lena.
The theatre’s name means “encounter” in the Lovari language. Originally, you began as a Hungarian-Roma company with Ionesco’s Jack, or The Submission, presented at the Roma Parliament. Why did you eventually abandon the Roma line?
Although our first four productions — Jack, or The Submission, School for Fools, Theomachia, and The Blacks — were enthusiastically praised by critics and audiences alike, the social environment of the Roma actors could not identify with them; they longed for folklore-based theatre. The Roma members of the company were accused of having “sold themselves,” of having become “too gadjo” and “too white.” Rudolf Balogh, Zoltán Oláh, and Krisztina Sárközi all became victims of scarlet letters. They were artists of extraordinary talent and sensitivity, but because of the constant moralizing from their surroundings, they gradually became anxious and internally divided. Eventually, they could no longer participate in ensemble work according to my expectations, their own abilities, or their earlier ambitions. For example, I once asked Rudolf Balogh — the exceptionally gifted lead actor of our opening production — to remove his shirt. It turned out that as a child he had scalded himself with hot milk, leaving part of his skin marked like frost patterns. After much persuasion, in the spirit of Jacques-like self-acceptance, he agreed to reveal this uniquely beautiful texture of his skin. Yet afterward, relatives and friends who saw the performance reproached him for exposing himself and “behaving like a whore.” The stigmatizing and exclusionary reactions directed against every independent creative aspiration of the Roma actors eventually escalated to the point where their own community regarded them as traitors. We could no longer work the way we once had, and the extra time and energy required to help the Roma actors catch up began seriously hindering the professional development of the company’s other performers.
Over the years, the company has changed completely several times. To what extent were these turning points driven by your own inner needs, and to what extent by external circumstances?
The composition of the company changes cyclically, usually every seven or eight years. This is natural both in terms of my internal needs and external circumstances. It is also natural that Maladype became recognized both in Hungary and internationally thanks to the talent of those artists and collaborators who worked with us over the past twenty years, whether for shorter or longer periods. What connects the different eras is the constant redefinition of the concept of the “human-actor.” It quickly becomes clear which actors, through both their humanity and talent, are capable of giving new momentum to ensemble work and of participating flexibly in the realization of our artistic ideas. Long-distance runners and the artists of tomorrow stand out immediately. But over time, one must also take into account the everyday considerations that inspire actors’ desires for family, apartment, and car. I have always been driven by the new and the unexpected, and therefore I often forgot the importance that human factors — stability and security — hold for others. I had to learn to accept and let go. The entire Maladype phenomenon emerged from a natural and powerful will, and its end will probably be equally organic. I never intended to lead a theatre company, nor did I imagine survival would be such a struggle, but I owe Maladype extraordinary encounters, remarkable works, and remarkable artists.
Young actors and beginners clearly idolize you because you opened an entirely new world to them through circus, physical theatre, and improvisation. Those who left perhaps grew tired of your methods, which demand the whole human being.
Perhaps. Or maybe they simply longed more strongly for the additional joys of family life or fame. Nevertheless, I do not deny that I am a determined and conceptual director; I know what I want. From Robert Wilson I learned that a director must leave his mark with his very first production, because if he does not, he will not be able to do so with his tenth. Perhaps I demand more work from actors than an average director does, but my experiences so far confirm that this is what moves the company forward. Impulses lying outside the comfort zone must always be worked for. Safe play eventually softens and becomes cowardly. Theatre-making, in any form, cannot become comfortable.
Can one define where Zoltán Balázs and Maladype are heading now?
We would like to finish what we left unfinished and realize our plans for the 2020/21 season. We would like to make up for our canceled foreign guest performances and host internationally renowned masters who, in connection with our Five Gates theatre-methodology concept, will hold workshops for our actors. But as before, in everything we seek human and professional renewal. The “reimagined worldview” formulated in Tankred Dorst’s work has gained especially strong relevance in light of the pandemic situation, and translating it into theatrical form represents a complex task and new challenge for all of us. I was also deeply struck by Péter Haumann’s statement that he considers the psychology of silence to be the most valuable aspect of acting. In future works, I too would like to pay greater attention to the changing qualities of silence. And regarding the petty human behavior that has exploited the negative events of recent times, I would like to rise above it with generosity.
Rita Szentgyörgyi, Színház.net, 2020
translated by: Zsuzsanna Juraszek