Hamlet in Bárka is a charming performance. As is would be filled with the early Brecht’s slogan: What are you staring at so romantically? It gets the frivolous traditions, the fossilized consensuses from Shakespeare’s tragedy. It is fresh, cheeky, playful, happy, imitation-like. The viewers can choose the chairs between the others, on which they would like to sit and the place of it too. They draw for the evening (except the main character) who will play the other roles. Some of them are prepared from six roles. From the hat, they can draw for each scene that the scene would happen on which part of the stage. All of us have to bring a CD with us, or keep an object in their lap. Then the actors take them randomly and build in their performance. Hamlet and Laertes’ fencing scene happens with a spaetzle maker and knife. The spaetzle maker is the poisoned sword.

Judit Csanádi’s bumpy structure of podiums are the stage and auditorium at the same time. The chairs can be put anywhere, except for the streets, marked by the carpets, however the actors are walking also between the chairs, come down between and behind the viewers too, they are watching all through it, and we cannot know: from where they will come into the performance. It is not a Shakespeare puzzle anyway. Tim Carroll, the director, hides himself in the formation of the performance. He does not perform the drama instead of the actors. On the contrary: he gets the directors from the actors, their creativity, imagination, adaptability to their unexpected situations. Even the distracting unforeseeable things can lose the main line of their roles and the story itself. This method is liberating and strictly disciplinary.

A happy seriousness pushes out the acting of importance. The smaller playfulness of the text also remains instead of the traditional jokes. The games of words, the teasing, which can push into the corner, are shining because of true humour. Hamlet’s “madness” hides into playfulness. Zoltán Balázs owns the main character with sparkling self-control, with the superior understanding knowledge of the text. Everything, which is accidental, moody new-coming thing, or the speaking out to the viewers, are all healthily appropriate. Hamlet suddenly sits into a girl’s lap. He cools Claudius down in the royal hall, with a fan, which he gets from a viewer, then he forms a cockscomb to himself from it to his head, he gives it to the queen, who obviously, ingeniously goes on with the life of the found object on the stage.

The fencing hall is closed lowly. In the middle they have stretched a cut white banner over the viewers head. Through its cut hole, in the middle, Zoltán Balázs can see up until God above. The appearance of ghost, at night, happens in steady, diffused light, it is a performance by the lights of torches, it is daylight, as in case of the performances of Elizabethan’s time, in the afternoons, or similarly to the performances by daylight, in the yard of the Globe memory theatre in the district of Southwark, in London, which was reconstructed according to Sam Wanamaker, American actor’s ideas.

Our contemporary. Polonius: Béla Gados. He is not a clown-like governor. His lessons are serious, correct. His talkative nature belongs to the main-front officer’s fussiness of today. He plays the role instead of Hamlet’s critical opinion about him. He lets the freedom of opinion formation to the viewers. The clowns of Shakespeare’s time, do not know about themselves, that they are funny. Maybe just József Czintos’ First gravedigger has some folk play-like tradition in his performance, however, from one of his sentences the honest spontaneity comes up.

Róbert Kardos serves beloved, he is able to love, a loveable Horatio. He grows his ungrateful role with his consideration and endless presence. Even when he is mingled between the viewers, he follows the happenings carefully. He is the accurate witness of spoiled times.

Zoltán Seress (Claudius) is the incestuous Danish one, sometimes gets lost in the recitation of the “great style”. He is solvable: many Hamlet performances have instilled stress into us too, some celebratory elevation. We are surprised by all the lines, which are different from the Arany’s translation. We realize ashamedly that we know it badly, there are stresses forced into us, and idle interpretations. We gratefully accept the human accents, which opens the fresh meanings of the text, which we can hear for the first time with their real meanings. In the scene of the Mousetrap, Seress is unexpectedly suppressed, he asks with quiet worry, during the Gonzago play: "Have you heard the argument? Is there no offence in it?". His terrified, quiet voice is more moving than the usual fake-dramatic theatrical outbreak. (Béla Faragó musical contribution limits to the most important and tactful sounds.)

Balázs looks up into the sky through the hole on the banner before the great monologue. He is standing there for a moment. The actions slow down. And these go on in the actor. Inside the viewers. When he has already recharged, he does not start his poetic song. He speaks with unaffected simplicity (he does not talk to the viewers then, he asks himself): to be or not to be. Break. A long break. He goes on with a similarly unceremonious question: that is the question. He is thinking through the whole monologue. He changes place. And he starts it again. He does it more colourfully, because he has already known the answers for the repeated questions. With his teen-like self-pity gets to the edge of crying. He snivels into the final great question. It is the trick of the honest self-examination instead of the sounding attraction. It is the confession of the healthy fear of death. He puts on himself a coat from a young viewer’s lap. He peacocks in it. He gets red plastic rack into his hand. As it would be a sword, but he puts off its usage. And unexpectedly he handles the rack as a rack: he puts it into the shoulders of his T-shirt, he hangs himself up by his own power.

Attila Egyed is the Ghost and the Actor King. How can someone become the ghost of the medieval father in a knitted blue shirt, between the viewers’ chairs, totally enlighten? He has an unfinished movement, he lures his orphan after himself with it. It is a real movement by the Ghost. An authentic ghost is made by his partner on stage. Balázs sticks to him, tries to reach him on tiptoe, he holds on his father, to be able to grow up to him, to reach his height. The man, who wants to grow a head higher is grotesque, and he is more pathetic than any promises, this adjustment to the greater man’s size.

Gabi Varga tells Fortinbras text from the end of the drama. She is the new emancipated womanish order. Hamlet has been performed as roles of trousers (Sarah Bernhardt and Asta Nielsen), the ending scene has never been in a woman’s hands. It is similar to that time, when in Benno Benson’s Hamlet in Berlin, the director’s little son arrives as the head of the conqueror army and the frivolous childish kingdom begins.

Kinga Mezei’s Ophelia in her tilted mental balance, comes in front of the royal couple with two pairs of shoes. She repeats words, as a stuck in CD player. During the funeral procession she goes in the front between the viewers’ divided lines, up to the grave, which is on the steeply rising mountain of set. He is not taken by St. Michael’s horse. He goes on his own foot to his grave, with some steps ahead the royal march. He can be seen as a ghost too. But a real actor goes towards his grave. The rivalry between Laertes and Hamlet is the bidding of their love (would you eat crocodile?), it is more serious than it, as the stake is there in reality. They do not argue about abstract love. The two boys go against each other as Romeo and Tybalt do it. The useless intervention of their partners, ends in a brawl, as in the case of collective panic in the school yard.

Tim Carroll’s performance is a theatrical gambling (but it is a game). They cannot give life to random objects every evening. On the dress rehearsal, I watched, the prince got a grotesque rubber animal as the scull of Yorick. The actor’s fast intellectual decision made the toy animal authentic. The other night a tennis ball was the head of the clown of yard, who is dead for 23 years. It flew up into the hung ceiling, and rolled above us there as a shadow.

The sluggish Tibor Mészáros, from the Jordán-Andor Lukáts’ class, and Gábor Nagypál with his caffee-mug-like eyes from Novi Sud (as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern or Guildenstern and Rosencrantz) could make real, that they were fellow students with Hamlet and Horatio in Wittenberg. The four boys behaved like school boys. Nagypál gave a box of medicine into Hamlet’s hand instead of a flute, he pushed it into his face, used the top of the box as keyboard, then pulled the box on his schoolmate’s nose, who was forced into the corner.

Kristóf Horváth as Ostrick behaved as a normal subject of the court, instead of prinking garishly it, he does an important exercise at the heir by his ruler. The humility towards the superior one is more humorous, than the traditional jokes of the role.

The actors are insolently playful. They have close contact to one another. They have close contact to the viewers too. Olga Varjú played Gertrud, the queen with the hard womanhood of her power. But there was not any hurt on her dignity, when she cleaned her son’s sweaty face during the fencing scene, with one of the girl viewer’s long hair. And the tragedy is not got hurt by the fact, that Hamlet spited out a probably imagined hair.

On a partly school-like sound Tibor Pásztor and Tamás Törőcsik started the performance in the short roles of the two guards. Kriszta Szorcsik’s Actor Queen, and the silent performance of the masked troupe were featureless. The Second gravedigger was Anikó Varga, we could learn it more form the cast, than from the performance. Kamilla Fátyol was Lucianus and the Priest at the funeral. Gábor Szabó, as Fortinbras’ captain, played a clown-trick with a bag in his hand with the questioning Hamlet, and he answered with bored outstanding way, as he was stopped during the fulfilment of his important work by a fussy passenger. If there had been some excuses in connection with some of the performers because of their roles, in the evening, all members of the troupe could affect with intensive attention and constant standby.

Hamlet by the actors of Bárka and Carroll is a tempter experiment, because of the fact that the viewers usually stand horrified against the tricks to take them into the performance. Hamlet made two honourable men stand on their chairs, to compare to his mother the advantages of the dead king to the pretender to bed and throne. The two respectful men were standing there for long, devotedly, between the mostly young viewers. They tolerated, even enjoyed it: they enjoyed their performance. One of them, who was always against the mad-made Shakespeare, sat back softened. And he became the believer of the play. The trial to make the viewers active is usually accepted reluctantly because they would like to make decide. In case of Hamlet they only free their buried childish playfulness. Bárka can free the viewers from the ballast that the learning of the elevated culture is a torturous work. It can give back the ceremonious wonder of theatre, it is lonely irreproducibility.

I rarely have the desire to watch a performance again. Hamlet excites me to watch again.

Péter Gál Molnár, Népszabadság, 2005

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)