About that variety of the Goethe-like poem of humanity, which was put on stage by Zoltán Balázs, the director and Sándor Zsótér, the dramaturg I could write a praising critic, if I did not take into consideration its enjoy-ability. Of course it can be misunderstood easily, if I did not add to it, that I do not expect from the performance that kind of enjoyment, then from a comedy other times or a bag of snacks. I can expect “intellectual adventure”, philosophy of life, catharsis, and who know, what else. That can be enjoyable, if they show something totally different for me, something, which is totally different from my needs and expectations.

The performance is similar to a confused dream the most – as someone would fall asleep sitting on the underground and he is travelling back and forth between the terminals during the three hours, he would sign a contract with “its part of power”, he would travel through the world and history, his skull and that “ancient something”, which is called to be subconscious. In spite of the fact, that the performance – as it starts in an underground car – belongs to the category, which I like (in reality I found it out), to the “opuses of the public transport”, it is not very enjoyable, according to most of the meanings of this word. I feel that for this low level of enjoyment they can be blamed, but on the other hand according to the final meaning of the performance, this feeling has an important role.

The writer of these lines does not want to give an impression that he would criticise the performance, as did not get the depth of it. Instead of it, they try to enforce the youngsters’ point of views, who use naïve tools to interpret the performance, as the Puppet Theatre of Budapest advertised the performance as it is for youngsters and adults too.

Goethe’s play is a really complex one. As the director said in one of the interviews: “Goethe’s incredibly rich text is so complex and brave, as we should swim through the ocean without any life boats.” 1. Unfortunately, the ocean, as we know it well, is a deep water, and if somebody continuously pushes us down under water, while we are swimming it through (beginners and professional swimmers), we will definitely drown. Anyway it seems to be the director’s intention. The distraction of acceptance can strengthen many times, moves on the viewers’ intentions to interpret it, but here we seemingly lose all clues, and the few understanding moments can get the beginners’ “mood” to visit theatre.

The director changed Goethe’s play a lot. But all of it does not help the understanding. It is philosophical, has abstract content too, it talks about army of mythical people and sentences come one after another, which are built on complicated metaphors. The story would not be easy to follow by reading too, especially not when during a three hour long performance the words are continuously flowing from the actors’ mouth, who are changing their roles all the time.

I think that the aim of the performance is partly to confuse the viewers – and it works perfectly. The theatre goers can hardly find out, if the actor wants to put his words into the mouth of the puppet, which he moves, or we can hear by his voice the words of another’s puppet. (This confusing statement may help to illustrate the viewers’ confusion too.) The look mostly cannot help to understand who speaks to whom, and who is speaking anyway in reality.

The hardness of the text is counterpointed from one side by the extreme puppets and the creative set, from the other side, they emphasise it too. The way, how we see the formation and organisation of the puppets and the sets, dispossesses our attention, and distracts it from the sentences. Maybe we could enjoy the performance more, if the actors in it speak a forgotten language, in that way we would prepare not to understand anything, and the non-verbal elements can compensate us for all of it. The performance of the actors is like this, but mostly the visuality and the view of the stage.

The director and the dramaturg may have expected too much from many points of view, from the viewers (from the writer of these lines for sure). Most of all, the detailed knowledge of Faust by Goethe. It is not lucky, as many of us – exhausted by the fact, that the performance was also advertised as a performance for youngsters – would like to watch the performance instead of the (re)reading of Goethe’s work, and not besides it. I confess, that I relied on my many years old memories in the theatre.

However, the performance shook my trust in my ability of interpretation, and many time I felt some kind of existential boredom, above it I was waiting for its near ending, anyway I could leave the theatre with good experience. The particularity and speciality of the performance could raise this feeling from me.

“It is a unique play” this puts the viewers on probe, but it disturbs them too, the lovers of modern fine art can hardly have any complaints against the visual appearance (against the already mentioned view of stage and sets), if against the text they could have some. The grotesque figures, the surrealistic puppets evoke mostly Dalí’s visual world: while I was watching the performance I remembered the soft portraits from his paintings. The strange ancient snail, which is moved by Zsófia Vesztl, which continuous presence is hard to explain, it signed the people’s ancient desires according to me.

Finally, at the end of the performance, all the actors raise their eyes on an imagined point in the air, behind the auditorium, as they are studying their future, the history of human kind: can be any (imagined?) point, where anybody would tell together with Faust: “You are so beautiful, please stay, do not go!”. As he is looking for the same kind of pleasure, as the viewers, which they can find whether in the “intellectual pleasure” of the interpretation of a poem of humanity, or in the taste of the Isler, which they eat during the interval, it will put out their desire for ever, and they would be satisfied with it.

Tamás Paár, Kultúra&Kritika, 2009

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)