Judit Gombár puritan set has been made by the connection of the underground station and an underground car. The place of the subway indicates specifically the travelling motif: Faust, who desires to know the whole infinite creation at all costs (for nothing of course), here sings his contract with the Satan, from here, he leaves to his great journey, so that the fragmental structure would take him back to here at the end. The main character, Mephisto and Margit stand in front of us, performed by many actors, in changing showing. All the performers are wearing dark suits and ties – except for the “main” Faust, who is distinguished by his white shirt.

Faust-like desire to know something, sin and trial, about which we usually have some previous knowledge, these stand out of the calm and elegant flow of the performance. Even a well-prepared art student can hardly follow all these, and the details of the story, mythological aspects, fantasy probes. Even the figural changings too. The adult viewers of the premiere (who could sit only in the middle seats of the lines to be able to accept the whole visual world well) were watching it in respectful silence towards the play and the performance, the hidden humour, which can be found in the depth of Zoltán Balázs’ generous performance, is rarely honoured by laughing. After the two hours long first part, the performance unfortunately has lost the fifth or sixth of its viewers: the unusual length and the consciously chosen monotony of the tone have made many leave. Hopefully the planed youth performances would not be broken by the viewers’ impatience.

Faust in the puppet theatre is for the adults. It mostly shows the melancholy from Goethe’s monumental play. (Dramaturg: Sándor Zsótér, who has directed a Faust adaptation, himself too.) Some motifs have shown intensively – like the motif of motherhood and of death. The archaic translation (which was originally made by Zoltán Jékely and László Kálnoky) is hardly touched by modernisation, this compilation is told by such actors, whose professions are not mainly about the direct formation of characters, and during the night the thesis is emphasized: the representation of individuality is stuck at the iconic outlook and the punctual, cold articulation. The lines and rhyme-pairs are shown more than the longer parts. The play needs about twenty minutes to find its own volume. The quietness is an aesthetic aspect here, but the over lowered voice is annoying. Especially when, if the pathetic orchestrated lyrical aspect, “the saint fire of poetry” is so important, as the “theatre of word”, which was condemned many times at the area of post-dramatic theatre, at its reign.

Zoltán Balázs must have asked for silence and closeness from his actors in their movements too. Graceful postures, waiting positions, structured movements are next to each other, the “theatre of words” becomes “theatre of actions”, turns into symbolic structure of gestures and movement. The group is divided sharply into old and young faces, egos. To the question of “Is somebody here?” the answer of “Yes”, which organizes the episodes: the place of the question is filled by the individuality that continuously changes but unable to escape from its resignation. The scale of actions is ceremonial and artistic. Zsófia Vesztl takes silently for a walk all through the whole night, close to the actions, the bird-fish-monster-like “dog” of death.

The perfect puppets were made of compact, flexible, sensitive material, of painted, light plastic, in their characteristics airy, earthy and watery traits have been mixed together with human features. These creatures that have lost their anthropomorphic nature are the prisoner of their own broken physique. By the second part their number has grown, their size gets bigger. These strange body-ghosts are seen to be escaped from formalin jars of a laboratory, where they have kept freaks. Their movers share sadness with the puppets, the puppets in a slightly illustrative way – as a projection – characterise their movers. The human and non-human spheres work together and against each other.

Norber Ács, Eszter Bánky, Péter Bercsényi, Gyöngyi Blasek, István Erdős, Henrik Gyurkó, Ibolya Juhász, Borbála Karádi, Ildikó Kazinczy, István Kemény, Marianna Kovács, Gergő Pethő, Rita Radics, Judit Rusz, Anna Simándi, Márta Szakály, Zsolt Tatai, Csaba Teszárek: many members of the great troupe of the Puppet Theatre of Budapest and many young artist can show their talent in the harmonized performance.

Zoltán Balázs’ Faust fantasy play is not a classical puppet theatre interpretation, and cannot be told to be successful from any point of view. The silent closing and opening of the walls of the set, the frightening shadows which are reflected to the background, the monsters, which got three dimensioned from Bosch’s brush, the monumental human failure, which has decreasing hope instead of running life, and it is lived through in rushing travelling, makes sure that: we are watching Goethe. In a way as Balázs, Gombár, Zsótér and nineteen actors can see it in 2009, in Andrássy Street, they get humanism and gracefulness from Faust-like failure.

Tamás Tarján, Kultúra.hu, 2009

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)