According to the folk wisdom only the Japanese can write haiku. The folk wisdom also says that an European haiku can be written too, but it will not be a real one. According to another wisdom statement we should leave wisdom ones, everything can be done, if they work properly. But what is the situation the other way around? What happens, if something European is put into far-eastern costume?

John Webster is English renaissance, he is very English and very renaissance, he is juicy, full-blooded, gesticulating tragedy of fate-like, fatal, hot-tempered, quick-tempered. When he is gentle, he is full, so: when he is just a little bit, then he is very much like that. For example he is very poetic, of course, we can hear from him Shakespeare, who was older even than him: if he speaks, he almost always uses metaphors, parallels and paraphrases. Of course, he has great translator, István Vas’ translation is as rampant and resourceful as the twisting story is in its own. Judit Góczán, dramaturg, has simplified the story for the performance of the National Theatre, but it requires concentrated attention that way too.

Two of her brothers, convict from another marriage the Duchess of Malfi, who becomes widow early. Fernando and the Cardinal would like to save the inheritance and the family’s social status. But the duchess gets married secretly to Antonio, and however they can keep in secret their marriage successfully for a while, the husbands has to escape anyway: Bosola, the soldier with sinful past, exposes the marriage. The two brothers hold the Duchess as a hostage, who they make suffer first mentally, then make her killed together with her maid and children. The Hamlet-like dramaturgy destroys here: a murder is followed by another one and then finally Antonio and the Cardinal die too.

In the story the randomness pulsates, which makes the weight of human decisions bigger, and it can relativize in a paradox way. Webster’s world is still the shop of human heroism: ideas with capital letters are sold here (Misfortune, Intrigue, Morality, and so on), and of course it cannot be easy for the director, if he wants to bargain genuinely – here and now – on these on the stage.

Zoltán Balázs’ sublimates into a vision The Duchess of Malfi, according to his aim, he grows the dramatic text into an expressive vision. We can almost see only one static picture all through it, Judit Gombár’s sets are changed just a little during the two hours long, slow scale of scenes. The space is narrowing backwards, here is a classical proscenium stage: cool, metallic walls are opening and closing slowly, when a character steps on stage. The background wall opens soon, and the perpendicular of vertical and horizontal trail of light rules the picture: here is a lack, which forms a cross.

The director moves his actors in this yellowish-greyish pastel and the moving must be meant by words here, all gestures are counted out, we can feel punctually composed aim, and planed effects. Obviously the director does not want to serve the viewers’ passive attitude. Zoltán Balázs instead of the sensual based and emotional theatre of experience – let’s suppose it – makes the viewers work. According to it even the marking of space is unclear: the dialogues, which are full of intrigues, can be heard in those people’s scenes, who are entrapped in them, and the locations are put together that way.

Anyway, the viewers’ work mostly means to get over the practical obstacles. Still in the opening scene, the slow changing of places are in contrast with the rhythm of the inner action of the play: the viewers can hardly follow the fast exposure of actions, even if they lean towards the stage with all their senses. The diction is simply incomprehensible, not only because of the chamber orchestra, which is put between the viewers and the actors, but because we do not have ears to see with them: during the first ten minutes, the actors are speaking with their backs towards the stalls.

More basic question is, that the aim, which is served by the already mentioned vision of stage can point beyond itself. So is it more than an original idea (so it is functional, effective, fertile, inspiring, so it is a good idea) which is about a trial to put The Duchess of Malfi into an eastern theatrical form.

The actors are covered by white, sometimes veil like, loose dresses, who are differentiated only by some colourful lines from each other. And of course by the hats and gloves, which give grotesque, figural attributes to the characters. More properly: the puppet-like head and hands can be there to make longer their personality, they are snapshots stiffened into gestures. The Cardinal’s (János Kulka) fingers, for example, mark a swearing, they give permanent devoutness to his sentences. Fernando’s (Zsolt László) frighteningly erected index finger can be associated with fury and anger. Julia’s (Eszter Bánfalvi) gloves is characterized by erotic female principle, they reject and get into themselves at the same time, as they would get the holding of hands from the sitting Buddha statues.

There is an important difference compared to the antique masks, that during the performance in the National Theatre we can see the actors’ face too. Not the mimic, as we can hardly speak about it: the actors almost become puppets, themselves too, they are frozen into their statue-like roles. Their reserved body positions, their rigid tribes: the costumes – the figurative elements of which would make difference between the characters – make their personalities mostly uniform.

The staging minimalize as much as possible the actors’ toolbar. The most important element of it that we cannot talk about intonation too: we can listen to monotonous text telling of the already mentioned language parade by István Vas during two hours – by the end almost with paradoxically indifferent diction.

The theatrical language, which is doubled that way, (the parallel of actors and puppets) can cancel each other. We can tell, that The Duchess of Malfi in the National Theatre is about the fact, that what a good and excellent puppet performance would be made of The Duchess of Malfi. In Zoltán Balázs’ complex vision the puppet-like nature and the actors’ presence are against each other anyway, as the elements, which refer to the Japanese no-theatre are just there to get the performance together as some kind of eastern taste after all. The dreamt vision eliminates itself: the form, which is built on the basic idea gets in front of those questions and problems, about which it should speak.

About those kind of tiny and concrete symbols, for example, why the puppet misses exactly from Bosola’s (László Sinkó) head. Who is that person is anyway, why he can see the good and do the bad one. Why the Duchess of Malfi (Bori Péterfy) can see bad and do the good one, (if it is bad and if it is good) and according to what kind of moral and immoral examples we behave. That if the whole of it has any meaning, if according to Bosola’s resigned definition of people, “we are the tennis balls of stars, and we fly where they hit us”.

After all, we will be laid out anyway.

Szabolcs Székely, Ellenfény, 2009

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)