John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi is that kind of performance of the National Theatre, about which the journals would tell: it has divided the viewers. So, some of the viewers are shaken by disgust, the other part admires it and tells that is forms a new era. The question is: more people admire or hate it?

According to the theatrical agreement is that it is boring, sensual telling of nothing, long lasting cliché. There are well-known forms and repeated ideas, those flavours slip down more easily, which we have tasted many times. The brave new things in it, its ideas, which are to think them over, and hard to consume them can upset some of the viewers. They would ask angry: should we connect our school leaving exam or our degree, when we buy theatre tickets? The theatre can be enjoyed only by previous training?

Of course I do not want to get anyone’s right to hate any theatrical performances, which they have watched, and they can tell their comments with rude phrases, I know anyway, that Zoltán Balázs is a very originally thinking and working theatrical person, his previous performances are in organic unity with each other. His cleverly free performances and more shadowed ideas are connected to one another logically. Under theatrical gardens they are whispering about, that his theatrical writing style can be connected to the effects of the performances by Bob Wilson, Anatolij Vasziljev or Zsótér. It is for sure, that he has visited all the three of them. I have tried to find Wilson’s and the orthodox genius’ sings with my careful eyes. It is for nothing. Instead of the listening of the circulating headphones it is better to watch the stage. Instead of repeating gossips, we should accept the facts, which can be seen in Balázs’ performances as aims or direct hits. According to me it is a more acceptable sin (if the charge, which we have put on him, would be appropriate) than shuffling on the road of comfortably copies of lazy, worn-out clichés. His performances are renewing trials in his fore-heading theatrical and artistic reforms. Balázs’ theatre instead of the flat reproduction of the text, makes experiments with the polyphonic theatre. He tries to transplant the toolbar of those foreign theatrical culture into the Hungarian wasteland, in which the singing, music, the dancing elements, the pantomime, the circus-like tricks, the artists’ tools and equilibristic can be found at the same time together with the active artistic work.

The lazy epigonism is changed by the theatre of rich imagination. Balázs’ trials and results offer a new theatre. It is a break from the post-naturalistic performance.

Jules Lemaitre, who is the killer of the witty impressionism, wrote a study about the snobs, he stated that those, who respect those, who may not understand the new ones, they have grown the primeurs, they help the support of the new ones, and they spread the new ones.

When the curtain raises up in the National Theatre at the beginning of the tragedy by the great bloody writer of stage from the Elizabethan era, then remains one more sheer curtain. The crowd, which is covered with vestments, works behind them with dream-like blurriness. They are higher than in reality. As they would have two heads. And it is the truth: on their everyday heads they wear a spare head, which is similar to barbaric white statue. One of them is flesh and blood, the other one a ghost head, which moves towards the sky of ghosts. Their hands are giant. They seem to be wearing foundry gloves, or they would be the white handed Mickey Mouse of Wald Disney and they are marching between the sacral, mice-grey, unbreakable walls of canvas. The cumbrous, huge hands, made of canvas intensify the vision of matched hands for praying. These are sacral hands of blessing. These are hands of robbers, who grab eagerly the gold. The space, which is divided by the beam of light, coming shiningly from above, refers to a cathedral, as we see it, we have that delusion that the freemason group of The Magic Flute celebrate on the stage.

They rise up the sheer curtain with black frames. Judit Gombár’s vision of stage becomes clear.

Webster’s thriller dramas, which are rich in spilled blood can connect the representation of horror between Seneca who has risen Nero up, the man destroying cruel things by the Maniacal Hercules’ tragedy, its ironic sentences and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill. The characters kill each other with cold blooded insensitivity. They kill each other without any emotional involvement with objectivity, witty brutality. The antique tragedies have effect on London from the Jacob’s era, and the English thriller dramas have effect on the independent film makers of Hollywood. The educated antique, the educated modern and the ones of today, when they talk about the cold world, the hopeless hopelessness they return to the brutality, which catches the viewers too. They satisfy the aggressivity, which is caused by their helplessness, that they relieve the satisfaction of revenge by the characters’ murderous instinct instead of by the viewers’. “The dark truth thrives on the lack of actions” – the Duchess of Malfi declaims it on István Vas’ sounds. Seneca’s “dramas of revenge” with Webster’s hands make the stage a similar self-serving shamble. On the stage, which is impregnated by blood, the murderous answer is unjustified psychologically too. As the writing of the processes is missing, the poet concentrated on the cruel episodes. His characters are talking loose-tongued. They step over the dramaturgical rules. They act according to their whim.

Balázs’ staging covers the passions. He does not let his actors tell these and those by wondering hands. He does not serve dramatic nature with increasing level of sounds, but in their inner intensity. He does not handle frantic theatrical performance. His characters are working with cold blood. Their passions warm up inside. He puts into the too wide space of stage the close pictures of his chamber performance. They are too far from the viewers’ eyes and ears.

Balázs’ performances fight determinedly against the traditional national naturalistic clichés. He creates sacral plays to the stage. The School for Fools, Theomachia, The Blacks, The Mikado, Leonce and Lena, The Egg(s) Hell, Faust or Marschner’s opera. The Vampire is a celebrated play, which can find its artistic home in the ancient layers of performances, in the puppet plays. The transparency between the puppets and human beings, and their interchangeability is not that kind of artistic whim, which is ordered by taste. His people act like puppets. His puppets are anthropomorphic. The characters are ruled by the automatism instead of their hearth. It would refer to: that the world is a puppet theatre, and all men and women are controlled from outside in it.

Bori Péterfy is the graceful innocence in the main role. She suffers her undeserving fate without any complaints. She decides her new marriage according to her free will, and against her brothers’ will she is married to her steward, and give birth to three children from him. She accepts the killing with straight back, and she flies as a ghost in flying clothes above the stage. It is an orange silk dress, without body, flying in the air. It is a transition between reality and nightmare.

Bosola becomes the assassin of court from a galley slave. He is a pigeon-like white villain. Sinkó resounding sound, which raises pleasure, fill reassuringly the stage. It emits power, steadfastness, and worried conscience. He does not have any outside intrigue characteristics. He does not use the toolbar of the intriguing villains of the theatre history. He shows himself to be Witty Sarastro, while mixing his bloody cards. He is elegant like a politician. He does calmly and with clear face his despicable works. With so seemingly innocent ideas, as Shakespeare’s Iago has done it. He “carpals” cruelly the women too, as Othello’s mate has done it with Desdemona.

Kulka as the Cardinal (after Bosola’s statement, that he has come to kill), says very silently, disciplined, almost towards inside, or as he is calling his mother, he almost exhales: “Help!” It is excellent. He repeats the calling for help, but on the voice of a theatrical papier mache. He recitals steadily until the end of the performance, when for two sentences he has become again intimate, ironic and moving. In his new theatre, Zalán Makranczi, the secret husband, finds himself with noble diction finally with an important exercise, after a long time. The lighting up Zsolt László is the other murderer brother, Frigyes Hollósi has a strong character, he is the doctor with husky voice. Andrea Söptei’s Carola is humble, next to Eszter Bánfalvi’s maid of court with her shining gaze from her covered head, Attila László, Bence Mátyássy, Róbert Marton, Péter Orth and Ádám Földi the new youngsters of the theatre are the victims of the distance from the viewers. The actors’ composition in Balázs’ directions can be strong because of the inner composition, which he makes move. It should be put in closed space. On the stage of a chamber. As the natural breathing of the performance would be averse to the wideness of the National Theatre. The characters have over human like sizes. They have two heads one above the other. They are statue-like above their necks. Because of it they move more rigidly, however the staging would indicate exercises with easy steps.

Their roles are choreographed and it is composed by music. (The violinists play very beautifully in the orchestra pit.) The actors, who are moved with the formality of the far-eastern theatres, perform their ceremonious movements on the polished benches and between them. There are too many exercises to do at the same time. Sometimes their silk robes get stuck in the edges of the benches, and these moments move the performers out of their required cold perfection.

The error of cast is because of the place of the performance and not of the actors.

Péter Gál Molnár, Mozgó Világ, 2009

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)