When Matilda sings her heart out in a cabaret, her musical mastery is formidable. Her seductive and wide-ranged voice can do things that most singers cannot even approach. But when she takes off her wig and costume and goes home, she’s just somebody’s wife.

The world premiere of the musical version of a short story, “The Suit,” written by South African author Can Themba in the 1950s, was presented as the opening event of the Louis Armstrong International Jazz Festival, held in Bánk (northeast of Vác). This contemporary jazz-opera, a collaboration between Maladype Theatre and the METTRIN Arts Center in Bánk’s lakeside resort, opened June 26-28 (and continues in late August) performed by an exceptional group of Hungarian singing actors and musicians.

“The Suit” is considered a gem of South African literature which has been translated into several languages and adapted in various forms over several decades in different countries. The story is set in Sophiatown, a neighborhood that was destroyed in the apartheid regime of the 1950s. The script’s present adaptation as a musical cabaret was inspired by Ethiopian Mothobi Mutloatse and Barney Simon, with direction by Zoltán Balázs, and musical score by Adrián Kovács. They re-created the character of Matilda as a cabaret singer, instead of Themba’s version of a silent and mistreated wife who is at the mercy of her punishing and self-centered husband, Philemon. The opera’s title refers to the suit of Matilda’s secret lover, who accidentally leaves it in her bedroom — later discovered by Philemon.

Balázs’ staging, on a small proscenium space crowded with props, furniture, and a five-man band, dramatically emphasizes the psychological prison that Matilda lives in. Her husband’s jealousy and control of her behavior match exactly how women have been treated throughout centuries, and how women have long been entrained to acquiesce to this powerless position. Her entrapment was further accentuated by two giant skeleton-like structures with enormous rib cages. At the end, Matilda encloses herself in it like a caged animal, reminding me of the similar ribbed enclosures in the torture chamber of the notorious palace of serial killer Elizabeth Báthory. Balázs’ skillful direction and Mátyás Lakatos’ semi-sinister lighting created an atmosphere akin to a noir film: the deliberately slow eye contact and reactions of each player to each other functioned as a mechanism of mystery throughout.

Mutloatse, in a post-performance chat with the audience, said: “This play is about freedom and oppression, love and hatred, and envy and empathy.” Mutloatse’s own life experience plays a hidden role too: “My mother was a good tap dancer who was forbidden to follow her artistic path in life and she also made the mistake of seeing another man. So, this is the first time the story doesn’t just revolve around the husband, but it turns itself inside out. My mother was the echo of Matilda.”

Mutloatse expressed his great joy in discovering the actress Csilla Radnay, whose performance of Matilda was “spectacular, and she’s absolutely the perfect actress to inhabit this character. I’ve been waiting years for this to happen!” Radnay is extraordinary: she has an astonishing vocal range, perfect pitch, exquisite control of several styles of music, and combined with highly proficient acting skills, she captured rapt attention. Philemon, played by Barna Bányai Kelemen, sang the role with assurance, though he seemed to suppress the villainous quality of the cuckolded husband’s vitriol expressed in the original story, in favor of competing with her charisma. In the role of K.K. the mysterious lover, Ferenc Fehér’s nimble dancer’s body did a lot of physical magic, twisting himself into a pretzel or somehow climbing around the set like a snake in his suit designed by Daniella Sovány. (In fact, several of the costumes she designed for this show were eye-catchingly colorful African styles.)

Composer Kovács’ score blends Afro-jazz rhythms of marabi, mbaganga, and kwela with European and Hungarian sounds, which accompany the actors’ thoughts and feelings. In two sections, Kovács includes Bach-like scoring that suggests a church-like atmosphere when Matilda decides to participate in a spiritual community. The orchestration consists of piano, guitar, sax, flute, bass, percussion and drums, and these top-tier musicians executed this non-stop, hour-plus performance with admirable skill.

The performance was framed with a recording of three women singing a popular Zulu song in three-part harmony, which easily slid us into the jazz-based score which not only set the stage as a sophisticated night club, but paid close attention to the actors’ texts and emotional conditions. As an added surprise treasure for non-Hungarian speakers, the cast delivered this gem in perfect English.

The company will perform “The Suit” in Budapest on August 29.

Alexandra Ivanoff, Papageno, 2026