A very visual set, despite popular belief is not among the grateful stage properties: somehow it always raises suspicion. The strong visual starting can put the involuntarily sceptic viewers outside, and make the performance face up with a hard task: if all these impressive visual characteristic can become an inside one, and can it integrate us into the special logic of the happenings on stage? If yes, then immersing into the performance, the question is not a question anymore; if no, then that night is about it.

We may know too much about the Macbeth interpretation of Maladype according to the symbolism of the beginning picture. The stage is black, in the museum like sterile place it is generous, it is a stylized object which can show harp and a ship as well: it has arc as an instrument, varnished surface, it is a slightly rising podium. In the middle of it there is a hole, filled with soil, in it the skeleton of a fossil is standing, behind it a wall of string, which is connected to the arc rises up to the sky like a sail. On the right hand side, a corridor, marked by columns, leads to the darkness, next to it, in the empire of instruments, there is a clown-like figure in suit jacket, checked shirt, underpants. There are music and dark instincts, consciousness and unconsciousness, will and fate, and in the middle Macbeth’s squatting naked figure. This directness can be a fast made background, the marked frame of the performance, which is made of strong features, inside it the most important thing can be born: the tragically human like nature. It can motivate heroes, the rebellious one against determination, the one, who wants to get into his own hand his fate anyway, the man, who is vulnerable either to the king or to his own demons (desires and fears) and his hopeless fight and inside-outside failure.

Anyway, Zoltán Balázs’ staging does not pull back these visual ideas later, but with the scales of gags and other special, visual tools makes impossible, that the energy can be formed between the actors, which can make the too meaningful place a considerable one.

The puppet from points and commas that is moved by the actors, is good to see, but it cannot find its place in the tragedy; we can think, that the director could not decide whether it stands for the childish ego or the skeleton-death; and finally it gets the role of entertainment, which is independent from the situation. Anyway the man of lines is a good performer, because of his nature too, he is in contrast to the vivid rats that are closed inside the podium and become visual in the flashing background light. They are irretrievably “civilian”, it is even worse: not symbolically, but in reality, they are creatures of instincts. So we cannot blame them because they use the technical mishap, they try to escape one by one, as we cannot blame the viewers for the fact that this real situation on the stage, which is generated accidentally, catches more their attention than the quasi happenings, which go on between the actors. In connection with these later ones, it is hard to decide, how much can they be connected to the circumstances and the to the performances, but that lean telling of the text, which is typical for the performance, it tries to hold back the feelings, and that lack of movements, which can be understood better from the sentences, than perceptible, it is against the angers. It could be very expressively effective and convincing as the counterpoint of the inner tension, which is ready to explode. Without the necessary emotional adding it is unable to focus our attention, from which both the viewers and actors seem to be caught by the externals that come from the set. For example, how the puppet should be animated, how to pull up the zip of the costumes, how to climb the plastic skeleton and imitate desire and satisfaction on the top; later how to dig out and take apart the statue, catch the escaping rats, and take them by their tails back to the stage manager. This latest episode is a bad luck, we should not notice it, if it did not become symbolic as a self-ironic gesture and understandable scene, in which the famous lines of “The life is just a fading shadow, only one / poor ham...nothing / It has no meaning” can be heard. Ákos Orosz laments them with a plastic puppet in his lap, which has Ákos Orosz-like face, turns here and there, similar to skinned down human skin (the lines without any inner motivation can be understand from the point of the performance mostly).

Because, what has been happening to the heroes meanwhile? From Mari Benedek’s costumes and from the connections of roles we can feel, that we should pay attention mostly on Macbeth (Ákos Orosz), who more and more wants to cover his beginning nakedness and vulnerability, guiltlessness with tighter and tighter chainmail and on Lady Macbeth (Andrea Petrik). All the other characters are performed by Erika Tankó and Zoltán Lendváczky, by the puppet that they animate, and by Pár Péter Szűcs, who is always presented in the performance and serves the background music (which is sometimes too loud) from the rewritten versions of hit songs, which always reflects with its text to the given situation, and he serves all the exciting sound effects too. I am afraid, that someone may not have the play as a deep and fresh experience, with the four actors’ performance it is hard to follow the Shakespeare-like cavalcade with many characters and its complicated system of relationships, especially because, many times the “changings of clothes” are many times expressed only by openness of the lace-tights-like dress, which are zipped up till their necks. From this it can be felt that for Zoltán Balázs some kind of story would be important not the story itself – but its kind can be found out more but felt. The traitor Cawdor’s hear is put out to the peak, and the fallen leader’s rank and wealth according to the order of the king were given to Macbeth, who hopes the witches’ predictions and kills his ruler cunningly to be able to stand in his place. The thing would be interesting from now on, as because of the ruler couple’s paranoiac silliness, who are fighting with their conscience, the road of the tyrant, which leads toward coldblooded cruelty, can become forgettable, together with its all inner motivations. That way Macbeth can become a tragic hero, who in Cawdor’s fate, unwillingly can recognise the unbearable order of the hierarchical world, which does not let freedom, and he can see the appearance of free will as the only way out, it is the acting itself. He takes his fate into his own hand, and because of it, he has all the responsibilities, because of the weight of his conscience, he cannot stop on the way, which leads to his fall; following by his nightmares and visions, he gets newer and newer sins onto his soul.

All of it was born not so immanently as they would be shown in progress, but they can be followed back from the last, Orwell-like associative picture: on the place of the fallen skeleton, the defeated Macbeth’s head was put (another copy of Ákos Orosz), and it becomes the prey of rats that now run in according to the plans. We can think it on, that who and how can be consumed by their own fears and demons, their own creature of instinct, but it is connected irretrievably to the closing picture and not to the performance.

Mária Ady, Színház, 2013

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)