What we can see before the pulling down of the lightening is promising: the set is wonderful, which glass-like base lightly rises up, while the cables, which are coming from it and going up towards the ceiling are similar to a harp in front of our eyes. Above all these there is an imposingly worked out skeleton, which is similar mostly to a sabre-toothed tiger, and which is also placed on the podium, which serves as the set. It is a real associational cavalcade, especially if we added those rats that later appear in the podium.

We cannot complain about the set, only because of the fact, how the performance uses all of it. The tiger is ridden as it is supposed to be, they sometimes look out between the strings of the harp, sometimes they even strum is softly, but nothing else. The set of vision – which is there to raise catharsis – can be seen at the end of the performance, exposes itself at least before its big setting-up.

At the compulsive disassembly of the skeleton at least once they can use the set playfully and full of sense way, when they set the bed from it for Lady Macbeth, who escapes into craziness and then suicide. The disappearing of the skeleton is necessary, the most beautiful must be if it can moulder but its taking apart is compulsive – during more scenes all the characters are trying to take it away from its original place, while they are fighting with the difficult Shakespeare’s text. As later it turns out, mostly because it must give its place to the closing picture, in which meaningfully the rats – according to the reference of the text by words, they are the members of the Scottish society – are eating Macbeth’s head that is pulled on a stick.

The understanding of the performance is bothered by the fact, that only four actors perform it, however – as the fifth one – sometimes the musician jumps in, who becomes a character himself too, from the left-hand side of the stage. Ákos Orosz may never change into any other characters from Macbeth, but Andrea Petrik, who performs Lady Macbeth sometimes appears as one of the members of the choirs of the witches. Zoltán Lendváczky and Erika Tankó perform many roles, between which they change with nice markings, but it does not always help the viewers to know clearly who is talking at the moment, to whom and finally why do they do it. Many times, the text gets over the performance; it makes the actors rigid, who become vax-, alabaster- or marble figures, and because of it the vision of stage gets a panoptic like nature. It matches to the staging conception that is marked in the title, as it is an anatomy, because of it we can see the exposed bodies in a given pose, that is conserved in formaldehyde. Shakespeare’s wonderful language can have a similar effect, but with this, many times appearing static nature, the playfulness disappears again from the actors’ performance. Unfortunately, it can be seen on the performance that this is the first one after the premiere. Sometimes the text gets stuck, sometimes the characters get stuck in the place, this lack of lubrication follows and haunts the whole performance. The showing of the puppet of pencils has been the great promise of the performance, and the play with it, thanks for it, they can put some humour and childish playfulness into some scenes, but the conception is not coherent here too; at the beginning of the performance the puppet is similar to some skeleton like figure of death, which is pulling with itself the cauldron of fate, which hides the head of the thane of Cawdor, then later it appears many times as a “child character”, who like some kind of monkey babies are going up and down on their parents.

We cannot complain because of the quality of the music, maybe only because of the moment, when Macbeth imitates the playing of the guitar, however, it is obvious that the musician, who is standing behind him, performs the sounds. Maybe, the performance would deserve its own music too, I do not feel the hits by The Doors to be very strong choices. Pál Péter Szűcs, who is responsible for the music, plays well, his voice is also good, the unique instruments are wonderful, which would earn to play something unique.

It is an interesting solution to show Szűcs as a Doorman, it can be felt that they try to strengthen the comic line there too, anyway why he would speak with a burr compulsively, but he is totally separated from the performance, his artistic performance moves in a different register than the others, so his performance does not remain anything else than a hopefully but prolonged episode.

At the end of the performance, which is very long, we can feel, that the Maladype has lost the noble fight against Shakespeare. The wonderful set restricts more than catalyse the actors’ performance. The performance is twenty minutes longer than it has been advertised, from it the unoiled nature of the hardly played performance. As the actors have not got the whole performance, or they get so immersed into themselves and in the autopsy of the characters, who are chased by fate, that they cannot express it as actors, and it can be spectacular, the play can be ready to burst out, it remains that kind of Macbeth interpretation, which does not have a real dialogue with the original play, but wants to be something new compulsively.

Ferenc Margl, KULTer.hu, 2013

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)