Zsuzsanna Komjáthy: Don Juan, or the apotheosis of the losing of the throne
Don Juan can be replace by Jesus...
Since Tirso de Molina put the story on stage in 1613 and in 1930 published it in the form of a paly, the legendary figure of Don Juan has become the anti-hero of the most defining character of the European culture, and he must be sung about the most. He is nobody else than the archetype of the sinful womanizer, the perfect illusion of male potency and its shining hubris. His success is ensured by the fact, that after the ancient text of the 1930s, his strange legend has been adapted by the best authors. It has been written by, for example, Moliére, Mozart, Puskin, Lord Byron, Baudelaire and Bernard Shaw. Bertolt Brecht also dealt with the story, and he made a version in 1954, for his theatre, for the Berliner Ensemble, based on the French version of the text from 1665. Brecht with strange honesty, by intonation-like difference, re-wrote Moliére’s ever lasting play – he did not change the original text a lot, just to be able to serve his own rebellious aims. That way, the figure of Don Juan has become the archetype of anti-humanist, atheist lessons, and even the apathy of the 20th century, of the alienating focus point of indifference.
Sándor Zsótér uses this text by Brecht, when he starts putting on stage Don Juan with the Maladype Theatre and some of his students. The relevance of the play does not need more explanation: both the materialist worldview of “two times two equal four”, which is announced in it, and the conquering moral of the hypocrisy, and even the missing of the importance and meaning of love are the cruel reality of present. Zsótér in his staging follows Júlia Ungár, the dramaturg’s interpretation, his work is the re-actualization of the Brecht’s version in reality. That way these kind of phrases can get into the plot, like the sentences we can hear from Donna Elvira (Erika Tankó), “May I hope, that you will recognise me? Or even to mark me to be your relationship?”, the sentences, which refer to the football teams of our present time, or even cruel sentences. That way it can happen, that following Brecht’s example, and we can meet intonating deviations too. Wandering on the border of the similarities and differences, we may be able to see the interpretation, which contains the previous experiences, and from these he forms his own voice: the present disposition.
Zsótér does not touch for example the story, all aspects of it are the same as in the case of the Brecht version of the text. Important difference anyway, that he places it into a sacral, and visual dimension, which is only in coordinating conjunction with the play, and he rephrases the play from this point of view. He performs almost the same word by word, as his ancestor did it, but he does it differently. The copy of Salvador Dali Gala and Dali’s painting, In the sky gets its place on the ground and on the ceiling too, on which the smaller versions of Jesus, Virgin Mary and Maria Magdalena share their place with amputated toy baby busts and a big German shepherd dog. This accidental placing implicates associative relationship with from the point of view of roles too. According to it, Don Juan can be replaced by Jesus, the horde of seduced women with the saint women and the personalities of side characters with one another. Donna Elvira is performed by two actresses, first Erika Tankó and then Rita Kerkay, who are responsible for another three-four figures. Máté Pallag is perfect in seven, Norbert Nagy is in six roles.
One actor performs anyway the figure of Sganarelle, who as a raisonneur follows all rules of Brecht’s orders. As an outsider moralist he serves indifferently his master, he keeps only one thing in front of him: his benefits. His figure is Brecht’s judgement above his own time and society, and Zsótér seems to adopt it totally. That is why, Zoltán Lendváczky form us the archetype of a servant, which remains as the inheritance of commedia dell'arte, who together with his theatrical gestures and monologues shows us the portrait of the turncoat ordinary person.
Seemingly, according to Brecht’s version, Don Juan himself appears in the role of emblematic, devil seductive man. The main hero is driven by the dirty, black bull of sexuality, who runs in our everyday interpretation as Alexander the Great of love, and we can see him at the same time, as a fragile, almost feminine dandy. Don Juan is a real metro dandy, a pink polyphone, he is nothing else than a wry torso of our time, an omnipotent failure, which hides in the structure of life. This failure with all of its steps is about to get structure according to its own teste of life.
And this failure is much more dangerous, than the fact that Don Juan is unable to love. Anyway, he is able to: it is not allowed to handle his character as the pathological event of narcissistic hurts, who is looking for his own image in all of his invade, and he does not know “anyone else”. Without explaining it more, we can understand that Don Juan is successful there, where the narcissist one always fails. His tragedy is, that he does not find, he cannot find a material object to fulfil his unsatisfied desire, as what he desires it is very symbolic. We can tell that he is the nothing that is watching from the holes of existence, he is the seductive power of deny, which is frightening the desired and unreachable symbolic order (according to it, Don Juan says at the peak point of the performance that: I am nobody.) Ákos Orosz’s formation of the character is the brilliant central point of this polemics. His figure is comic and graceful at the same time, he is fallible and majestic, human and at the same time he is frightening, repulsive and attractive, intuitive and at the same time he is conscious – he is the diversity on his own, by which (for nothing!) the female look seems to get lost.
We cannot be surprised by the fact that Zsótér hides in the second great meeting scene of Don Juan and Don Luis, behind and next to the son’s words the heterogeneous, vulgar and obscene contents. These, with their own flow, can open a gate onto the fragile nature of the main hero’s personality, and we can hardly find the signs of them – we have to comment it – in those Brecht’s plays, which we have known.
These come more from the verbal level than from the visual world. The dual speech in Zsótér’s performance brings to heel those, who is the birth father of the Don Juan-like behaviour on concrete and symbolic way: the Father. (In the original one the direction of fight is very different: in Brecht’s text, it is Don Juan, who gets lost forever because of the dialogue, and the symbolic order can get above him; in case of Zsótér, it is the other way around). Don Luis by Norbert Nagy because of the latent failure, becomes a crying hysteric baby during moments, who swallows his snot and tear, because he can finally see his son, that way he always wants to – the presenter of a picture. The fact that the picture finally, after the father’s apathetic deposition, absorbs Don Juan, is almost minor.
Zsuzsanna Komjáthy, Színház Online, 2013
(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)
Since Tirso de Molina put the story on stage in 1613 and in 1930 published it in the form of a paly, the legendary figure of Don Juan has become the anti-hero of the most defining character of the European culture, and he must be sung about the most. He is nobody else than the archetype of the sinful womanizer, the perfect illusion of male potency and its shining hubris. His success is ensured by the fact, that after the ancient text of the 1930s, his strange legend has been adapted by the best authors. It has been written by, for example, Moliére, Mozart, Puskin, Lord Byron, Baudelaire and Bernard Shaw. Bertolt Brecht also dealt with the story, and he made a version in 1954, for his theatre, for the Berliner Ensemble, based on the French version of the text from 1665. Brecht with strange honesty, by intonation-like difference, re-wrote Moliére’s ever lasting play – he did not change the original text a lot, just to be able to serve his own rebellious aims. That way, the figure of Don Juan has become the archetype of anti-humanist, atheist lessons, and even the apathy of the 20th century, of the alienating focus point of indifference.
Sándor Zsótér uses this text by Brecht, when he starts putting on stage Don Juan with the Maladype Theatre and some of his students. The relevance of the play does not need more explanation: both the materialist worldview of “two times two equal four”, which is announced in it, and the conquering moral of the hypocrisy, and even the missing of the importance and meaning of love are the cruel reality of present. Zsótér in his staging follows Júlia Ungár, the dramaturg’s interpretation, his work is the re-actualization of the Brecht’s version in reality. That way these kind of phrases can get into the plot, like the sentences we can hear from Donna Elvira (Erika Tankó), “May I hope, that you will recognise me? Or even to mark me to be your relationship?”, the sentences, which refer to the football teams of our present time, or even cruel sentences. That way it can happen, that following Brecht’s example, and we can meet intonating deviations too. Wandering on the border of the similarities and differences, we may be able to see the interpretation, which contains the previous experiences, and from these he forms his own voice: the present disposition.
Zsótér does not touch for example the story, all aspects of it are the same as in the case of the Brecht version of the text. Important difference anyway, that he places it into a sacral, and visual dimension, which is only in coordinating conjunction with the play, and he rephrases the play from this point of view. He performs almost the same word by word, as his ancestor did it, but he does it differently. The copy of Salvador Dali Gala and Dali’s painting, In the sky gets its place on the ground and on the ceiling too, on which the smaller versions of Jesus, Virgin Mary and Maria Magdalena share their place with amputated toy baby busts and a big German shepherd dog. This accidental placing implicates associative relationship with from the point of view of roles too. According to it, Don Juan can be replaced by Jesus, the horde of seduced women with the saint women and the personalities of side characters with one another. Donna Elvira is performed by two actresses, first Erika Tankó and then Rita Kerkay, who are responsible for another three-four figures. Máté Pallag is perfect in seven, Norbert Nagy is in six roles.
One actor performs anyway the figure of Sganarelle, who as a raisonneur follows all rules of Brecht’s orders. As an outsider moralist he serves indifferently his master, he keeps only one thing in front of him: his benefits. His figure is Brecht’s judgement above his own time and society, and Zsótér seems to adopt it totally. That is why, Zoltán Lendváczky form us the archetype of a servant, which remains as the inheritance of commedia dell'arte, who together with his theatrical gestures and monologues shows us the portrait of the turncoat ordinary person.
Seemingly, according to Brecht’s version, Don Juan himself appears in the role of emblematic, devil seductive man. The main hero is driven by the dirty, black bull of sexuality, who runs in our everyday interpretation as Alexander the Great of love, and we can see him at the same time, as a fragile, almost feminine dandy. Don Juan is a real metro dandy, a pink polyphone, he is nothing else than a wry torso of our time, an omnipotent failure, which hides in the structure of life. This failure with all of its steps is about to get structure according to its own teste of life.
And this failure is much more dangerous, than the fact that Don Juan is unable to love. Anyway, he is able to: it is not allowed to handle his character as the pathological event of narcissistic hurts, who is looking for his own image in all of his invade, and he does not know “anyone else”. Without explaining it more, we can understand that Don Juan is successful there, where the narcissist one always fails. His tragedy is, that he does not find, he cannot find a material object to fulfil his unsatisfied desire, as what he desires it is very symbolic. We can tell that he is the nothing that is watching from the holes of existence, he is the seductive power of deny, which is frightening the desired and unreachable symbolic order (according to it, Don Juan says at the peak point of the performance that: I am nobody.) Ákos Orosz’s formation of the character is the brilliant central point of this polemics. His figure is comic and graceful at the same time, he is fallible and majestic, human and at the same time he is frightening, repulsive and attractive, intuitive and at the same time he is conscious – he is the diversity on his own, by which (for nothing!) the female look seems to get lost.
We cannot be surprised by the fact that Zsótér hides in the second great meeting scene of Don Juan and Don Luis, behind and next to the son’s words the heterogeneous, vulgar and obscene contents. These, with their own flow, can open a gate onto the fragile nature of the main hero’s personality, and we can hardly find the signs of them – we have to comment it – in those Brecht’s plays, which we have known.
These come more from the verbal level than from the visual world. The dual speech in Zsótér’s performance brings to heel those, who is the birth father of the Don Juan-like behaviour on concrete and symbolic way: the Father. (In the original one the direction of fight is very different: in Brecht’s text, it is Don Juan, who gets lost forever because of the dialogue, and the symbolic order can get above him; in case of Zsótér, it is the other way around). Don Luis by Norbert Nagy because of the latent failure, becomes a crying hysteric baby during moments, who swallows his snot and tear, because he can finally see his son, that way he always wants to – the presenter of a picture. The fact that the picture finally, after the father’s apathetic deposition, absorbs Don Juan, is almost minor.
Zsuzsanna Komjáthy, Színház Online, 2013
(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)