The new Büchner performance by Maladype can be held by the term of physical theatre – the Italian Collovà asks about the human’s physical and body existence and definition and about the illusion of free will with the composition of sound-movement-text-picture. The performance is like the act of the closing the essential of the question of: “What makes a human?” into a jar by the set.

This experiment leaves the feeling of unsuccessfulness behind together with all of its cruelty and visual thoughts: the pictures, movements, sounds, which begins from the actors’ inner concentrations, the tones of the views offer beautiful solutions too, but many times, they are clichéd, hard to place and seem to circle around themselves.

Woyzeck has fought from the first standing picture. He wants to do something else, somehow else than what he is doing between the hanging jars and plates filled with peas. He faces up against the inside accumulating losing of control and madness with his mimics and silent elements of gesture. The hallucinations in the light of sense still can be recognised: four of them guards by the light of candles the piles of plates, which they started moving by the rhythm of some kind of inner concentration.

The clattering of the plates rules the common sense with terrifying attacks, it brakes the hope and virtue, Marys in white dresses and Woyzecks in military uniforms are between the human pairs. The eight actors quotes the other figures only with some essential sentences, they project them onto the inner stage of mind as blurred memories and unrealistic nightmares.

On the stage we can see Woyzeck’s story which “is played” from his subconscious: it is so confused but crystal clear too as Büchner’s fragments let it anyway. He would like to lead us through Woyzecks and Marys’ stations, as we are stumbling towards our death, more and more soaking wet, closed into echoing monologues and vulnerability, up to the photos of childhood on the wall, the memories, the hop-hop jumping games, which overcomes the understanding of adult life from the point of view of orders and responsibilities.

The order of achievement of the outside world, and the order of inner side, they must go on, they must jump over the empty plates and those, which are full of peas, the rules of body, the sins of flesh and the dirt of life.

Woyzeck, who is multiplied can be any of the actors, he fulfils the fixed responsibilities of military uniform and medical experiment, its series of movements, while the other who suddenly gets separated, the society, the others can crucify him any time by the wall. Woyzeck would try to dance tenderly with Mary, who always drops her red scarf; the symbol of the line of blood on Woyzeck’s chest can be the symbol of the wounded heart. Meanwhile Woyzeck cannot “perform” sensibly. His tenderness turns into instinctive jerks, so he can be drum major too, from whom Mary got the scarf; his beautiful words die into the splashing by the river, which is brought up by Mary’s splashing game then by her choking. Woyzeck’s sentences, which are repeated by everybody as echoes, with which he is searching for the free will are missing in the automatism of the society of the crowd, as the hard rhythm of military marching can destroy any communicational try: identity gets lost, the sound collage of introductions die between the orders.

The tenderness and peacefulness cannot be made. Woyzeck’s hug, which is getting stronger and stronger brings up a frightening fury from Mary, and every pairs who are laying on the ground are fighting for the dream as cramping muscle knots, but they cannot sleep. Woyzeck inside whom the humiliations are there, is washing himself for nothing with the water which is held in the buckets similar to cans – the knife from the Jewish is there on their button too – water can be rubbish, even urine, their own faeces, which he collects in the jars hanging from the wall and pours it into the pots.

Finally, he turns into a murderer. We can see Mary’s death more: as a dance of two beautiful sirens in the draining canal; as a desperate scene of choking in its own action, but in a symbolic form too, when a big spot of blood by lipstick is put on Mary’s neck to be able to drag her puppet-like body back and forth as an element of a sight in a circus. All live creatures are similar puppets too in the lighting, which is similar to the tone of ancient photos, which make us remember Francis Bacon’s world, which shows us vulnerability and one type of elementary schizophrenia and danger, where the water, plates and pool become metaphors, the highlighted parts of texts get biblical content. The live and dead, the yes and no are connected as the undamaged and the damaged ones.

The will cannot beat the body, the urination cannot be held back.

These recognitions cannot shock the viewers; the air, which is moved by the creepy-crawly, falling, strained bodies cannot reach them. It is hard to feel the actors’ achievement, which use Collovà’s method and follow the sound effect from inside and others’ presence, but they can fix themselves and their roles into a score. The score that uses freely the material of the fragments by Büchner has been given to the viewers. Maybe it can help us to measure this performance, which requires great open-mindedness, which points more towards the searching of road, which gets further from the text, then towards a found aim and method.

VMR, Kulturpart.hu, 2008

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)