Unconventional Premiere, or Rather Premieres, Special Stage, Interesting Characters in Unusual Roles. Let’s make the interview unusual as well: we are talking to someone who has ventured out of their genre. Puppet artist Gyöngyi Blasek will be making her debut at the Maladype Theatre on May 20, in the first episode of the three-part project The Carlos Affair.

- Here we are, sitting in your "home," the Budapest Puppet Theatre. You’ve been here for quite some time.

- For forty years.

- But your next premiere won’t be here, it will be at the Maladype Base, where you will perform for the first time.

- Yes, it will be my first time at Mikszáth Kálmán Square.

- However, you have worked with the director, Zoltán Balázs, several times before.

- Yes, I played in Faust, which was his first production here at the Puppet Theatre. His second production, Swan Lake, premiered last autumn. This time, he has invited me to his own theatre for Don Carlos and Egmont.

- However, the performance on May 20 won’t be a full premiere, but rather a pre-premiere.

- The director’s idea was that although Schiller's Don Carlos and Goethe’s Egmont are historically connected, they have never been staged together. In the pre-premiere, only Don Carlos will be performed. Zoltán Balázs plans for both plays to be performed in one evening, but for now, only Don Carlos is ready. We’ll start rehearsing Egmont in August and premiere it in November, after which the two plays will be staged together. When I joined the project, we worked a bit on Egmont, then on Don Carlos. Both are huge pieces with a complex plot, rich historical background, and elaborate language, which requires a lot of work to make them enjoyable for today’s audience.

- I understand there will be another premiere next year, titled The Carlos Affair, set in modern times, at the Budapest Courthouse, where Carlos gets a chance to have his case reconstructed and retried.

- Yes, that’s Zoltán Balázs’ concept.

- He is known for always coming up with something new and casting people in unusual roles. Will you be performing as a puppet artist in a mixed-genre performance?

- No. He cast me as an actress. But my background as a puppeteer is important, and that gives me a slightly different perspective on the stage. I tend to think more abstractly.

- What role are you playing?

- In Don Carlos, I have two roles: I will play the Grand Inquisitor and Clara Eugenia, a three-year-old Infanta.

- So, a distinctly male role and a young child. That abstract thinking will definitely come in handy.

- When we started rehearsing, I was quite frightened. But Zoltán Balázs has an interesting and colorful approach to the work, almost like a workshop, where he invites university students, for example.

- I understand that the entire project consists of several phases, including an educational program: off-site classical lessons, open/initiation rehearsals, and classroom performances.

- Yes, it’s made up of many threads, and he prepares the actors in different ways. For example, he asked us to rehearse the scenes using modern language, in our own words. That really helped me, because I was a bit scared of both roles. I couldn’t find my place, I was looking for myself. How could a woman my age play a 3-year-old? I found that difficult to imagine. He encouraged me, saying I had already done everything – through the puppets. I felt that was very different. But when we started rehearsing with Karcsi Kuna, I realized what the director was actually aiming for. Even with Károly, I could see that he was shocked by how bizarre the whole thing was. It feels like an extremely strange, almost absurd production. He creates some kind of unreal situation from the play. It’s incredibly exciting. I wasn’t frightened, I was more intrigued by the oddity of the role.

- Can you apply your puppetry and pantomime skills?

- Definitely. Especially the perspective. About two years ago, Gábor Tengely invited me to a reading theatre at Merlin, where I had to play a 300-kilo female elephant. That’s when I learned how to abstract and realized that nothing is impossible. It all depends on what I imagine myself to be. I can build on that now as well.

- Will you be part of Egmont too?

- Yes. I will play Clara’s mother, and various characters from the crowd: for example, a messenger, a citizen.

- Is this your first acting role?

- No. I would like to emphasize that being a puppeteer doesn’t mean one is not an actor; in fact, it requires something else as well. As a so-called ‘live’ actor, I already made my debut in Faust. Of the five Margarets in the play, I was the last one. Faust stays eternally young, while Margaret ages. I played the oldest, who goes mad. It was an extremely exciting role.

- But there were also puppets involved in that production.

- Yes, there were huge puppets, and marionettes as well.

- Now you’re “putting away” the puppet and stepping into the spotlight yourself. Will the puppeteer return to the stage only when they want to, but are a bit afraid, so they hide behind the puppet and the screen?

- Maybe that’s how it is. But of course, it’s more complicated than that. The puppeteer transposes the kind of exhibitionism that an actor has onto their hands.

- These days, hiding behind a screen is often not possible; they almost never work behind the screen anymore. Whether they like it or not, they stand before us.

- Exactly. For example, this set we are sitting in, from the afternoon performance of The Cowardly Little Tiger, where we’re moving among the props, makes our work even more exciting.

- It can’t be easy to keep the focus on the puppet. Once a live person appears on stage, I always end up looking at them.

- That’s the point. That’s why it’s much harder than a screen performance. It requires a new technique. The puppet has to be separated, so to speak, from the live actor. Sometimes the director wants a connection between the puppet and the actor. If that’s not the case, it becomes very difficult to neutralize myself and make sure only the puppet works.

- How did you decide on this career?

- I was rejected three times by the Academy of Theatre and Film Arts. I went to work, but in the meantime, I was studying pantomime. My teacher suggested that I audition for the Puppet Theatre. It was a rough road. We traveled a lot to the countryside. I went with the production as an accountant. Then the props manager got sick, and I stepped in for her. I did that job for five years, and I learned a lot from it. That’s how I got onto the stage, where I’ve been performing for decades. The special gift of fate was that I met Zoltán Balázs, because he challenges me in ways that are building my career.

Mikés Éva, Fidelio, 2012

Translation by Zsuzsanna Juraszek