On the first day of the Mozaik National Theatre Festival, audiences will have the opportunity to see Maladype Theatre’s production of Yvonne. We spoke with Simon Jáger, one of the leading actors in the production, about the performance, the theatre, and his plans.

— What led you to pursue acting?

— The world of theatre has played a defining role throughout my life, which is hardly surprising, since my father (András Jáger) is also an actor. As a child, through him, the corridors and dressing rooms of the Győr National Theatre became an endless playground, always new, exciting, and waiting to be explored. Later, I also had the opportunity to try my hand at acting as a child performer, and the entire building—and theatre itself—became a familiar and inviting place.

During much of my teenage years, as I was trying to find myself, I distanced myself from this world. I continued participating in poetry recitation competitions, but I was mainly interested in mathematics and physics, because for a while I was drawn to an engineering career. Then, in my final year of secondary school, six months before the entrance examinations, I decided that I would rather choose a vocation than simply a job, and I applied to universities in Budapest and Kaposvár.

My path to becoming an actor was far from straightforward, but eventually, in 2018, I returned home from Târgu Mureș with a master’s degree in acting. Now my father and I can have long conversations about our work as fellow professionals.

— You have been a member of Maladype Theatre since 2018. How did you meet the company’s artistic director, Zoltán Balázs?

— Zoltán Balázs directed a production for us at the University of Arts in Târgu Mureș during our fifth year (the second year of the master’s programme), inspired by short stories by Bruno Schulz. It was an intense, thorough, and deeply engaging rehearsal process—not only physically, but intellectually as well. We analysed every story in depth, talked about them extensively, and supplemented them with our own experiences and personal insights.

At the same time, we were constantly putting movement sequences together and learning them, making use of our individual physical abilities, until we became one with the material, body and soul. Zoli set very high expectations for us, and I was extremely grateful for that. It released enormous amounts of energy in me that, I feel, had been dormant for a very long time before we began working together.

It was an uplifting and liberating encounter, both with him and with the way of thinking about theatre that he represents.

— What does Maladype Theatre mean to you?

— For me, Maladype means the team, the common goal and the path we are travelling together towards it. It means the possibilities inherent in the art of theatre and the potential that is waiting to be explored.

— Maladype Theatre strives for constant renewal, which makes it difficult to put the company into any particular category. As an actor, how do you experience this constant change?

— I believe that anyone involved in theatre must constantly renew themselves. Of course, this is not always easy. As human beings, we tend to fall back on strategies that have already been tested and proven to work, choosing safe and optimal paths to achieve our goals.

As an actor, you have to rise above this and accept the possibility that something may not work, that we may “stumble, tear our flesh on the barrier, fall down, and then run again” (a paraphrase of Miklós Radnóti’s poem And He Spoke and Talked with Cain About Abel).

I find this process engaging and beautiful, and I hope that this feeling, and this desire for renewal, will remain with me wherever fate may lead.

— What is the production of Yvonne about for you?

— In truth, it has changed a great deal for me since the premiere, but lately, more than anything, it has been about the helplessness of wanting to act. About that visceral tension when energies are raging inside you, yet you still feel helpless, lost, and uncertain—and this contradiction tears you apart and makes you angry.

Of course, this largely stems from the problems my character is dealing with.

— The audience also plays a major role in the production.

— In Gombrowicz’s play, Yvonne is a wounded, vulnerable, exploited being whom the entire court cannot find a place for within the existing structure. In our production, this figure is the spectator—someone who is often forgotten in the theatre or hidden away in the darkness of the auditorium.

Someone who, although an indispensable element of theatre, is nevertheless not part of the “performance” or the “programme.” And although in our production the spectator does not appear as some grotesquely distorted creature, but in their own real, natural body, on stage they seem just as alien as a painted, sequin-clad actor would look sitting in the audience.

This demands constant, razor-sharp attention from me as well, and prevents the routine of the umpteenth performance from simply carrying the production along. You have to be prepared for anything. On the one hand, this is a tremendous responsibility; on the other, it always offers the possibility of genuine, ever-renewed play.

— What are you currently working on?

— At the moment, we are working on Jean-Paul Sartre’s play The Flies, which will premiere at the end of this season, in June, directed by Zsuzsanna Juraszek.

— What are your plans for the future?

— “Only Merlin knows the future” (Tankred Dorst: Merlin, or The Wasteland).

There is not the slightest question in my mind that I still have plenty to do as an actor, and I am curious to see what the next season—or even the next five or ten years—will bring. Recently, I have increasingly felt the desire to create something tangible as an art form, and I have become strongly attracted to the visual arts, particularly sculpture and working with wood and metal.

Andrea Szilágyi, Papageno, 2022

translated by Zsuzsanna Juraszek