Mettrin – A Hungarian cultural institution devoted to openness, diversity and sustainability in performing arts

Mettrin – A Hungarian cultural institution devoted to openness, diversity and sustainability in performing arts

by Dr. Kyriakos Loukakos¹, Hon. President of the Greek Drama and Music Critics’ Union (est. 1928)

Mettrin as a holistic architectural and cultural concept

Mettrin does not mean anything specific! It just may be some cryptic combination of letters and their latent meanings. Yet, it corresponds to a nascent and ambitious effort for a harmonized coexistence of first-class wellness hotel hospitality with totally up-to-date, moderately sized multi-faceted cultural productions and guest performances without harassing the nearby idyllic Bánk lake, blessed with peaceful stillness and a still thriving nature. But let us take the story from its pleasantly improbable beginning.

It was in the frame of the latest Kosovo-Albania Theatre Showcase we had the opportunity of contact with two special cultural ambassadors of Hungarian contemporary theatre and performing arts, internationally acclaimed director Zoltán Balázs and his all-round Egeria of a «producer», Sylvia Huszár². Little we knew then of an emerging new institution, financially independent of state and due to the artistic sensibility of the art loving family of Messrs. Ferenc Karacs, Julianna Karacs-Zagyva and their young and handsome offsprings, beautifully situated at the lake village of Bánk, barely an hour by car from Budapest. Still less we knew then about the intention for this cultural frame to form a holistic combination of still-to-be-programmed cultural activities, hosted in a nearby new and fully ecologically sustainable complex of non-monumental and internally flexible buildings, sitting lightly on the lake vicinity.

The friendly atmosphere of our reception, as members of a multinational 10-member «Foreign Theatre Delegation», invited to participate to the Opening Ceremony of the Mettrin Arts Centre, could not conceal the seriousness of purpose around the new project. The importance of the occasion became even more obvious during its preceding press conference, featuring first and foremost a presentation of the new premises and their architectural and ecological philosophy by the well-known Hungarian architect Árpád Ferdinánd of «Ferdinand & Ferdinand Architects» Firm, followed to the fore by an enthusiastic Balázs, who also presented his vision in front of a select public headed by the initiator and his family and featuring much of Budapest’s artistic cream in selections from poetry, instrumental and vocal music, as well as nostalgic yet imaginative dance numbers, French chanson evergreens and much more.

The special evening was introduced by the well-known Kossuth-Prize Winner actress Ildikó Bánsági, who introduced the Ceremony with the World Theatre Day message of Greek director Theodoros Terzopoulos. After a greeting by the new Director General of the International Theatre Institute/UNESCO Ms. Zhongwen CHEN, the evening came to its artistic highpoint with a series of multinational songs, introduced by the Greek one «Mavra mou Matia», movingly interpreted by Transylvania-born Kinga Újhelyi, tastefully yet intensely accompanied by Armenian David Yengibarian, a musician well acquainted with Greek Rebetiko and more traditions, as it became obvious during personal contact after the Event.

Singer, film and musical actress Eszter Bíró and her multitalented accompanist Sándor Födő offered sensational Friday evening Sabbath prayer «in a thread of song», followed by violinist Júlia Rabovay and cellist Ágnes Kállay in the second movement (Très vif) of Maurice Ravel’s only sonata for this combination, first performed in 1922 and dedicated to Claude Debussy, a really awkward choice for such a mysticist programmatic frame. Anna Györgi’s recitation of an excerpt from «Song of Myself» by Walt Whitman was followed by a rock music sample, «Song of Martti», composed by punk rock singer Sámuel Pásztor, who also accompanied vocally and from the electric guitar his singer sister Anna Pásztor. Edith Piaf in Hungarian was offered by such all-round artistic personalities as actress and singer singer Ildikó Keresztes  accompanied on the piano by composer and pianist Péter Furák. Following them, the stage was occupied by the accurately described as «superb musician … in many ways unique and working solo or with supreme beatboxer Jammal» Edina Szirtes Mókus for an instrumental and vocal demonstration without parallel in our humble experience. An evocative tango imbued with shrewd choreographic elements was offered with classy lightness of movement by the pair András Szőllősy and Zsófia Kiss Gy, before singer, painter and actor  Gábor Gábriel Farkas, son of illustrious Hungarian parents, occupied the stage with his post-Sinatra outgoing personality in his idol’s famous «Lady is a trump».

Bringing back to memory a long standing and fairly established local «Louis Armstrong Jazz Festival», in view of its imminent reinstatement, the evening culminated with the song «The time for your life is now» by the American songwriter John Mellencamp, composed in the shocking aftermath of September 11^th USA terror act and defiantly sung by his fellow American jazz singer Joan Faulkner, soulfully accompanied at the piano by her long standing companion, the internationally acclaimed jazz pianist Gusztáv Csik. A performance that brought the evening to a vociferous public acclaim and led to the concluding Fireworks over the lake, that all participants witnessed from the terrace with Farkas sharing one last time his extrovert artistry with the intoxicated participants…

Zoltán Balázs and his Puppetmaster at Debrecen …

Focal person of our 3-day sojourn at the picturesque outskirts of Budapest indisputably was the appointed artistic director of the Mettrin Cultural Centre. According to the 2025 update of szinhaz.online, Zoltán Balázs is a multi-faceted artist, being an actor, director, set designer, and theater director. In 2001, he founded the avant-garde Maladype Theatre³, an ensemble that quickly gained international acclaim and recognition, where he continues to serve as artistic director. Over the past two decades, this groundbreaking company has become one of Budapest’s most prestigious theatrical and cultural institutions, regularly appearing at international festivals across Africa, America, Asia, and Europe. As a sought-after director worldwide, he has staged productions in the United States, Bosnia and Herzegovina, France, Kosovo, Poland, Germany, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Romania’s dynamic theater scene. His work as both an actor and director has been acknowledged via numerous professional and state awards, including the Comet Award, the Critics’ Award, the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary, the Gábor Miklós Award, the Lajos Őze Award, the Mari Jászai Award, the Kálmán Nádasdy Award, the Sándor Hevesi Award, the Hanna Honthy Award, and the Golden Mask Award.

As we were briefly to ascertain through our own experience, Balázs’ theatrical approach is deeply conceptual and method-driven, spanning various genres and styles. He has successfully directed classical and contemporary works, adapted novels and epics, staged dramas, comedies, operas, operettas, musicals, dance performances, puppet shows, performances, non-verbal and movement-based theater, and even rock concerts. His productions, inspired by diverse cultures and theatrical traditions, consistently receive critical and audience acclaim both in Hungary and abroad. His artistic work is characterized by intellectual freedom, experimentation, and a pioneering spirit. Committed to nurturing the next generation of theater professionals, Balázs developed the “Gold-Bug Method” in 2013 -an actor-training and creative-communication analytical program. In 2023, he introduced the “Five Gates” theater methodology, a comprehensive system integrating his extensive creative experience into a new, era-specific approach to theater education.

In pursue of such a demanding scope of artistic intentions, it required a more than 4-hour journey to the old university city of Debrecen, not far away from the Ukrainian border, in order to witness «The Puppetmaster», an impressive performance, directed by Balázs, who was also responsible for the abstractly evocative sets as well as for the so called «motion sculpture», with Sylvia Huszar as its creative producer. The theatrical atmosphere was further enhanced by the evocative costumes of Anikó Németh and original music by Adrián Kovács interspersed with evergreen romantic hits, relevant to the remote decades of the plot. A «Gesamtkunstwerk» perception that thankfully ignored Wagnerian proportions but was meant to consolidate our opinion of witnessing the theatrical highlight of our brief Hungarian cultural quest. The co-production, skillfully managed by Katalin Balázs, involved the Csokonai National Theatre Debrecen, Maladype Theatre Budapest and Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities in Honor of the 80th Anniversary of the Holocaust.

Very near to the historical centre of this second largest city of the country, a city full of architectural references to its Reformation and «K. und k. Monarchie» past, Csokonai National Theatre Debrecen is a modern building of unexpected originality, particularly regarding its inner space with a galactic kind of aura through the futuristic lighting of its main hall leading to the medium-sized stage that hosted the performance. Gilles Ségal’ s «absurd play», originally titled «The Puppetmaster of Lodz», depicts, as described by the Theatre’s own notes, the imaginary character of Samuel Finkelbaum, a world-famous puppeteer and a Birkenau survivor living in the divided city of Berlin five years after World War II. Despite numerous efforts to convince him otherwise, he doesn’t believe that the war is over and he no longer needs to hide. Thus, he spends his days locked away in a room with the puppets of his wife, who perished in the concentration camp, and his child who was never born as he prepares for the grand performance of his life, entitled The Tragicomic Life of Samuel Finkelbaum. The puppeteer’s alternate reality is framed by a classic “theater within the theater” setup, and the arrival of a friend who might finally convince Finkelbaum that the war is indeed over⁴.

Born in Fălticeni, Romania, Ségal (13 January 1929 – 11 June 2014) shared common traits with his antihero. As a French actor, mime and playwright, he performed on stage with world famous mime Marcel Marceau and acted in more than sixty films since 1954, among them, most notably, in Jules Dassin‘s Topkapi featuring among many illustrious others, director’s wife, emblematic Greek actress Melina Merkouri. Although Ségal intended, in his own words, «to write something light», he rather created «a descent into the heart of darkness»⁵ with an ambivalent and largely open conclusion, perpetuated in the production we attended.

Being granted, as members of the International Committee, the inestimable privilege of a collective face to face contact with the interpreters of the performance after its conclusion, we came to realize the thoroughly dialectic, intellectual «midwife» (μαιευτική in all-time Greek) method Balázs used, in order to extract from his team (Gergely Máté Kiss in the title role, contemporary dancer Rut Nache López, as well as Kinga Újhelyi and János Mercs, the latter in multiple assignments) the truth in the way of seeking a firm dramaturgic purpose. In this respect and by denying to cede to a predictable holocaust solemnity, Balázs enriched the rattling intensity of the parola scenica and its mostly forceful but also -at times- frightfully intimate, barely audible, declamation with further layers of scenic action. So, intermittently to scenes and / or third-party appearances by characters who tried to pull the protagonist out of his illusion, the play was enhanced by evergreen and mostly sentimental musical numbers from the dark decades between 1920s and 1950s, contradicting and yet relieving the relentless plot, first and foremost, because of the high-quality singing by our already familiar Újhelyi.

The action took place in the frame of an abstract, light to handle scenery, lighted discreetly with moody use of alternating colours, and served by costumes conform to periods and situations in an aesthetically rewarding synthesis. This was a performance where proportions, analogies, sound and visual elements, including dynamics, presented a painstakingly accurate result of almost cinematic exactitude, without betraying in the least the theatrical directness of a spectacle that further incorporated in a most esoteric way the body theatre of an expressive human puppet choreography and its dialogue with the Puppetmaster as well as with other characters and, sometimes, even brief yet aptly contributing sounds. And if our remarks should misguide to an assumption of soulless technicalities, we have to be adamant in the conclusion that we shared a deeply moving theatrical and aesthetic experience haunting us long after Morpheus demanded his own rights for the tiresome way back!

Crowning Penelopeiad at the Mettrin

In the aftermath of the previous evening’s experience, we were not in for a surprise that Balasz’s choice for the inauguration theatrical spectacle in the Mettrin Cultural Centre would involve the tricky production of a virtual monologue for Ulisses’s wife Penelope as conceived and narrated by the distinguished Canadian author Margaret Atwood in her 2005 «The Penelopiad».

It is «a retelling of the life of Penelope, and the fate of the 12 maids from The Odyssey, … told primarily from the perspective of Penelope, dead in the underworld, retelling her life on earth with interjecting sections from the point of view of the maids… commentating on their lives, Penelope and their hanging»⁶. The play is fairly hard to revive since it contains the use of different forms including poetry, a trial, a play and a love song, elements that brought once more to the attention the virtuosic element of Balázs ‘s production and direction values, firmly supported by his own sparse yet imaginative and functional scenery on a stage of very limited proportions as well as the subtly ancientized costumes by Anikó Németh and originally composed music by Adrián Kovács.

Three highly intelligent artists of various talents (Gabriella Varga as Penelope, Nelli Orbán as Helene and Edina Bajkó representing the Handmaids) excelled in refined utterance of the most complex and delicate declamation prosody, alternating it with solo and collective singing as well as instrumental self-accompaniment on a number of instruments including really exotic ones. An all-inclusive performing arts experience then, which we retain fondly and gratefully in our memory and soul, even far away from Hungary! Thank You All!