Hungary's National Theater: A Battle for Modern Relevance

Global | November 2011

November 1, 2011 Robert Avila Leave a comment

What Is a National Theatre?

Róbert Alföldi battles to invigorate Hungary’s premier stage with visions of the here and now.

By Robert Avila

On a warm and sunny April morning in Budapest, Róbert Alföldi leads a group of 12 actors in an early rehearsal of The Tragedy of Man , a new production of a hefty classic that will soon join the more than two dozen plays currently running in repertory for the National Theatre of Hungary’s 2011-12 season.

Alföldi, a handsomely graying fortysomething in jeans and a leather jacket, sits behind a long wooden table at the front of a spacious room occupying an upper floor of the National, Hungary’s premier stage. Alföldi has been its much-touted, award-winning and politically embattled artistic director since 2008 (his five-year renewable contract extends until 2013). Alföldi is also one of the country’s most famous and respected actors, a one-time TV personality and leading stage director.

On the right side of the rehearsal room, a long window looks out onto a new development zone located several metro stops south of the city center. The Danube is just a few strides away but obscured; the view is of a precarious load of building equipment floating by silently, swung on a line from a construction crane. Alföldi springs up for the fourth or fifth time in 20 minutes to approach his young leads, Dávid Szatory and Réka Tenki, who are playing Adam and Eve, respectively.

Alföldi stands taut but flexible, arms at his sides but hands ever expressive, shaping the air as if rotating a pair of light bulbs. He likes to direct up close from time to time before stepping back to look and consider again—familiar but apart. Then again, Alföldi may just have too much nervous energy to sit behind a desk for very long.

Company member Zsolt László leans against an aluminum ladder, scruffy in jeans and a T-shirt, and cracks a joke that all enjoy. László is playing Lucifer. Wiry and sly-looking, he seems right for the job. A versatile actor who was part of the company when Alföldi took over, he had been Tartuffe the night before in the National’s downstairs studio theatre—in a lively, insouciant but otherwise straight-ahead production staged by Alföldi several years ago while still a guest director.

God is also in the room, in the form of an offstage character voiced by veteran company actor Péter Blásko, who sits to the right of the director’s table just below an international no-smoking sign everyone roundly ignores. As it happens, the refined, quietly commanding Blásko is also Harpagon in this season’s other Molière offering.

The Tragedy of Man is 19th-century Hungarian writer Imre Madách’s nationally renowned poetic drama, an allegory of humanity’s imperfection and its baleful yet dogged march through history. Lucifer guides Adam through this historical pageant, each time dashing his dreams with cruel realities, only to find Eve resuscitating Adam’s courage once more. One of the foremost texts in Hungarian cultural life, The Tragedy of Man is staged over and over, while its passages get memorized by generations of school children. Indeed, The Tragedy of Man had been the play chosen to open the bulky new National Theatre building in 2002. (That lavish production, in which Alföldi himself played Lucifer, was broadcast live on national television and was, by most accounts, a critical failure despite the money and talent thrown at it.)

When Alföldi the director approaches a classic, however, you can be sure he will knock any stuffiness out of it. That has sometimes gained him as much trouble as praise. His unconventional staging of Bánk bán , for example, re-envisions seminal Hungarian playwright Jozsef Katona’s 1819 nationalist tragedy—based on the historical assassination of Queen Gertrúd in 1213, and another major stage and classroom perennial—with an exclusively young cast energetically thrashing around an onstage pool and playing punk rock. Brilliantly resuscitating a hoary text burdened by its very prominence in the Hungarian canon, Bánk bán—junior remains an earthy and punchy part of the National repertoire, and notably popular with younger audiences otherwise used to hibernating before such good-for-you masterworks.

“This is a great example of what I think about the role of the National Theatre,” says Alföldi later in his office. “Every national theatre must play Bánk bán ,” he notes, referring to the several self-styled “national” repertory houses across Hungary, of which the one in Budapest is by far the largest and most important. “But they should only put it in their repertoire when they make a living performance out of it.”

In this first rehearsal of Tragedy of Man things are still loose. But a search for the life of the play is already underway—an essential connection that will make sense of the play’s art, its persistent truths. And that—in addition to artistic excellence and full houses—is the dominant through-line across nearly every production seen during the course of this reporter’s two-week visit to the National. No matter the play or setting, a conversation was underway with the audience about Hungarian life as it is lived now.

Taking many forms over a wide body of work—from classics of the Hungarian canon and the international stage to cutting-edge work like the Krétakör-spawned production Ice , or Alföldi’s own adaptation of Martin Speer’s Hunting Scenes from Lower Bavaria (which won best production at this year’s National Theatre Festival in Pécs; see page 56 )—this conversation invariably brought history strikingly into the present and set the present into the ebb and flow of history. It did so, moreover, while asking basic and urgent questions about community, solidarity, social responsibility, the meaning of nationhood, even the role of theatre and art in the life of a society. Alföldi proves constitutionally allergic to staging anything that does not speak, forcefully and eloquently, to the here and now.

The plight of Hungarian theatres, and cultural institutions more generally, amid a right-wing backlash against free expression has drawn increasing attention abroad. Since the April 2010 elections that brought the center-right Fidesz party to power, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government has passed an instantly notorious media law, which ominously extends state control over the cultural realm. A new constitution—which likewise faced serious international criticism and major protests within Hungary by those who see it as a rollback of rights and a power grab—was passed in April (it takes effect on Jan. 1, 2012). Concomitant economic reforms impinging on social programs, such as pensions for civil servants, have likewise resulted in recent mass demonstrations.

The 2010 elections also brought significant gains for the ultranationalist Jobbik party, which has pushed Fidesz to the right with its blatantly anti-Semitic, homophobic, anti-Roma platform of “national renewal.” Since then, Jobbik members have called on the floor of Parliament for Alföldi’s ouster, while making disparaging reference to his sexual orientation.

Last December, Jobbik members and allies staged a demonstration outside the National that was met by a counter-demonstration of artists and critics in defense of Alföldi and artistic expression.

At the same time, in Alföldi’s three seasons as artistic director, the National has undergone a long-awaited renewal few can gainsay. Attendance is up and the critical response to the programming has been unusually enthusiastic. It is now widely considered one of the leading theatres in the country, called Hungary’s “most progressive” stage by at least one prominent critic, and its productions are receiving international attention as well.

Alföldi’s vision, including his commitment to examining the forces and values that animate society, has run headlong against a right-wing government that also speaks loudly about “Hungarian values.” While this situation is part of a larger predicament facing Hungarian theatres (grown increasingly susceptible to political pressure owing to a blurring between the professional administration of publicly subsidized arts institutions and the machinations of factions in power), the National’s centrality as a symbolic repository of national identity has helped make its director a lightning rod in Hungary’s culture wars.

Alföldi admits his appointment in 2008, made after an open competition held by the cultural ministry under the then Socialist-led government, was unusual. Certainly he was more than qualified for the job—but he was only about 40 years old, significantly younger than the average for such a post. He was also outspoken and restive, not a sedate figure but an aesthetically challenging artist. Given the political tussling and controversy that had taken place in recent years over everything from the physical location and architectural design of the new National Theatre building to its artistic leadership, the ministry’s decision seemed a real break with the norm.

“I have to say, that was a brave thing,” he acknowledges. “I have to tell you that when I came here, inside the company there were voices of surprise or confusion. ‘What does he want? What will he do?’”

For his part, Alföldi insists he has been fulfilling what he articulated in his application as his vision for the theatre. The National’s mission statement calls for instilling “openness, tolerance, and curiosity in spectators—with special attention to younger generations.”

National classics invigoratingly reimagined, as well as international ones—from Molière to Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams—come well represented in the programming at the National. The theatre is also pursuing international collaborations and dialogue by hosting foreign directors like Romanian-American Andrei Serban, whose Uncle Vanya (with Romania’s Cluj Hungarian State Theatre) was among the very first productions brought in under Alföldi. Serban later directed Alföldi as Vershinin in an ebullient and eye-opening production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters , alongside outstanding turns by the members of this exceptional company. The production was one of three chosen for the National Theatre Festival at Pécs this year, where it was warmly received.

Alföldi has also made a point of developing and bringing in cutting-edge work. It was no accident that one of his first programming decisions was incorporating Ice into the repertoire. Originally staged by Árpád Schilling’s now-defunct Krétakör company under the inspired direction of film and theatremaker Kornél Mundruczó, Ice is a raucous and devastating adaptation of Russian novelist Vladimir Sorokin’s 2002 satirical, paranoid fantasy about a quasi-fascistic brotherhood of superior beings. Trapped in the hearts of certain “meat machines,” a.k.a. human beings, the members of the collective are liberated one-by-one with the help of a violent whack from a sledgehammer primed with some cosmic ice delivered to earth by a meteorite. The presence of Ice at the National, with its mix of Krétakör and National actors, signals a winning partnership between Hungary’s two theatre systems, the scrappy and vibrant independent scene and the heavily subsidized and generally more traditional repertory houses.

The fact that the set and the audience for Ice both fit entirely into the backstage area of the main house only underscores the unusual wedding of production and venue as well as the dynamic nature of the National under Alföldi’s leadership.

“ Ice was important also as a way to renew the company,” continues Alföldi, who painfully let go a fair number of actors after he arrived. The National currently has 40 actors on contract, a mixture of veterans and a large number of younger actors brought in by Alföldi, many formerly his students at Budapest’s prestigious Academy of Theatre and Film. Alföldi added a lauded senior member of the compa

_Originally reported by [American Theatre](https://www.americantheatre.org/2026/05/11/what-is-a-national-theatre/)._