Contemporaries in the Drawer?
Professional Conference on the State of Hungarian Drama Today
Keywords:
contemporary premiere, domestic and european theatre, staging processes, stage viability
Abstract
On the 23rd of May, 2022, the Hungarian Academy of Arts organised a conference on the state of contemporary Hungarian drama, entitled “Contemporaries in the drawer”, in an attempt to address the question as to how well new Hungarian plays of recent decades are finding their way onto the stage, and how this compares with the situation in other European countries. In a speech entitled “Why do we sometimes write plays for ourselves?”, director Géza Bodolay illustrated his own working method, in which classic dramatic texts are sometimes so radically altered during the staging process that they can almost be considered contemporary plays.
