MITEM News

Life-and-Death Struggle of Stage Selves at the National Theatre

Roundtable on The Drunks

Since its premiere at the National Theatre in Budapest last autumn, Részegek (The Drunks), directed by Victor Ryzhakov, has been bringing down the house. It is shortlisted for the summer 2017 POSzT (National Theatre Festival in Pécs), too, where the previous season’s most highly esteemed Hungarian productions are presented each year.

Gyula Király

Hamlet and Raskolnikov – Renaissance and the 19th Century

Shakespeare is a landmark in the construction of tragedy: he intersperses tragedy with novelistic and dramatic threads – he opens the play with a novelistic drama and we are faced with this novelistic drama actually up to the actors’ play. Here the drama does not, really cannot, yet slide into tragedy. Hamlet starts with a test: he needs to ascertain his apprehension whether time is really out of joint. Tragedy is still to follow; Hamlet would not be the tragic hero of modern times if he passed up this experiment, if he did not start with the intellectual’s certitude and took combat with mere conviction or prejudice, if he simply accepted the revenge.

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