T H E A T R E S
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

..The Géza Gárdonyi Theatre
..Gárdonyi Géza Színház - Eger (Hungary)

The Géza Gárdonyi Színház is a professional Hungarian theatre with a hundred-year-old history, and one of the most significant contemporary theatres in Hungary. The Hungarian theatre branch, the critics and the media has accepted it in the previous years as one of the most innovative young theatres of the country. Its performances are regular and successful guests of festivals.

In the studio and on the big stage as well the ensemble experiments with new theatrical forms and languages, looks for new ways of expression – always regarding of course the demands of the local audience, being a repertoire theatre.
The Gárdonyi Géza Színház works with established leading directors of the Hungarian and the international theatre scene. For example: Radoslav Milenkovic, the main director of the Serbian National Theatre, Novi Sad; Sándor Zsótér, who has been several times selected to be the best director of the season by the Hungarian critics; Gábor Máté, the leading director of József Katona Theatre, Budapest; Menyhért Szegvári, who became an established artist of the country as the leading director of the National Theatre of Pécs; András Dömötör, one of the biggest young talents of the Hungarian theatre scene; and Tibor Csizmadia, who was earlier general manager of the Budapest Chamber Thaetre and has been leading the Gárdonyi Géza Theatre successful for seven years.

The Gárdonyi Géza Színház has a strong ensemble with high quality, which has been playing year for year interesting performances. In the season of 2006/7 two, in 2007/8 one of its productions were selected among the 12 best plays of the actual Hungarian season and shown during the most significant all-hungarian theatre festival in Pécs (POSZT). The shows won several awards. The productions of the Gárdonyi Géza Színház are often invited to abroad as well.



..QUARTET FESTIVAL - 4th edition - Ancenis (France) - 10 - 14.3.2010.

..QUARTET FESTIVAL - 3rd edition - Eger (Hungary) - 27 - 31.10.2009.

..QUARTET FESTIVAL - 2nd edition - Cheb (Czech Republic) - 24 - 28.3.2009.

..András Visky - ALCOHOLICS (musical perform without a break) /
..Alkoholisták

(Worldwide first theatre-opening of the play in the Gárdonyi Géza Színház)

„We came together here to rescue Eve” /András Visky/

„She tells her stories so sweet, so heroic and with so sensitive and erotic womanness, that we must fall in love with her.” /Péter Horváth, director and critic/

„Somebody is fighting here for her own freedom. She is seeking, tigering round, her brain is working continuously – I am interested in this human fate.” / Menyhért Szegvári, the director of the performance/

Eve is alcoholic. She would be perhaps an actress, but she has not got a role for years. Most likely she lost her child. (Perhaps she killed it?) Nobody knows it exactly.
The Alcoholics is a secretful, poetic mystery-play, but with very lively characters and situations. Searching for belief, making jokes about the dispair of existence. Human angels and poetic alcoholics.
Eve is asking and thinking, and she is asking us to do the same. The performance from the Gárdonyi Géza Színház is a common existence with the audience – we are waiting together for salvation.

András Visky is a contemporary Hungarian playwright living in Roumania (Transylvania). He is dramaturg of Kolozsvár’s National Hungarian Theatre (Cluj Napoca), editor of the publishing house Koinónia, associate professor on the theatre faculty of the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj Napoca. His plays are being performed in Roumania, Hungary, the United States. He has been awarded with several literary and theatre prizes.

„I write plays to change the people, who watch them. The theatre exists, that people can meet each other.” /András Visky/

EVE / Mary
ERIKA NÁDASY
PATER / Old angel
VALENTIN VENCZEL
FATHER KÁLMÁN / Young angel
CSABA HÜSE
TREZOR / Other Mary
ERIKA IVÁDY
CHILD
JÓZSEF VERES
MUSICIANS
Baran Grzegorz (accordion), XY (flute)

Scenery: MENYHÉRT SZEGVÁRI, GYULA GRÓF
Music: LÁSZLÓ KÁTAI
Costume: TAMÁSNÉ SZANISZLÓ 
Dramaturg: PÉTER JÓNÁS                         
Stage manager: ORSOLYA BAJUSZ
Director’s assistent / Prompter: ÉVA HORVÁTH
Director: MENYHÉRT SZEGVÁRI

Opening:  06. Februar  2009.

THE DIRECTOR, MENYHÉRT SZEGVÁRI
Menyhért Szegvári (1949., Szeged, Hungary), one of the home-directors of our theatre, has been working for two decades with our ensemble. He knows very well every actor, knows, what they are capable of, his choosing of the roles is always accurate – he is a master in getting the maximum out of his actors.
He knows how to direct the very core of almost every genre: musicals, comedies, farces – but he has the most intimate, long-year connection to tragic stories. His home is the pain in the soul – of the actors and of the audience.

Short biography:
1972-1981 actor, National Theatre of Pécs
1981-1982 director, National Theatre of Pécs
1982-1986 leading director, National Theatre of Pécs
1986-1987 chef director, National Theatre of Pécs
1987-1992 director, National Theatre of Pécs
1992-1994 director, József Attila Színház, Budapest
1994- director, Gárdonyi Géza Színház, Eger

Award: 1989. Jászai Mari-award

Most important roles as actor:
Shakespeare: The Comedy of Errors – Dromio of Syracuse
Shakespeare: The Tempest - Caliban
Moliere: Don Juan - Sganarelle
Shakespeare: Antonius and Cleopatra - Caesar
Maxim Gorkij: In the depth - Luka

Most important directions:
W. Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, The Comedy of Errors
F. Schiller: Die Räuber, Don Carlos, Maria Stuart
W. Russell: Shirley Valentine, Bloods Brothers
J. Orton: What the Butler Saw
T. Williams: The tattood Rose
Gems: Paif
K. Kesey: One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Gogol: The Government Inspector (Revizor)
Franz Molnár: Liliom
Ray Cooney: Out of Order
Lajos Parti Nagy: Ibusár
András Nagy: Camille

Mihail Bulgakov: Iwan Vasiljevitsch

..QUARTET FESTIVAL - 1st edition - Novi Sad (Serbia) - 30.10. - 3.11.2008.

..János Háy - UNCLE PITYU'S SON / A Pityu bácsi fia

SYNOPSE: Many of us grew up in little towns, villages. Most of the Hungarians have their childhood-memories about the first heroic adventure with the subway in Budapest. “Imagine, it goes under the Danube, and the water does not come in!” But many other people throughout Europe must have had such experiences as well in Belgrade, Prague, Paris a few decades ago. It was an age, when we believed, that modern technology leads us to Paradise and among the wide folk only very few scepticals had even the idea to doubt in the steady evolution of the human race – especially in the communist countries. „The people in Budapest, they know everything, but who come from the country, they roam in the subway, and have not a mere idea, how to come out… and it is not to know, how long they have been wandering there under the ground, maybe they have lost their way since days.” – a young boy from the country explains his friend this in the play. He visited uncle Pityu in Budapest with his parents, where there is even a subway-train. His words are funny, their deeper meaning is gruesome.

The story of Háy is simple: a country-family’s visit to Budapest in the 1970’s, and the consequences of this visit. Háy tells his story with love and a lot of humour. His figures are very simple people as well, giving a lot of reasons to smile and laugh about them. We are watching the story, laughing a lot, and shivering sometimes from who knows, what… We are roaming between our common memories, like country-people in the subway of Budapest.

Pityu:
Venczel Valentin
Jani:
Sata Árpád
Marika:
Nádasy Erika
Gyerek:
Veres József
Laci:
Liktor Balázs
A Pityu bácsi fia:
Bali Árpád, Kovács Bálint
Rendező:
Szegvári Menyhért
Díszlettervező:
Csík György
Jelmeztervező:
Csík György
Zenei szerkesztő:
Kátai László
Asszisztens:
Horváth Éva

Premiere:
2006.10.31.

THE AUTHOR: JÁNOS HÁY

János Háy one of the most important Hungarian contemporary playwrights. He is writer, poet, playwright. He was born in 1960 in a little Hungarian village, studied Russian literature, history and aesthetics. He worked by different book-publishers. His literary works have been  published by various newspapers and publishers since 1983 – at first he wrote poetry, then short-stories, in the last years theatre-plays. He is an amateur painter and beat-gitarrist. Háy lives in Budapest. His first play (Gézagyerek/ The Géza child) won the award of the best new Hungarian drama in 2001/2002, his second (Senák) got the same award in 2005/2006. His plays are translated and played throughout Europe.
His pregnant experience is the tension between two cultures – coming from a little province village and trying to survive in a modern city. A Pityu bácsi fia (Uncle Pityu’s son), as many other of his writings, is autobiographically ispired. It is about integration, identity, getting adult.

JÁNOS HÁY ABOUT HIS PLAY

„I have four plays, and I do not want to write more. They all the subtitle “Divine drama” – except from the last one, Uncle Pityu’s son, which has the subtitle: “Devil-play”. Senák takes place in the 1960’s, Géza-child in the 1990’s, Herner Ferike’s Father in our age, and Uncle Pityu’s Son in the 1970’s. But I did not want to make a picture of the age.
I can summarize the story of Pityu very easy: a country-couple, Jani and Marika visits uncle Pityu in Budapest in 1972, who lives in a tiny hole of a “Stalin-block” in a suburb, and they go together to take a trip with the subway. After it uncle Pityu’s son visits them in the country, and this visit ends in a tragedy. I myself went to grammar school to Budapest from a little village, as well. I lived in my first 14 years in Vámosmikola. I know very well the home-seeking basic situation of the play: how difficult is the assimilation in a different society and culture, in a big city. How can we reserve the past, our former life and identity.
But actually I am not interested very much in the sociological background, when I wrote the play, I was interested in basic onthological questions. One of the story’s biggest tension is between fatalism and ‘things happening at random’. Why things happen with us, what motivates the characters, is there any ‘reason-consequence order’ in the world. We can experience, that though we make fatal steps (for example a husband has a lover), but the former state of living does not change. And then comes a banal accident, somebody finds an e-mail or sms, and everything turns upside-down.

I always imagine a border, that I should reach as a writer, a kind of aesthetic and moral level. When I came to Eger to the first rehearsal of Pityu, I was listening to Mozart’s D-moll piano concerto. I had the feeling, the pianist wouldpush the keys of my heart. I would like to reach this level in my plays. I despise those authors, who try to judge their heroes from above. I am not better from any of my figures. They can be funny, but I do not laugh about them, I try to show their human caducity. They think about problems, which are problems for me as well.
CZ FR HU SR ENG