The essay aims at examining the ways postdramatic aesthetics meet Shakespearean plays in Hungarian theatre. Offering a context for postdramatic strategies in European theatre practices and touching upon its regional differences, a main goal is to analyse how postdramatic strategies affect the schemes of interpretation and reception in the Central European geopolitical region. Presenting two case studies of staging Romeo and Juliet on Hungarian stages between 1996 and 2019, the article argues that a new relation of visuality, performativity, and textuality, emerging in these productions, can lead to rediscovering and reinterpreting Shakespearean dramas after 1989.
The paper focuses on the methodological challenges of handling the material remains of banned theatre practices in Cold War Hungary. Focusing on the case of the collective Apartment Theatre (1972–6), it examines the relation of material remains, originally created by or for the socialist authorities in order to prove the danger caused by the collective, and the materials which were created by the group members as a countermovement to preserve their own memories and narratives. Consequently, archival practices of care as well as archival practices of suspicion together contribute to situating the collective in Hungarian and European cultural memory and theatre history.
The essay aims at highlighting the methodological challenges of researching amateur theatres under Hungarian state socialism, including the accessibility of documents in official archives, leading and sometimes misleading narratives of historiography, and the emerging role of oral history interviews and personal collections. Focusing on the history of the university theatre at Budapest University of Technology, namely, the Szkéné Collective, the case study investigates the dynamics of invisible work, collective creation, and the role of female participants between 1962 and 1973. In order to acknowledge the role of community in amateur theatre practices, it is essential to readdress the hierarchical understanding of a collective, and search for the usually hidden stories of shared creativity and labour.
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