The Urban Theatre of the Present : The 40 Years of the Katona József Theatre

Abstract

Katona József Theatre closed its 40th season on June 16, 2023. Director Gábor Máté said that “the entire staff at the Katona József Theatre can be proud that, despite the ongoing economic difficulties, the 40th season was completed in a manner worthy of the institution’s roots.” During the anniversary celebrations, I watched the performances and was haunted by the thought of taking a look at the Katona (as the people of Budapest call it) from the outside of its cultural framework and creative idiom. For forty years, the Katona has provided a most intensely stimulating discourse on artistic creation in Hungarian, with a specific theatrical idiom and a continuous self-reflective redefinition of its own status. In search of such ideas as “roots” and “worthy manner”, in this paper I juxtapose the 1982 and 2022 seasons to evaluate this complexity as it can be understood and perceived from the perspective of European urban theatre cultures.