Shakespeare,national memory,and tourist place: Gyula's Várszínház Festival

Introduction

Hungary's Gyula Shakespeare Festival is an important part of the larger Várszínház Festival, which contributes significantly to making the host town a tourist place. ¹ Since 1964, the Várszínház Festival has operated each summer in the town of Gyula (population 30,000), located near the country's southeastern border with Romania; the annual two-week Shakespeare Festival became part of the Várszínház's season in 2005. Gyula offers tourists numerous diversions: thermal bath spas, shopping and dining experiences, and various cultural attractions. The fortified medieval Vár (castle) in which Festival performances take place (színház means theatre) is Gyula's signature attraction, one that reflects concerns central to Hungarian national memory and identity, especially because it was the site of a lengthy Ottoman siege in 1566. The nationalist issues attached to the Vár and other historic attractions in Gyula have become highly politically charged in the last decade, during which time Viktor Orbán's Fidesz government has held large majorities in Hungary's parliament. Scholars describe how Fidesz has pushed initiatives that reflect an attitude of ‘post-communist traditionalism’. ² This ‘traditionalism’ valorises ‘“patria, church, and the (traditional) family”’ and includes ‘anti-immigration’ sentiment. ³ If those sympathetic to these sentiments might regard Gyula as a place that uses its tourist attractions to celebrate traditional national culture, the Várszínház complicates any such sense of place by hosting challenging Shakespearean performances that often portray national crises and relationships between political rulers and the ruled with profound pessimism. In this essay, I will examine two productions that exemplify such performance, László Bocsárdi's Hamlet (2013) and Attila Vidnyánszky Jr's Richard III (2016), to consider how the relationships between tourism, national identity, and Shakespearean theatre affect the kind of tourist place Gyula is in the twenty-first century. ⁴

Place is integral to tourism in Gyula and elsewhere since tourists typically seek out ‘encounters with distinct places and place images’ ⁵ in ways that are analogous to theatregoing. ⁶ Tourists have been depicted as journeying to seek out various types of otherness, though their travels are often seen as temporary and circular, since they intend ‘to return “home” within a relatively short period of time’. ⁷ Tourist journeys have been compared to pilgrimages and other social-separation rites in which participants experience the sacred. ⁸ Modern tourism, meanwhile, has been described as a ‘limited breaking with established routines and practices of everyday [modern] life’ and ‘regulated and organized work’. ⁹ As Athinodoros Chronis argues, such journeys are not made only to a ‘physical location but [to] an imaginary zone’ of encounter with a ‘tourism imaginary’, which Chronis defines ‘as a social construct that envelops and shapes’ space ‘into an evocative tourism destination’. ¹⁰ In other words, material locations become ‘“tourist places” when they are appropriated, used and made part of the living memory and accumulated life narratives of people performing tourism’, people who view places ‘with particular mindsets’. ¹¹ John Urry and Jonas Larsen refer to this mindset as ‘the tourist gaze’: ‘a performance that orders, shapes and classifies, rather than reflects the world’. ¹² This emphasis on performance should remind us that place-making includes embodied practices; tourists make meaningful places by acting in space. The emphasis should also draw attention to the similarities between tourism and theatre. Like tourism, theatre typically requires spectators to adopt a gaze that ‘orders, shapes and classifies ¹³ ; they are asked to turn concrete space into ‘place richly invested with meaning’ by regarding the material components of scenography – design elements, actors, architecture – as something other than what they are. ¹⁴ To adapt Chronis's phrasing, spectators thereby travel to ‘an imaginary zone’, turning the physical performance space ‘into an evocative [theatrical] destination’. ¹⁵ Still, spectators and tourists are typically present at physical locations when experiencing them as imagined places. Although the Várszínház managed to run a limited 2020 season and a fuller one in 2021, the travel restrictions imposed as a result of the Covid-19 outbreak elsewhere hindered precisely the kind of imaginative work that theatregoer-tourists perform at Gyula in turning the town into a tourist place.

I will consider Boscárdi's Hamlet and Vidnyánszky Jr's Richard III to tease out the implications of embedding Shakespearean theatre within a larger tourist destination, something Gyula shares with, for instance, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in Stratford-upon-Avon and Shakespeare's Globe in London. At both the RSC and the Globe, theatrical performance is an important attraction spurring the physical and metaphorical journeys visitors take in transforming physical environments into places associated with ‘nostalgia for an idealized past’, ‘English identity’, and making the ‘otherness’ of Shakespeare's literary greatness accessible. ¹⁶ There is not the same obvious fit between Gyula and Shakespeare as there is with Stratford or London, but the Várszínház, part of the European Shakespeare Festival Network (ESFN), has worked to make the castle a venue amenable to cosmopolitan Shakespearean theatre. ¹⁷ The international productions and performance styles that the Festival brings to Gyula arguably lend prestige to the town and to the Hungarian theatre community generally. However, the nature of the Shakespeare productions in the Vár, most of which are staged by Hungarian companies, runs counter to the ethos of the town's leisure activities and national significance of its various attractions. Bocsárdi's Hamlet and Vidnyánszky Jr's Richard III are characteristic of such productions: they draw on recent movements in European Shakespeare that diminish the importance of the verbal text and linear narrative while foregrounding a spectacularly associative and symbolic scenography that is often enigmatic. The two productions appear to take up issues central to Hungary's fraught cultural politics, and though they do so in oblique and perplexing ways, their cryptic scenography has implications for the meaning of place in the Vár. These shows indicate what is at stake in closing venues similar to Gyula's castle due to the pandemic: they reveal how Shakespeare is made to engage with the history-rich fortress in ways that generate meaning only when spectators and tourists are present. Specifically, this Hamlet and Richard III demonstrate how Shakespeare can be used to play with and against the physical materials of the castle courtyard as a richly meaningful performance site insofar as they challenge the values that have attached to Gyula as a tourist place, especially the fortress's identity as a location intended to sustain the memory of heroic nationalism.

Gyula as tourist place and the Várszínház

At first glance, Gyula-as-tourist-place seems to have more to do with physical pleasure than with artistic heritage. ¹⁸ The town's well-maintained buildings, streets, and public gardens indicate the care taken to create a pleasingly built environment, not necessarily the ‘imaginary zone’ ¹⁹ associated with tourist places that embody cultural history. In the summer, Gyula is filled with people clearly acting as tourists in the sense of those who depart from ‘routines and practices of everyday life’ by ‘allowing [their] senses to engage with a set of stimuli that contrast with the everyday and mundane’. ²⁰ Visitors amble along tree-lined boulevards, menace the streets with push-pedal carts, sunbathe, swim in Gyula's many pools, enjoy spa services, and frequent the town's numerous restaurants and bars, enjoying the region's renowned food and drink. In a straightforward way, then, Gyula is one of those tourist ‘landscapes produced through bodily engagement and practice’ where pleasure-seeking tourists physically ‘produce the experience of “being in and part of place”’. ²¹ Another look, however, reveals how certain of these pleasures are intertwined with the town's history. Tourists can participate in this history by enjoying a coffee at the eighteenth-century Almásy Castle's twenty-first-century café or by savouring wine at the Rondella Terrace Bar, part of the medieval fortress complex. Customers of the Százéves Cukrászda, meanwhile, can immerse themselves in the patisserie's 180-year history by eating in the restored dining room filled with quintessentially Central European Biedermeier furniture.

Gyula's museums also strive to create an ‘imaginary zone’ ²² that produces a sense of local and national identity by supposedly putting tourists in touch with the town's historical otherness. The Ladics House, a nineteenth-century family residence, presents the home as it once was. Packed with Biedermeier, pictures, and knick-knacks, it suggests bourgeois life in a small pre-World War I Austro-Hungarian town. The Almásy Castle offers visitors a recreation of aristocratic life in Gyula, providing interactive displays describing the property's past. Displays there also position Gyula as a place set apart from metropolitan centres with signage that describes how the arrival of the railway turned ‘the rural sojourn’ into ‘a sort of romantic getaway’ from rushed ‘city life’, hinting at how current tourists might understand their own visit to the castle. Exhibits depict Gyula and environs as a region that provisioned the continent with meat from vast cattle herds once raised locally, and remind visitors that Albrecht Dürer Sr followed the same trade routes to Nuremberg, thereby linking Gyula to Dürer Jr, one of the greatest artists of Europe's Northern Renaissance. A similar sentiment prevails at the Erkel Ferenc Memorial House, once owned by Erkel, the nineteenth-century composer of the music to the Hungarian national anthem and nationalist operas. Displays remind us that Gyula remained for Erkel a rural retreat where he composed music for the popular and politically charged 1861 opera Bánk Bán, which depicted medieval Hungarian history in order to reflect on then-contemporary Habsburg occupation of the country. These museums rely on ‘authorized heritage discourse’ related to ‘material objects, sites, [and] places’, as they exist in the actual physical buildings that they display to the public. ²³ In this way, they exemplify how ‘tourism stages the world as a museum of itself’ in the process of ‘creating the sense of “hereness” necessary to convert a location into a destination’ or meaningful place. ²⁴ The museum-isation of these former residences celebrates the traditional society of an idyllic countryside landscape and a nation that bestowed cultural gifts upon Europe, but that also possesses a resolutely independent spirit.

Assertions of national Hungarian independence find fuller expression at the Vár, which has also become ‘a museum of itself’. ²⁵ Displays at the Vár focus on the fortress's military-political history as it relates to times of national crisis and resistance to foreign empires. Visitors process through rooms encircling the courtyard where theatre takes place, with much of the exhibition space devoted to displays of weaponry and armour. In one case filled with nineteenth-century weapons is an engraving of the ‘National Martyrs of 1848–49’, leaders executed for participating in Hungary's failed anti-Habsburg revolution, with signage describing the 1849 surrender of 2,000 Hungarian soldiers just outside Gyula's fortress (this matches the outdoor display commemorating the ‘Martyrs’ directly next to the Vár). Adjacent rooms are filled with Ottoman weapons and furnishings depicting the era of that empire's occupation of Hungary (1566–1695). On the walls are engravings of various Hungarian fortresses captured by Ottoman forces in the sixteenth century. The explanatory signage about Gyula's fortress relates the singular circumstances of the 1566 siege there: the Hungarians burned the surrounding town to keep it out of enemy hands; they defended the fortress for more than 62 days (longer than any other in the country); and, when the defenders finally surrendered, the Ottomans broke their promise to provide safe passage for the defeated. These displays’ portrayal of heroic resistance to foreign influence (i.e., invasion) imbue the Vár with the kind of nationalist sentiments that have long been ingrained in Hungarian thought due to their circulation through popular culture, education, museums, and other institutions. While such sentiments might be consistent with the ‘traditionalism’ that Luca Kristóf identifies as characteristic of the Fidesz government's policy initiatives throughout the 2010s, ²⁶ the two are not identical. Rather, the government has harnessed these ideas for its own ends. ²⁷

Shakespeare does not figure in any of these attractions, nor was he part of the early history of the Várszínház Festival. Restoration of the fortress began in the early 1960s; exhibits and cultural events within the castle soon followed, leading István Miszlay to found the Festival. ²⁸ As Miszlay was inspired by visits to open-air festivals in Europe, ²⁹ theatre in the Vár was similar to other post-Second-World-War European festival performance that sought to employ high culture as a means of ‘national reconstruction’, reflecting a belief in the healing power of art. ³⁰ But, in keeping with the notion that such festivals could bring ‘societal benefit, educational enrichment, and the provision of arts and culture to communities outside the metropole’, ³¹ Miszlay was sympathetic to sentiment in Gyula that drama linked to the region should be performed in the fortress. ³² Consequently, in its first decade, the Festival included eight dramas about Hungarian history. ³³ Thus, from its beginning, the Festival combined the ‘authorised heritage discourse’ associated with the Vár's material space and ‘heritage as process’ ³⁴ in which performance of locally meaningful theatre helps create ‘cultural identity, memory, sense of place and belonging’. ³⁵ Early seasons included dramas from the classical European repertoire, but the Festival did not stage Shakespeare until 1982 (Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet and a musical based on The Comedy of Errors), and did not mount another until 1991's Antony and Cleopatra. Subsequently, however, at least one Shakespeare-related production appeared most years until 2005 when artistic director József Gedeon founded the Shakespeare Festival. ³⁶

Várszínház publicity from the Shakespeare Festival's inaugural year affirmed that Gyula is a place amenable to Shakespeare and international theatre. The 2005 programme reminds theatregoers of Hungary's distinguished tradition of translating and performing Shakespeare and depicts the courtyard as an ideal venue in which to perform the works of this literary ‘giant’, since the Vár would supposedly put audiences in touch with the early modern spirit of Shakespeare's plays. ³⁷ Gedeon commented that 2005 marked the expansion of two Várszínház traditions: performing Shakespeare and (since 1999) inviting well-known directors to stage their work at the Festival; now they would invite one Hungarian-language performance and two foreign-language performances by distinguished directors. ³⁸ The goal of this plan was to employ Shakespeare to create a prestigious international festival that increased the stature and profile of Hungarian theatre. ³⁹ Várszínház organizers thus wished to remake the Vár as a place explicitly open to foreign influence by encouraging spectators to regard the new festival-within-a-festival with a particular type of theatre-tourist's gaze: they were to participate in performances (or ‘heritage as process’) that would use the ‘authorised heritage discourse’ of the historically significant architecture. ⁴⁰ They would do so to channel Shakespeare ‘the author-as-historical-other’ while encountering the theatrical otherness of international performance in ways that raised Hungarian theatre's international reputation. ⁴¹

If, as Júlia Paraizs and Ágnes Matuska astutely remark, the Várszínház was serving as a quasi-national theatre in pursuing this goal, the Festival's reversal of the proportion of Hungarian and international performances Gedeon mentioned in 2005 is telling. ⁴² While the Festival has hosted productions from many countries, performances by Hungarian companies and Hungarian-language shows from Romania and Slovakia have outnumbered non-Hungarian productions at a rate of two-to-one. ⁴³ Hungarian-language performances in the Vár have outnumbered non-Hungarian ones (which usually play in secondary venues) at a rate of three-to-one, and only Hungarian-language productions in the Vár get more than one night's performance. Such works, co-produced with the Festival and premiered in the fortress, have a ‘main-event’ quality each season. They are typically devised by established directors with major reputations in the country or by emerging stars of the Hungarian theatre scene, as is the case with, respectively, Bocsárdi's Hamlet and Vidnyánszky Jr's Richard III. Compared to other shows, directors and cast members from these productions get much more coverage in the Festival's publicity and in the press. Some of these high-profile productions tour after their Gyula premieres, and thereby make an impression on other Hungarian-speaking audiences. By hosting intercultural Shakespeare productions, the Festival opened the castle's courtyard to a number of international shows, but the great majority of Shakespearean performances there have turned it into a place for perpetuating the Vár's prestige and that of Hungarian theatre artists.

Whatever prestige Shakespearean performance brings to Gyula's best-known landmark is quite distinct from the physical pleasures and the cultural heritage that contribute to the town's identity as a tourist place. Unlike the accessible eateries and spas and the uncomplicated messaging of Gyula's museums, many Shakespeare productions at the Festival are truly perplexing. These challenging productions do not clearly venerate Shakespeare's timeless ‘genius’ but have oblique relationships to the plays’ narratives and characters, and are generally more concerned with mise en scène than conveying a sense that they are faithfully rendering the texts’ supposedly inherent meanings. Staging such productions in the Vár complicates the fortresses’ historical meanings and their ostensible connections to Shakespeare's early modernity. The two mainstage Hungarian-language productions I examine in the next section, both co-produced by the Festival and premiered in the Vár's courtyard, reveal how Shakespeare can alter the sense of place in the fortress. While these shows incorporate the courtyard's brick architecture into their scenography, they also point away from this ‘authorized heritage discourse’, ⁴⁴ using performance to bring contemporary political and cultural concerns, including those related to changing Shakespearean theatrical traditions, into the historical space. ⁴⁵

The 2013 Hamlet and 2016 Richard III

Outlining developments in twenty-first-century Hungarian Shakespeare reception helps explain how Bocsárdi's Hamlet and Vidnyánszky Jr's Richard III affect the representation of place in the Vár. The longstanding importance of Shakespeare to Hungary's theatrical repertoire has only increased in recent years. ⁴⁶ Since the end of communism (1989–90), the annual average number of Hungarian Shakespeare premieres is double that of the previous 40 years and Shakespeare is by far the country's most produced dramatist. ⁴⁷ During communism, staging Shakespeare was often a political act simply because the overbearing context of dictatorial rule meant that audiences would read criticism of the regime ‘between the lines’ of what appeared onstage. ⁴⁸ In the last decade, a large part of the arts community has become increasingly critical of government policy. Scholars describe an intensification of longstanding political divisiveness among artists as Fidesz has attempted to impose on the cultural sector a ‘post-communist traditionalism’. ⁴⁹ Critics argue that the government has advanced such attitudes by influencing arts-funding decisions, placing partisan allies in strategic positions at cultural institutions, and by strengthening institutions sympathetic to the government's priorities. ⁵⁰

Shakespearean theatre in Hungary has reflected this situation, though not always in a straightforward manner. Productions of the last decade have dealt with political pessimism, politics’ corruptive influence, and a younger generation's disillusionment with the failed promises of freedoms in the post-communist era. ⁵¹ While such productions have been interpreted as critical of contemporary politics, and Fidesz's rule in particular, these stagings have not been consistently topical, sharply focused, or easily legible. ⁵² Such imprecise political commentary might result from publicly funded practitioners’ wariness about explicitly criticising the government upon which they rely financially, though explicit political affiliations can provide many Hungarian artists with ‘material and symbolic resources’ that help them advance their careers. ⁵³ It is likely that the political imprecision is related to changing performance styles that do not lend themselves to straightforward interpretation. Text-centred, psychologically realistic Shakespearean theatre still has its place in Hungary, ⁵⁴ though changes have occurred. For instance, there has recently been significant innovation in translating the playwright's work. ⁵⁵ Furthermore, critics have traced the emergence of a new generation of practitioners experimenting with novel approaches to performance and a movement away from the centrality of the text when conceiving performance towards complex, often cryptic scenography that requires great interpretive effort from spectators. ⁵⁶ Kornélia Deres connects this trend to the rise of postdramatic theatre, commenting that Hungarian practitioners, influenced by artists elsewhere in Europe, apply to Shakespeare this performance style that is characterised by ‘fragmentedness’, constantly ‘shifting focuses’, loose ‘associations, and partiality’ in order to explore a ‘politics of perception, body, national memory, gender, [and] cultural identity’. ⁵⁷ Bocsárdi's Hamlet and Vidnyánszky Jr's Richard III both fit this pattern: the directors may have been cautious about their work's political meanings, but their remarkable productions about nations suffering from corrupt leadership showed how contemporary Shakespeare performed in the Vár could result in complex, multilayered forms of place. These forms of place came about as a result of the castle's historical connotations and architecture, the plays’ fictional worlds, and twenty-first-century contexts.

As the season's mainstage Hungarian-language production, Bocsárdi's Hamlet was perhaps an awkward fit for the 2013 Festival, then marking its fiftieth anniversary. In the season program, Gedeon emphasised the Festival's Hungarian nature, underscoring the Várszínház's longstanding dedication to Hungarian plays and its close relationship to the country's theatre community. ⁵⁸ To celebrate the Festival's decades-long connection to the Vár, they staged in the courtyard Tibor Zalán's A fáklya kialszik (The Torch Goes Out) about the 1566 siege. In writing about this drama, Gedeon highlighted the Hungarians’ heroic defence of the fortress, Ottoman duplicity, and the fact that no European power sent military assistance to Gyula. ⁵⁹ Although some might consider the Fidesz government to rely on such national memory to gain support for its nationalistic antagonism towards the European Union, ⁶⁰ Gedeon's comments were far from jingoistic; indeed, he consistently supported intercultural exchange in the theatre. Bocsárdi, meanwhile, stated flatly in the season program that he was not interested in adapting Hamlet's politics to the present, though he expected audiences to experience in the production a feeling that characterised the current age. ⁶¹ This politically vague statement is consistent with Bocsárdi's theatrical approach, which he describes by opposing Hungarian and Romanian performance traditions. While he generalises about these traditions, his judgment is that of the head of the Tamási Áron Theatre, which serves Romania's minority Hungarian community, and as a director who works regularly in Hungary where he is highly respected. At different times, Bocsárdi has associated Hungarian theatre with an interest in politics, psychology, and intellectualism while linking Romanian theatre with practices that unearth a production's ‘soul’, ancient human desires and the sacred, which he attributes to Orthodox Christianity's deep influence in Romania. ⁶² Bocsárdi later professed to continue the ‘Romanian’ tradition by supplanting text with mise en scène and absorbing the audience's attention in distinct moments of characters’ explosive emotion and unpredictable behaviour, all of which he hoped would help spectators forget dramas’ overall linear narratives. ⁶³

Whether or not spectators perceived Hamlet's ‘Romanian’ identity, the production challenged theatregoers’ comprehension, Shakespeare's textual authority, and a straightforward sense of theatrical place. Bocsárdi reduced the linearity of Hamlet's narrative by cutting many scenes and rearranging incident for a two-and-a-half-hour performance that began recognisably Shakespearean action with the Ghost's appearance. The director also added scenes that inexplicably cut away from the play's conventional plot. The production opened with two unidentified characters waving plastic skulls and taunting, without apparent reason, László Mátray's Hamlet, who remained unseen behind a curtain. Similarly, the Player's Hecuba speech was preceded by two other unidentified characters, dressed like Laurel and Hardy, who mimed a comedic escape from a flood that had nothing to do with the surrounding action. Later, László Szakács's Polonius returned to life long after Hamlet killed him to listen to Ágnes Benedek's Ophelia as she went mad; Ophelia, apparently no longer mad, subsequently had a brief reconciliation with Hamlet and József Kolcsár's Laertes. Because such diversions fragmented the tragedy's familiar narrative and removed causal links between incidents, there was no coherent signification of the world of Elsinore, no fictional place into which the playing space could be consistently transformed. Instead, spectators witnessed a series of perplexing episodes and ‘shifting focuses’, ⁶⁴ which, as Bocsárdi intended, demanded theatregoers’ attention and reminded them that they were watching a performance, not a line-by-line enactment of a script. ⁶⁵ Two other episodes reveal how the director employed unpredictable emotion to diminish further the narrative coherence of the play's fictional world. In one, Mátray joined the Mousetrap performance, possibly becoming the Player Queen, though that transformation remained unclear since he simply put on a white mask. The Player King was not evidently poisoned, but he abruptly started writhing in pain and Mátray's Hamlet-Queen at once mimed excruciatingly moving anguish. In the other, Ophelia rejected Hamlet's love token, though Bocsárdi made the scene external to a logically unfolding plot, not part of Polonius's scheme to spy on Hamlet. Ophelia silently refused Hamlet's offer of a page from a book, and suddenly became enraged, crumpling the paper before spending almost a minute hurling about dozens of similar sheets she retrieved from behind a curtain. The characters’ sudden, unexpectedly intense anger and pain required extra effort from the audience who had to scrutinise the details of the physically and temporally present action to imagine the missing motivations and causal actions. This effect was amplified in Bocsárdi's Mousetrap by the mystifying overlap of characters’ identities and in the gift-rejection scene by the duration of Benedek's impressively vehement physicality and the mess she made of the stage; both drew attention to the here-and-now of the actors’ performance, rather than simply contributing to the imagined elsewhere of Hamlet's fictional world.

Bocsárdi's visually striking scenography similarly complicated the production's representation of place. In the graveyard scene, one gravedigger drank from a skull and both tossed wreaths onto a wooden tomb/crate placed at centre stage before creating a continuous mist with garden sprayers; backlit, the mist enfolded the tomb in a luminous white cloud. The cloud's arresting, ethereal beauty contrasted with the gravediggers’ shabby coveralls, the ugly sheeting draped over the crate, and the dirt on Ophelia's face. Such calculated, self-conscious artistry drew attention to the performance's unfolding in the temporal-physical present. Ostentatious spectacle also foregrounded the artistry of the present moment of performance in Hamlet's humiliation of Polonius when Mátray calmly waited by an antique bathtub at the stage's centre; Szakács reluctantly sat in the tub and crossed his arms in resignation as the water cascaded from a showerhead, the beautifully lit spray counterpointing Polonius's sullen abjection. This bath became a visual marker of meaningful location or place on the stage throughout the production. It was from the bath that Mátray first emerged, naked, as though newborn into the scene where he met Levente Nemes's Ghost. Szakács and Tibor Pálffy's Claudius dressed Benedek's naked Ophelia in this tub before using her to draw out the source of Hamlet's melancholy, Mátray washed Benedek's face shortly thereafter with water from the bath, and the Mousetrap unfolded downstage of the tub, which appeared doubled in the large mirror placed behind it. The tomb/crate and the bathtub may have prioritized the here-and-now of performance, but they were also aspects of how Bocsárdi conspicuously left his own mark on a group of scenes and relationships made iconic by Hamlet's well-known theatrical history: Hamlet's encounter with the Ghost, Hamlet's abuse of Polonius and Ophelia, the play-within-the-play, and the graveyard skull. The production was, in this regard, like Robert Lepage's Elsinore, ‘a self-conscious manipulation of the situation of Hamlet at the heart of the Shakespearean canon’. ⁶⁶ Thus, the kind of theatre Bocsárdi created, part of a tradition which explicitly challenges the notion that theatre should embody the verbal text, evoked a multilayered place consisting of Hamlet's narrative, archetypal features of its production history, and the immediacy of performance.

The director blended this Hamlet's fragmented diegesis with the extradiegetic material of the castle's brickwork by partly masking the side and back walls of the stage with opaque, silvery sheets. At three to four metres in height, and frequently opened, the makeshift curtains left large portions of the fortresses’ brick exposed. As Florence March shrewdly observes of the Avignon Festival's stage adjacent to the Pope's Palace walls, such spaces, ‘charged with history’, can be ‘re-encoded so as to encourage a dialogic relationship with the performance’. ⁶⁷ Bocsárdi's masking encouraged such a relationship. The stage, enclosed on three sides by the sheet-covered castle walls, looked like a ruin cordoned off for excavation. When Pálffy unveiled a 3-metre-by-3-metre poster hanging on the upstage wall, the sense of the courtyard being a ruins or in moral decay became more sharply defined. The poster, printed on durable fabric, was a photograph of Pálffy's grinning face, prodigiously enlarged. Pálffy groped Benedek's terrified Ophelia from behind this poster, enfolding her in it as she struggled to escape. In the equivalent of Claudius’ attempted third-act repentance, Pálffy knelt before the poster, as though worshipping his own tacky idol, and when he removed the headphones he wore, theatregoers could hear the awful heavy metal music he had been blasting. One scene later, Mátray stabbed Szakács's Polonius through this picture. The hapless courtier staggered forward, dragged down the poster as he fell onto the stage littered with Ophelia's rejected sheets of paper, and remained there partly covered by Pálffy's photograph for several scenes. These caustically ironic episodes, played out against the always partly visible brick wall, turned the space into a place existing somewhere between the fortress, celebrated as a bastion of heroic national resistance to foreign invasion, and Elsinore as Bocsárdi devised it, a deadly world of corruption ruled by a narcissistic sexual predator.

Bocsárdi added yet another dimension to the performance's production of place by projecting video onto the sheeting. In the first sequence, moments after Mátray, Alfréd Nagy's Rosencrantz, and Lóránd Márton's Guildenstern exited to depart for England, they reappeared in a recorded clip edited into a scene from Grigory Kozintsev's 1964 Hamlet film in which Fortinbras's army traverses Denmark to fight Poland. Such projections interrupt performer and spectator co-presence upon which conventional ideas of ‘liveness’ and theatrical place depend ⁶⁸ because the medium changes the location of stage action ‘through physical and temporal displacement’. ⁶⁹ For much of this sequence, Mátray's face in close-up occluded most of the other actors; like the Wooster Group's 2007 Hamlet, which played with projections of the 1964 John Gielgud-Richard Burton film, this technique treated ‘originals’, both text and iconic film, as competitors against which contemporary artists could prove their ‘physical virtuosity’. ⁷⁰ Bocsárdi altered his strategy for the second sequence, which replaced the duel scene. Here, Pálffy, D. Albu Annamari's Gertrude, Mátray, and Kolcsár watched a pre-recorded video montage depicting Hamlet in the bath, Claudius drinking, the shadow of rainfall playing over Gertrude's face, and Hamlet and Laertes fencing. As Aneta Manciewicz writes, such technology ‘allows the actors to combine the embodiment of a character with alienation from the role’. ⁷¹ The consequence of this kind of characterisation for the production's representation of place is that, like the Wooster performance, this scene shifted the recorded and the live actors ‘out of their temporally situated bodies and toward the location where screen and stage met’. ⁷² In a final twist, the montage ended with Mátray edited again into the Norwegian-army scene from Kozintsev's film: staring grimly at the camera, he apparently had become Fortinbras, ready to seize power from a country destroyed by internal corruption. What were theatregoers to make of this shot that combined a present cast member with a canonical cinematic Hamlet? Put another way, where did ‘stage and screen meet’ ⁷³ at this moment? Given that the curtain-screen hung on the visible castle wall, did the projection emphasise the historically suffused building as ‘a framing device’ and as the ‘material support for the performance it had housed’? ⁷⁴ Did spectators who recognized the Russian film make links between Hungary's Soviet colonizers and earlier Habsburg and Ottoman occupations? It is difficult to answer these questions definitively, especially given Bocsárdi's disavowal of topicality. Nevertheless, the image of the tormented heir to the throne turning into a conquering invader is a suitably dispiriting conclusion to this Hamlet. At the very least, the transformation suggested to Hungarian theatregoers overlapping locales: their own contemporary world, fictional Elsinore, and the historical world of national memory with which Gyula's Vár is imbued.

Gyula's 2016 Richard III was, for a number of reasons, more explicitly concerned with the world of contemporary Hungarian politics than Bocsárdi's Hamlet was. First, Richard III's director, Attila Vidnyánszky Jr, a talented young actor-director, would have evoked national cultural-political friction because he is named for his father, Attila Vidnyánszky Sr, a highly regarded director widely recognised as a major force in conservative Hungarian cultural affairs. Luca Kristóf relates that Vidnyánszky Sr is closely aligned with the Fidesz government; by 2016, he had co-founded ‘the Hungarian Theatrum Society as a kind of counter-organisation to the existing Hungarian Theatre Society’, and held influential positions in postsecondary arts education. ⁷⁵ In 2013, he became Director of Hungary's National Theatre, where he reversed the ‘progressive artistic programme’ of its previous Director, Robert Alföldi, and where, in 2017, his son's Richard III was remounted. ⁷⁶ Furthermore, Vidnyánszky Jr and his dramaturg-translator Miklós Vecsei, saw in Richard III a reflection of their contemporary world. For Vidnyánszky Jr, Richard is the villain who behaves like or embodies the current age, an age that is apparently attractive and peaceful, but is, in fact, full of conflict and injustice, especially for their generation of then-twentysomething Hungarians. ⁷⁷ Vecsei, meanwhile, commented that evil in their production is not simply individual but social; it is determined by the nature of the world Richard lives in. The tragic hero, like a generation of young Hungarians growing up after the end of communism, must adjust to an inhumane era rife with corruption that breeds pervasive cynicism. ⁷⁸ As Vecsei commented in publicity for the remount, what matters is the kind of world that allows the individual to become so evil. Although these comments indicate an approach more explicitly political than Bocsárdi's, they are not topically specific, as they do not identify those responsible for the present disillusioning world. Rather, it is up to the audience to ask questions about the corrupt environment in which Richard dwells. ⁷⁹

Vidnyánszky Jr cultivated an overtly artificial theatrical world similar to but more explicitly political than that in Bocsárdi's Hamlet. Two blatantly symbolic features remained on display throughout the performance: a large wooden crate sat at the centre of the playing space like a stage within or upon the stage; hanging above the crate was a crown, a clear token of power. Zsolt Trill's Richard certainly embodied Vidnyánszky Jr's villain who ‘behave[s] like the world that surrounds’ Hungarian youth. ⁸⁰ During Richard's opening monologue, as he prepared his ‘disguise’ of a plastic half-bubble he held to his shoulder, Trill was in Richard's platea mode, addressing spectators directly in the here-and-now world of performance. Vidnyánszky Jr thus primed theatregoers to view Richard as the agent largely responsible for shaping the play's corrupt fictional world through manipulation, a performance at which Trill excelled. He could be obsequious, as when he abased himself before Henry VI's funeral procession, gently bending his head so that his lips nearly brushed the corpse's bare feet. However, he soon convinced Nóra Trokán's Anne to let him thrust his head under her skirt; as he moved about suggestively her expression alternated between disgust and desire. This repugnant scene was self-consciously theatrical insofar as it highlighted the actors’ abilities to perform such swift transformations, but its absorbing emotionalism also directed spectators’ attention to the fictional world of the characters’ psyches. At other moments, Trill was so eccentric he seemed to flaunt his ability to dissemble. For instance, once Richard became king, Trill attached a pair of huge spurs to his boots and awkwardly climbed the three-metre wooden beam placed upright in the central crate where he sat throughout his ensuing conversations with Tyrrell (Géza Hegedűs, who also played King Edward and Clarence), Catesby (Márton Patkós), and Queen Elizabeth (Enikő Eszenyi). This ostentatious emblematisation of Richard's superior political position was another overtly theatrical aspect of the production, and required a remarkable athletic feat that highlighted the here-and-now of performance rather than the play's fictional world. The arduous climb exhausted Trill, who had to maintain his balance on the narrow beam for several scenes. At the same time, the emotionally gripping political negotiations between Richard and Elizabeth over the fate of her daughter placed the action within the play's fictional world of cynical political transaction.

Vidnyánszky Jr interrupted the play's linear narrative with cutaway scenes that formed a separate arc of political commentary which connected Hungary and the play's fictional world of Richard's tyranny with increasing explicitness. As the performance began, the young male cast members lined up and struck poses to recreate the often-parodied ‘March of Progress’ or ‘Evolution’ poster. With Trill standing erect at stage right, this display stood outside the play's narrative as a visual clue about the world that Richard will dominate. The image, which reversed the original poster's left-to-right ‘progress’ towards modern humanity was a visual riposte to the clichéd understanding of Richard's physicality. This extradiegetic tableau raised questions about what it meant for Richard to be the ‘most evolved’ character in the world of the play and what his superlative status implied for the younger ‘devolving’ characters. Those questions were partly answered in the second cutaway scene. As the courtiers stood about chastened following Edward's lament over Clarence's death, Trill wrapped himself and Elizabeth's daughter, a much younger Ágnes Barta, in a blanket and had sex with her on the central platform. This act had no direct causal relationship to the world of the courtiers who did not seem to see it and did not acknowledge it. Yet, if Richard and the princess were not fully part of the fictional court world, the grim look on Barta's face when Trill caressed her shoulders and the loud moaning that soon emanated from beneath the blanket signalled Richard's corruption of youth, echoed his treatment of Trokán, and condemned the play's political world. The scene immediately preceded intermission, which was followed by another cutaway performance that more explicitly linked the first two extradiegetic scenes to contemporary Hungary. The young male cast members, shirtless, danced in a line spread horizontally across the stage as electronic club music blared. Barta, wearing a sequined mini-dress, danced on the platform while Trokán, dressed similarly, mostly stood staring coolly straight ahead. The male dancers rapped about their disillusion with their world: among others, one rapped about suicide and generational trauma (‘I’m shooting myself and my father was killed while singing the Internationale’) and another about the futility of his existence (‘I peed in a flowerpot for a year. Do you know what came of it? Nothing.’). This song-and-dance routine had no causal relationship to the world of the play, but commented on it, linking it to the cynicism Vidnyánszky Jr and Vecsei saw in the real world of post-communist Hungarian youth. The final such scene took place shortly before Richard's coronation when two young male actors improvised a survey of audience members, asking them if Richard would make a good king. They relayed the results – all negative – to Trill's anxious Richard who stood at centre stage, thereby guiding spectators to link their contemporary world to the play's fictional one through explicit political commentary.

The director also used technology explicitly to facilitate the interplay between the self-consciously present world of the platea and the fictional word of the drama's locus. This technology could enhance ‘affect and presence’, ⁸¹ as in the post-interval dance scene when glaring lights and loudly amplified music and voices intensified the impact of the performers in the present time and place. Yet Trill's Richard frequently controlled the technology that enhanced the emotions in the play's fictional world from outside it. Shortly after the ‘Evolution’ tableau, wild jazzy string music indicating the chaos of the play's fictional world swelled to a crescendo until Trill stopped it by banging his half-bubble on the wall; later, Trill stopped the music simply by pumping his fist in the air. Similarly, when Trill used a microphone for his speech about the ease of wooing Anne, the device amplified each word and breath, drawing attention to the physicality and present moment of Trill's performance, while the technology helped make the link between the platea that Richard shared with theatregoers and the locus that he commented on. Such technology did not change the depiction of location ‘through physical and temporal displacement’ ⁸² in quite the same way Bocsárdi's projections did. Yet, when Trill, sitting on the pole, popped bubbled wrapping plastic into his microphone, the amplified cracking produced a comparable effect: theatregoers witnessing Trill use the electronic technology in the here-and-now of performance could trace the sharp sounds’ effects to the castle ramparts high above where the young princes held by Hegedűs's Tyrrell screamed in agony. Using technology that the preceding action had established as existing outside the play's fictional world, Trill could employ that technology to dematerialise physical violence and displace it or re-materialise its traces (the boys’ screams) in the play's fictional world, located two stories above the stage on the castle walls.

As in Hamlet, Richard III's fictional world became bound up with the extradiegetic material of the Vár's architecture. Trill's Richard pretended to pray in the small stage-right alcove, profaning this chapel-like space with a cynical political ruse. Similarly, when Hegedűs's Tyrrell appeared to hurl the young princes over the outside of the castle, the act defiled the ramparts that are otherwise associated with heroic repulsion of Ottoman invasion. As if driving home this point, Vidnyánszky Jr had Nelli Szűcs's Margaret slowly descend the upstage staircase to the stage once Hegedűs's Tyrrell committed murder on the ramparts. Szűcs half blended into the shadows at the back wall, as though she were part of the castle's underworld, a silent reminder of the curses she had spoken, and a portent of the Yorkists’ destruction. The scene was preceded by Richard's coronation when the young male cast members lifted Trill on a platform up to the crown. Illuminated within and from without, the mirror-encrusted crown reflected shifting points of light all over the darkened walls as Trill moved about. More directly than in Hamlet, light was projected onto the pink brick that served as a screen upon which the menacing shadows and beguiling light of the corrupt court world registered. Vidnyánszky Jr took this effect a step further in the final battle scene. Trill's Richard, wearing the illuminating crown, was attacked by the young male cast members. Everyone was wrapped in ‘armour’ of shiny metallic tape and they all became drenched by an overhead sprinkler. As discordant brass notes blared, Richard dispatched all opponents with a gesture, though the dead repeatedly revived and renewed their attack. While the crown, armour, and rain all reflected the light onto the brick walls, the courtyard became a spectacular mess of ripped silvery tape, water and corpses returning to life as swarming soldiers. If theatregoers suspected the battle was a glittering prelude to a victory speech ushering in a virtuous Tudor dynasty, they were disappointed. After Trill's recoded voice intoned ‘[t]here is no way back to paradise, no hope for improvement’, the lights went out and the show ended. It was a suitably pessimistic conclusion to a production that had conjured such a politically bleak world within a building meant to represent Hungary's tragic, though heroic, history.

Conclusion

How did Bocsárdi's Hamlet and Vidnyánszky Jr's Richard III affect the ways that the Várszínház contributed to Gyula as a tourist place? The productions’ self-conscious scenography encouraged theatregoers to reflect on their own viewing positions, as both shows moved between the plays’ fictional locales and the here-and-now world of performance where actors and audiences are present to each other. They did so while playing with and against the castle's architecture that is ‘charged with history’ and thus evokes the world of Hungary's past. ⁸³ Furthermore, Bocsárdi's and Vidnyánszky Jr's productions’ challenging, anxiety-filled, and densely meaningful scenography, which is typical of Shakespeare at the Festival in the recent past, is very different from the nationally significant cultural heritage on display in Gyula and the leisurely pastimes grounded in the physical pleasure normally associated with tourism that the town offers. In this regard, the productions added a dimension of ‘difficult’ theatre to the town's tourist imaginary. The 2013 Hamlet and 2016 Richard III may not have demonstrated straightforward reverence for Shakespeare's text or the history of Hungarian translations thereof, but they exemplify how the Várszínház has fulfilled its vision of staging innovative and prestigious Shakespearean performance. By so doing, the Festival has complicated Gyula's identity as a tourist place in the process of transforming the Várszínház from a regionally significant theatre to an institution of national importance that was also part of an international touring circuit.

One can analyse Hamlet and Richard III as abstractions in an essay, but it is only possible fully to experience the ways such productions influence touristic-theatrical places like Gyula in person, and it is this fullness of experience which comes with being ‘in place’ that the pandemic has threatened worldwide. At the Várszínház, the pandemic seemed initially to have sped up processes that had already begun to diminish the fullness of Gyula as a Shakespearean tourist place. Paraizs and Matuska relate that Gedeon's successor, Tibor Elek, who was wary of the Shakespeare Festival's future, reduced it ‘from ten days in 2016 to one week in 2018’. ⁸⁴ They also note that, while the Várszínház did manage to stage four Shakespeares in 2020, all shows were in Hungarian and there were scant signs of any coherent festival held in the playwright's name. ⁸⁵ In 2021, the Shakespeare Festival returned for a full week with nine productions, though all were by Hungarians or in Hungarian. ⁸⁶ It is, of course, remarkable that the Várszínház was able to mount so much Shakespeare over two summers of the pandemic and it remains to be seen whether or not the global spread of Covid-19 puts a permanent end to international Shakespeare performance at Gyula. If that happens, the Festival will not be what it was ten or even five years ago. Nevertheless, so long as the Várszínház continues to stage Hungarian-language productions like Bocsárdi's Hamlet and Vidnyánszky Jr's Richard III, the castle courtyard will be a venue in which theatregoers can experience spectacular, perplexing live Shakespearean performance that reflects urgent cultural-political concerns, thereby enriching the cultural heritage of Gyula and its identity as a tourist place.