Ian Herbert about Gyula and Shakespeare Festival in the Stage magazine.
There’s no obvious reason why any of my readers (hi there, Sid and Doris!) should be making their way to Gyula in Hungary, but if you should have the chance it’s one worth taking about now.
Sadly, Gyula is not really on the road to anywhere, out near the border with Romania and a three hour drive from Budapest. It’s popular, however, with Hungarians (who have no seaside) because of its huge spa complex, with multiple pools for both swimming and the taking of the town’s therapeutic waters. It’s not a historic site in spa terms – the hot springs were only discovered in 1973 as part of a failed exploration for oil. But it does boast, in the same park, a square redbrick fifteenth century castle, perfectly preserved, which looks like one of those crenellated toy forts from which a troop of tin soldiers might emerge.
The castle and its environs provide some of the venues for a summer festival, with performances both in its courtyard and on a larger, floating stage in the grounds. Within a two month programme of theatre and music comes the Gyula Shakespeare Festival, a ten day event which over the years has attracted companies from all over the world to play the Bard.
This year the local company opened with Troilus and Cressida, followed by guest Hungarian companies in Coriolanus, the Merchant and Friedrich Dűrrenmatt’s version of King John – no crowd-pleasing comedy here. I joined the festival in time to catch this year’s international visitors, whose fare was somewhat lighter in intent.
First up were the Yohangza company from Korea, playing their take on Midsummer Night’s Dream in the castle courtyard. I first saw this production in a stuffy basement in Edinburgh on the Fringe several years ago, where I had not been very impressed. A subsequent visit to the Barbican Pit did not impress the London critics, either, but in Gyula’s medieval setting, under a full moon, the Korean company came magically to life. Their brash percussion accompaniment echoed around the castle walls, while the hyperactive cast did not restrict their playing to the castle’s large thrust stage, but regularly popped up on the battlements, among the audience or from under their rake of seating, bringing with them an innocent energy that completely won over the local audience, and with them this jaded critic. It was a tonic to see a production which continues to grow in strength over years of touring.
The great Georgian director Robert Sturua brought his Rustaveli company all the way from Tbilisi in another production which has been around for a while, an overblown take on Twelfth Night that chose all-out mugging and overemphasis as its way of interpreting a play which deserves more subtlety. Here the benefits of playing for a long time in a solid repertory were less apparent.
The final international show in a busy weekend was a world premiere: the Gyula festival had invited the dynamic Lithuanian director Oskaras Korsunovas to stage a new production, and instead of his trademark bouncy company shows (a Dream relying on a pile of boards, a Romeo and Juliet featuring rival pizza parlours) he came up with a sombre two-hander, a meditation on Shakespeare’s Tempest, set in the cluttered apartment of a dissident intellectual in internal exile somewhere in the old Soviet Union. Here he looks after his seriously disabled daughter, Miranda – who gives this version its title. It’s a work of great invention that ranges far wider than its source play, with echoes of Lear and Macbeth in its Brezhnev-era Prospero, and manages to achieve a brilliantly life-affirming climax out of its bleak setting.
Meanwhile the summer entertainment in Gyula continues: if you can get there for August 12 or 13, you can see Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom, live on the lake stage in a concert performance.
Ian Herbert 26 July 2011
