Shakespeare in the post-1989 Hungarian Puppet Scene

Although according to popular belief puppet theatre is a children's amusement while Shakespeare traditionally belongs to live theatre, in Hungary the two acting traditions seem to come together in the 2000s, bringing positive changes in both spheres. Theatre practitioners elsewhere in the Central European region have already experimented with ‘the third genre' (JURKOWSKI 2014: 33), namely, a new way of theatrical expression featuring actors and puppet elements on stage. Indeed, talented theatre directors could often find no work in any other domain. In Hungary, where puppet theatres were obliged to cater to no one else but a very young audience and were thus for the general adult spectatorship often overlooked, the time has come only in the post-1989 decades to explore this new and highly metaphorical theatrical language. The era has produced changes in puppetry training and puppetry as educational medium. Within this environment, relatively few stagings of Shakespeare were produced, although these included remarkable productions by Krofta and Balogh in 2006, and by Somogyi and Szikszai in 2018.