Theatre play

In the 1980s, there were a number of dance venues in communist Budapest in which the rural folklore of Hungary was rediscovered and performed. In this historic context, a tragedy befell the folk music researcher István Balla Ban, who fell in love with his seven-year-old stepdaughter. This secret was not kept hidden long from the secret police and made Balla Ban vulnerable to blackmail by the state.

»Titkaink« (»Our secrets«) combines emphatic dialogue with a great deal of music and singular characters with societal situations during the time of the Iron Curtain. As humour has been granted an important role, the piece becomes stirring and very touching emotionally. It served as the highlight of numerous festivals in 2014, including the Wiener Festwochen and Theaterfestival Basel.

Béla Pintér, born in 1970 in Budapest, has been successfully representing the independent theatre in Hungary for years. He began his career autodidactically at the age of 17 as an actor with the theatre group Arvisura and founded his own company in 1998 at Theater Szkéné. The piece »Parasztopera« (»Peasant opera«) was honoured in Hungary as best music theatre production of the year in 2003. Béla Pintér visited euro‑scene Leipzig in 2006 with a guest performance of »Roncsolt kópia« (»Scratched celluloid«).