BÁNK BÁN (The Viceroy Bánk) 14

“The Viceroy Bánk is a work of genius, and of our great classics – Csongor and Tünde and The Tragedy of Man – it is the one best written for the stage. Like Shakespeare, Katona is no mere philosopher. He presents a series of characters who evoke sympathy, identification, love, contempt and hatred in the audience. He builds the dramatic construct out of still valid, gripping, gut-felt and ultimately tense conflicts

The Viceroy Bánk reminds us of a series of ever-topical issues: that we have been stuck between East and West for thousands of years, our sense of being in-between, the recurrence of the same historical conflict patterns, that we are not understood and at odds with the rest of the world. But Katona does not get didactic, instead, he weaves a profoundly touching story of love, loyalty, seduction, betrayal, patriotism, power and politics” – says director Attila Vidnyánszky, who is staging The Viceroy Bánk again at the National Theatre following the 2002 and 2017 versions (and after staging Ferenc Erkel’s famous operaversion many times).

“When I started working on the production in 2002, I had the feeling that the world was changing. And by now, the world has changed – radically and irrevocably, so I decided to create a new performance bringing new ideas, this time with young people. We Hungarians must come once again face-to-face with the issues that have been challenging us for a thousand years: division, discord and hatred, passed down through the generations.”