Premiers - 2025/2026

My decision to engage with Voltaire’s Candide is connected to the word optimism. To that fascinating word which, nowadays, has become more a subject of mockery, or else is treated as a form of weakness. Its essence seems to have retreated, out of fear of reality.
What does it mean to be an optimist today? Is it even possible anymore? Can we still hope for something better?
This is why I added another word to the title, one that is all too familiar to us today: radicalism.
This Candide is a simple optimist—this Candide is a radical optimist.
Hence the title of the play: Candide, or Radical Optimism.

The line-up of the Surviving Trallalla is given by the lyrics that Hobo considers important, for which no music was made that he would have liked to sing. He selected those from more than seventy such lyrics, which take us from the change of regime to the present day, but with each poem we can also reach back to the era before the change of regime. Between the performance of the lyrics and poems, Hobo recalls what impulses, joys and pains, what events and circumstances lie behind each great line or verse.

Thornton Wilder’s celebrated play is set in the fictional American town of Grover’s Corners. Over several decades, the story gradually reveals the events, sorrows, secrets, and hopes that shape the everyday lives of its traditional small-town community.

“I first read Capital as a university student. Later, as a director, I became aware of the dramatic potential emanating from Marx’s sentences. Money, capital, class struggle – once given human form, these concepts reveal a drama that shapes our entire lives,” says director Attila Vidnyánszky.

Elizabeth is preparing for her coronation. Maurice, a commando soldier, is assigned to guard the Crown Jewels at Buckingham Palace on his birthday. During this extraordinary night, the modest young soldier captures the attention of the future Queen Elizabeth II with his intelligence and charm, and falls irrevocably in love with her. Before they part, they promise to meet again in sixty years. Maurice’s life is defined by this promise. Though his loyal wife, Helena, believes the story to be nothing more than a product of her husband’s imagination, Maurice remains unwavering in his conviction that the Queen will keep her promise. And then the long-awaited anniversary arrives. The doorbell rings…