Director

Young Hungarian director and actor Kornél Mundruczó was born in Gödöllő in Hungary. He received a degree in Acting in 1998 from the Department of Film and Drama at the Hungarian University, and went on to study direction at the same Department, graduating in 2003. From 1999, he worked as a film director, and in 2003, he established the Proton Cinema film production house. Since 2003, he has also directed dramas at several theatres. His plays include Frankenstein-Plan, directed by Yvette Bíró and Kornél Mundruczó (Barka Theatre, Budapest, 2007.); Ice, by Vladimir Sorokin (produced by the Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, Budapest, 2006, in cooperation with the Krétakör Company); Albert Camus' Caligula (Radnóti Theatre, Budapest, 2006); Zérus – The Poetry of Sinead Morrissey (Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, Budapest, 2005, in cooperation with the British Council); János Térey's Nibelung – residency (Cave Hospital, Budapest, 2004, in cooperation with the Krétakör Company); and Kamilló Lendvay's The Average Prostitute (Budapest Autumn Festival, 2003).

Performance

Vladimir Sorokin (1955) is an international star, a great experimenter, and the real master of scandals in contemporary Russian literature. He is known to European audiences primarily because of his singular style and unique, almost utopian world, which hovers between extreme cruelty and poetry. In his novel, The Ice, and in the production at the Hungarian National Theatre that the novel inspired, we track this world. The play The Ice deconstructs the love myth commonly present in Russian literature, as well as the set archetypes of the collective memory and paradigms about global conspiracy. A contemporary, scandalous, shocking drama, in a spectacular production, which opens the eyes of the public to the problems of our day and age.

Theatre

In March 2002, after several decades, the doors of the Budapest National Theatre were finally opened. The mission of this Theatre is to promote openness, tolerance, paying special attention to the work of younger generations of artists – actors, directors and playwrights. The Budapest National Theatre has the ambition to be part of the contemporary European theatre scene, and to speak out in a comprehensible artistic expression. Today, the Theatre brings together and supports some of Hungary's best theatre professionals, such as Tamás Ascher, Zoltán Balázs, Balázs Koválik, János Mohácsi, Kornél Mundruczó, János Száz, Péter Valló and Sándor Zsótér, but, at the same time, remains open to the global trends in theatre, that incorporate different forms of artistic expression.