"Our performances in Lincoln Center's 200-seat chamber theatre, the Clark Studio Theater, were very successful," said Béla Pintér on his return to Hungary on Tuesday.
The production debuted in the United States on July 21 and ended at New York's Lincoln on Sunday as part of Extremely Hungary, the Hungarian cultural season in New York and Washington.
Pintér said audiences in Western Europe had not picked up as much on the humour in the piece, which takes place in a Hungarian village. "I thought that if we went even further West, this would be even more so, but just the opposite happened: the audience got the humour of the production as if we were performing it at home," he said.
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Peasant Opera
is Béla Pintér and Company's most popular piece. It has been performed in Vienna, Paris, Cardiff, Zagreb, Belgrade, Plzen, Prague, Ljubljana, Brussels, Stuttgart and Moscow.
"The music of the piece, which is a unique mix of baroque and Transylvanian folk music, is probably why it is invited to so many places," Pintér said.
"The show is a ribald sendup of opera that blends the earthy sounds of Hungarian folk songs with the ordered conventions of baroque music, to strange but surprisingly satisfying effect," Charles Isherwood wrote in the July 23 issue of the New York Times.
"Peasant Opera is Pintér's pi?ce de resistance. His text balances macabre wit with outrageous whimsy, and dabbles in bizarre sociopolitical discourse while savouring the power of pious parody. In 70 tough minutes, Pintér manages to explore lurid ramifications of devotion, deceit, lust, incest, murder, poverty and guilt - little things like that - all aligned with distortions of rustic chivalry. Dark in mood yet bright in focus, the play's the thing," Martin Bernheimer said in the July 24 issue of The Financial Times.
Source: Hungarian News Agency (MTI)
Photo: The New York Times
