Gyula All Arts Festival

As usual, the festival will include a medley of programs, offering classic plays and musicals, dance, music, film and fine arts. In addition, four premieres are planned for the summer season, not to mention the International Shakespeare Festival. If that is not enough, the all arts festival will also host the jazz, blues, folk art, folk music and world music festivals.

For all those fans of musicals, there will be performances of the Jungle Book and Dracula or for a more conventional theater experience, the actors of the New Theater, Budapest will put on the Sándor Hunyady Comedy.

As an added bonus to this year’s program, writer-actor Zoltán Papp will present a historical drama featuring only two actors and a single flute in six-halved iambic titled The Kingdom of Mathias Rex.

On the music side, the Gyula Castle Jazz Festival will feature two-time Grammy winner the Yellowjackets with Mike Stern, guitarist for the late Miles Davis. The Fekete-Kovács quintet and the Borbély Project will represent Hungarian jazz. And from France, Michael Montanaro will take the stage at the Folk and World Music Festival, along with Béla Halmos and the Kerekes Band.

As part of the Gyula All Arts Festival, the 4th International Shakespeare Festival will take place from June 30th – July 12th.

William Shakespeare has definitely found a home among the walls of the last standing gothic castle in Middle Europe, where productions staged nowhere else in Hungary await.

Richard III, will be staged in a coproduction with the Kolozsvár Hungarian National Theater, directed by Gábor Tompa and with Zsolt Bogdán playing the title role. Krétakör Theater will play hamlet.ws, a minimalist adaption of the famous drama, with only three actors on stage. Returning from Vilnius will be Meno Fortas, the company of Eimuntas Nekrosius, who after having played Hamlet and Othello in prior years, will now finish off the trilogy with Macbeth.

The London Shakespeare’s Globe Theater Company will play Romeo and Juliet set in a bus that represents the cart wandering actors travelled in back in the day. Also, The classic Japanese theater adaption of The Winter’s Tale promises to be exciting and exotic.

Among all of these performances, the festival will also offer a professional conference, music concerts and the opportunity to get a taste of the writer’s time in Shakespeare’s Kitchen.

Dates: June 27-August 10
Place: The Gyula Castle Theater
5700 Gyula, Kossuth u. 13.
Tel.: +36.66.362.501


www.gyulaivarszinhaz.hu

(photos by Mátyás Erdély, Zoltán Bagyinszky, Attila Glázer)