Bartók night Bluebeard's Castle | The Wooden Prince

13th June 2015
Saturday - 21:00

Summer Theatre

Bluebeard's Castle

The 1918 première of the Hungarian Royal Opera comes to life in Miskolc.
Bartók's opus have been reconsidered by Miklós Szinetár, the doyen of Hungarian opera staging with the sets reconstructed on the basis of designs by Miklós Bánffy, erstwhile intendant of the Opera.
With this performance the Hungarian Opera, Cluj paid tribute to the unfairly forgotten life work of the Kolozsvár born "renaissance man", Count Miklós Bánffy, writer, graphic artist, set and costume designer, stage director, politician and foreign minister in the Bánffy Memorial Year, 2014.

The Wooden Prince

The production of the Csodamalom Puppet Theatre, Miskolc addresses various age groups and remains faithful to the dace dramaturgy prescribed by Bartók while it follows the conventional rules of storytelling.
This dance play creates the illusion of the fairy tale making good use of the opportunities given by the movement theatre and animation theatre combined. Fairy tale characters are put on stage with their customary and required symbols: the crown and the mantle, the wanderer's sack, the veil or golden hair, but the background adapts to puppet theatre dimensions or is presented by means of pantomime.
There is only one male character, the Prince in the performance and we can follow his struggle for the fulfilment of Love with the elements, feminine pride, conceit and, finally, his own pain. The Wooden Prince, alter ego of the real Prince, in contrast with stage conventions, does not appear as a flesh and blood character in this performance. Instead, it is an oversized puppet, a veritable golem, stressing/underlying the fearful nature of the figure that personifies archetypal male power.