To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Iron Curtain and the proclamation of the 3rd Republic The Embassy of Hungary proudly presents Hungary’s outstanding theater company, Radnoti Szinhaz of Budapest, performing Gyorgy Spiro's PRAH A contemporary Hungarian play.

We invite you to join us for this special evening of Hungarian culture at its best!

WHAT: Radnoti Szinhaz of Budapest performing Gyorgy Spiro: PRAH, a contemporary Hungarian play (in Hungarian with English supertitles)

WHEN: Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 6.30 pm and 9.00 pm

WHERE: Source Theatre, 1835 14th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C., 20009 (http://www.sourcedc.org/)

TICKETS: Limited number of tickets will be on sale online soon (http://www.huembwas.org/).

Learn more on Radnoti Szinhaz of Budapest

About Gyorgy Spiro’s PRAH

We are all waiting for the day when fortune favors us. Week by week we trust in five numbers, five small crosses, which should bring our fortune, and we hope our numbers will be the winners on the lottery. We are planning in advance how to spend that money, what to buy, with whom should we share it.

It all happens to the two characters of Gyorgy Spiro’s latest play, Prah: they won the biggest price on the lottery. It’s easy to dream about something, but difficult to be really happy about it. The couple can not cope with the unexpected fortune: they can not buy their past years back, and they also can not purchase their future. In that certain minute they do not know what to do, but while they are thinking about it, planning the future: just to make sure they hide away the sweep-ticket in a box labeled KAKAO-PRAH. This box is from an old summer holiday at the Croatian seaside, and it contained “kakao prah” – cocoa powder.

So the box is like the past, in which they imprison their future, which will be soon only powder, only dust – like the sweep-ticket itself.

About of Radnoti Szinhaz of Budapest (Radnoti Theatre)

The story of today's Radnoti Theatre began in 1985 when Andras Balint became its artistic director and started off a major change in its profile. In place of the then existing literary stage (but taking its traditions into account as well) there evolved the repertory type, high standard civil art-theatre. Its presence is an important factor in the theatrical scene and cultural life of Budapest and Hungary.

The company of the theatre is rather small, yet it is regarded as one of the strongest professional teams in the country. They regularly invite guest actors, always the most suitable for each role, who later gladly come back again to take part in new projects. The work of the company can be characterized by its collectiveness, stability in creating values and by the salutary effect of its mobility.

The theatre has an average of 4 premieres each theatre season, and the repertoire is filled by about 8 plays which all run on a full house – with an average of over 100% attendance. Our audience consists mainly of civil intellectuals and young people who have come to form an understanding and loving base of our theatre throughout the years.

Numerous schools of drama have shaped the course of the Radnoti Theatre's artistic image. On our stage were and are the world's major pieces of the classical (Brecht, Calderón, Caragiale, Chekhov, de Filippo, Euripides, Goethe, Gogol, Goldoni, Gozzi, Hauptmann, Ibsen, Krleža, Marivaux, Moliere, Ostrovsky, Pirandello, Plautus, Shakespeare, Strindberg, Wedekind, Wilde) and the modern (Albee, Berkoff, Bernhard, Genet, Głowacki, Marius von Mayenburg, Martin McDonagh, Eugene O’Neill, Sam Shepard, Botho Strauss, George Tabori). Likewise our repertoire consists of some outstanding opuses of the Hungarian civil drama (Lajos Barta, Milan Fust, Ferenc Herczeg, Menyhert Lengyel, Sandor Marai, Ferenc Molnar, Zsigmond Moricz, István Orkeny, Erno Szep), and of Hungarian contemporary plays (Laszlo Darvasi, Kornel Hamvai, Peter Karpati, Iván Mandy, Laszlo Marton, Andras Nagy, Gyorgy Spiro, Balazs Szalinger, Andor Szilagyi, Janos Terey).

The Radnoti Theatre cultivates the traditions of Hungarian literature as well with evenings introducing and popularizing poets' life and works, contemporary writers, periodicals, publishers. At times the company takes the audience on a lighter, musical excursion, widening the 'serious' repertoire: one of our most popular performances was the Italian musical comedy, The Lovers of Ancona (based on Renaissance motives scored for today's instruments).

To the artistic conception of the Radnoti Theatre belongs not only the modernizing lyric realism, which gives the main direction of the performances, building on the Stanislavskyian traditions while modernizing them. Likewise we set on stage bold, even experimental productions. But our greatest efforts are made to create valuable performances, those that are able to create and maintain values. Our productions aim at keeping the different schools of theatre in equilibrium and placing them in the refraction of a unique mode of irony. We wish to mix the most dignified traditions of European theatrical art with the viewpoints and reforming endeavours of our times, and the sensitivity for current problems and questions.

In previous years the obvious popularity among the audience has joined hands with growing professional acknowledgement: several prestigious awards have been given to our company to both actors and directors for the performances of The Wedding (directed by Peter Vallo), Uncle Vanya (dir. Peter Vallo), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (dir. Peter Gothar), The Cripple of Inishmaan (dir. Peter Gothar), Medea (dir. Sandor Zsoter) and Henry IV. (dir. Stefano de Luca).