Performances for expatriates waiting in the wings

These are the productions:

First performed around 1600, “Hamlet” tells the story of a prince whose duty to revenge his father’s death entangles him in philosophical problems he can’t solve. Shakespeare’s best-known play is widely regarded as one of the most influential literary works ever written. On a dark winter night, a ghost walks the ramparts of Elsinore Castle in Denmark…

“Ghetto Sheriff” talks about the biggest trauma of the 20th century, the Holocaust, with the help of Jewish jokes and songs, documents from the 1930s and 1940s, and by reciting them – in pitch darkness for 80 minutes.
The texts were selected by director János Mohácsi and the actors together, predominantly from personal reminiscences. Texts from the 1985 French documentary “Shoah” by Claude Lanzmann as well as many other sources are used, such as case studies, survivor testimonies, literary works, diary notes, historical sources, official reports and personal collections to evoke the mood of the time.
The piece was produced in 2012 as a co-production of the Faculty of Arts of Kaposvár University and FÜGE, one of the leading production houses in Budapest for independent performing arts. In 2013 the piece received an award from the Hungarian Association of Theatre Critics for Best Independent Performance and Best Music, and in the same year it was programmed in the Hungarian Theatre Showcase 2013. It has been regularly presented in Örkény István Theatre and around Hungary, now in English.

The text of “Diggerdriver” is based on a blog of the same name. The blogger writes: “I’m a heavy machine operator. More commonly: an excavator. Here in London: a digger driver. My language skills are barely above basic. I didn’t come here to try my luck, but to insure [sic] a better life for my eight-year-old child and to earn a decent wage for myself.
“I could have vegetated the rest of my life till retirement. After all, my job was certain. I’d reached the top of my field. Then, as the years went by, there was less and less in my shopping basket, and I had to pay more and more for it.
“A sort of hopelessness and lethargy settled in the country, which was downright smothering.
“When someone leaves his home, it’s like when he leaves the woman he stammered out ‘I do’ for, who somehow after the divorce becomes a stupid whore.
“There are calm divorces and endlessly bitter ones.
“Afterwards, though, we like to see ourselves as used-and-abused victims, and we love to tell everyone about it.. ”

“Death of a Salesman”, a play in “two acts and a requiem” by Arthur Miller, was written in 1948 and produced in 1949. Miller won a Pulitzer Prize for the work, which he described as “the tragedy of a man who gave his life, or sold it” in pursuit of the American Dream.

“The Bell Jar”, a novel by Sylvia Plath, was first published in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas and later released posthumously under her real name. The work, a thinly veiled autobiography, chronicles a young woman’s mental breakdown and eventual recovery, while also exploring societal expectations of women in the 1950s. Plath committed suicide one month after the publication of “The Bell Jar”, her only novel.