This is the first time that Attila Vidnyánszky, the director of the Hungarian National Theatre, has directed an operetta performance, and the world’s most famous one at that. Following its July preview performance at the Margaret Island Open Air Theatre, Imre Kálmán’s immortal masterpiece, the Csárdásfürstin, will join the repertoire of the Operetta Theatre from September 2019. This particularly lavish production of the oft-reconfigured play is based on the first Hungarian version produced by Andor Gábor in 1916.
With its bohemian characters among the high nobility, its complicated plot involving matters of the heart and compelling melodies, the piece has become a memorial to light-heartedness itself; while the dark clouds heralding the dissolution of old Hungary and of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy also appear on the horizon.
Attila Vidnyánszky (Berehove, Ukraine; March 8, 1964) is a Kossuth and Jászai Mari Prize-winning Hungarian theatre director and filmmaker, founder of the Gyula Illyés Hungarian National Theatre in Berehove (Transcarpathian Regional Hungarian Drama Theatre). In the course of his work, he created a special stage language, which he defines with the term 'poetic theatre', which contrasts with the naturalist-realist theatrical traditions and the aesthetics of bourgeois theatre.
In 1985, he obtained a degree in humanities at the Uzhhorod State University, majoring in Hungarian language and history. He graduated in directing from the Kyiv National I. K. Karpenko-Karyi Theatre, Cinema and Television University in 1992, and he taught acting at the institution from the 1990s until 1997.
In 1992, he was the founding director of the Gyula Illyés Hungarian National Theatre in Berehove, where he became artistic director in 1993, and today he is the main director of the theatre. He has been staging plays in Hungary since 1999. From 2004, he was the leading director of the Hungarian State Opera House for a year. From January 2006, he was the artistic director of the Csokonai Theatre in Debrecen, and from April 2007 until 2013, he was the appointed director of the institution. He has been the director of the Budapest National Theatre since 2013.
From 2011, he was an honorary university professor at the University of Kaposvár. He was the vice-rector of art between 2013 and 2020, and the head of the department of acting between 2012 and 2017. From 2020, he is the appointed rector of the Rippl-Rónai Faculty of Arts of Szent István University. From August 1, 2020, he is the chairman of the board of the foundation that maintains the Budapest University of Theatre and Film Arts.
He is married, the father of six children. The Madách International Theatre Meeting (MITEM) was created in 2014 on his initiative. The number of his premieres registered in the Theatre Repository: 90.
