The Aradi Kamaraszínház’s new, innovative production of Mrs. Karnyó, directed by Ernő Tapasztó in collaboration with the Szegedi Pinceszínház, is a drifting, absurd, live-actor puppet show that revives Csokonai's more than 220-year-old work, the first Hungarian fairy farce, in which the original lyrics are sung to the melodies of a Bach minuet, accompanied by live music.
The overall effect is greatly enhanced by Péter Szvatek's tricky box decoration with its many candles, which evokes a funeral and gives the game multiple frames. The image of Anna Varsányi's ragged rococo and tattered contemporary costumes exacerbated with white face painting and moth-eaten wigs will be long remembered in the viewer's memory. The shop counter becomes an unnoticed puppet screen, and the tiny legs of the characters, visible only from the waist up, are thrown in front of the wall of drawers, making us laugh for the umpteenth time. This is a colorful, widescreen, raucous fairground puppet comedy at its finest, abundantly sprinkled with rice powder. (Papageno.hu)
Ernő Tapaszto was born on November 29, 1975 in Arad. Lived in Békéscsaba, Budapest, Bucharest. Between 1996–2001, he completed his acting course under the auspices of the Foundation for Young Theater Arts in Békéscsaba; From 2004, he studied communication at the Vasile Goldis Western University in Arad, where he graduated in 2008; he is currently attending a master's degree in management and human resources at the same institution.
Since the mid-1990s, the focus of his multifaceted activities has been theater and performing arts, where he served as an actor at the Timisoara State Hungarian Theater (1994–1995), the Orkesztika Színház in Budapest (1998–1999), and when in 2002 he founded the Aradi Hungarian Theater, of which he was the director until 2004. From 2004, he worked as a cultural organizer at the Arad City Cultural Center for a year, and later became a theater critic for the weekly newspaper Erdélyi Riport and the editor of the daily newspaper Új Magyar Szó.
In 2010, he was the festival director of the V. Interethnic Theater Festival, previously he was the selector of the Underground International Theater Festival. In 2007, he founded the Arad Chamber Theatre, of which he is currently the artistic director. The international recognition of the high-quality artistic work taking place in the theater is also indicated by the fact that the performances organized by it have so far won more than 60 professional awards at theater festivals.
