The Peasant Opera is a celebrated work by Béla Pintér, one of Hungary’s most prominent theatre makers. True to its title, it masterfully combines seemingly incompatible elements. The Sarajevo production, presented by one of the region’s finest theatre directors, András Urbán, takes on a distinct Balkan identity, with the actors singing throughout the entire performance. Rooted in archaic motifs, the story intertwines themes of incest and clandestine parenthood into a folkloric tapestry of Hungarian ballads. Like an ancient tragedy, a wedding descends into evil, blending drama and music in a tonal spectrum that ranges from the sublime to the banal. The piece defies easy categorization, and yet it has resonated with many a diverse audience since its Budapest premiere. In Sarajevo, The Peasant Opera will be performed for the first time in any South Slavic languages. I am confident that this production — marked by the lyrical depth of the ballad, the raw power of ethnic music, and a dynamic fusion of rock, punk, classical music, and jazz — will become a box office hit of our repertoire. It heralds an exhilarating season of hybrid genres in this year’s drama programme. With this production, the ensemble of the National Theatre Sarajevo once again demonstrates its remarkable creative strength, embracing artistic challenges and exploring new, unexpected theatrical forms  ̶  in terms of processes and procedures alike.

(Dino Mustafić, Managing Director of the National Theatre Sarajevo)

About the director

 András Urbán was born in 1970 in Senta. Before formally studying theatre, he founded his first theatre workshops and an independent company, called Iowa, at the age of 17. After high school, he enrolled in the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad to study directing under Professor Vlatko Gilić. In the mid-1990s, he temporarily suspended his studies but resumed them five years later in the class of Professor Bora Drašković. At the beginning of the 21^st century, with the support of the Szeged MASZK and his own ensemble, he staged several independent theatre productions. Following his graduation, Urbán began working professionally at the Hungarian City Theatre Dezső Kosztolányi in Subotica and became its managing director in 2005. In April 2023, he was appointed managing director of the Novi Sad Theatre.

Urbán’s directorial work spans an impressive range of playwrights, including Büchner, Shakespeare, Dukovski, Arrabal, and Beckett. He has staged more than 40 productions in cities of the former Yugoslavia, including Niš, Novi Sad, Belgrade, Szeged, Bitola, and Ljubljana. In 2009, he founded Desire Central Station, an international festival dedicated to contemporary theatre and ran theatre workshops in Romania. He is the author of short films Nobody and Somebody, Glass, As If We Were Not There. He has published a book of stories, A Partisan at Dawn. He lives and works in Subotica.