Mors bona, or, Storm in a Tea Cup? Shakespeare’s Tempest in a Puppet and Live-Actor Production

The most recent Shakespearean première in Budapest, in September 2018, was held at the Budapest Puppet Theatre. The Tempest is not the first ever Shakespeare to be staged in a Hungarian puppet theatre, yet, I argue that the production directed by Rémusz Szikszai is one that demands thorough attention from the Shakespeare researcher from at least three aspects.Firstly, the performance is advertised as 16+, and it marks the gradual consolidation of the puppet medium by adult audiences. It features a wide variety of characters on the stage, all perfectly visible, including live/flesh actors, bunraku (child-size) puppets, bunraku heads made after actors’ heads, and attachable body puppets (prostheses, which puppeteers can wear); therefore, the subtle and complex play with the relations between the bodies of the actors and the bodies of the puppets ought to be noted.Secondly, the performing space is worth being mentioned: an enormous wreck of a barge in a spacious room which squeezes performers and spectators together. The lack of physical distance between viewer and player simultaneously provokes the spectator’s powerful emotional involvement and at once reminds them of the meta‑theatre present in both the play and the production.Thirdly, the production is noteworthy in a country where the slapstick-for-three-year-olds kind of puppet productions that Socialist authorities permitted after World War II practically washed away the scarce and weak pre‑World War adult puppet traditions. It is Prague (Czechia) where marionettes are ubiquitous, sold in the streets and footbridges, and it is Brno (Moravia) where scholarly journals like Theatralia regularly deal with puppeteering in detail. In sum, the cradle and home of centuries-long Central-European puppetry is the Czech Lands rather than Hungary.My paper does not aim to summarize the state of Hungarian post-war and post‑1990 puppeteering, nor does it mean to deal with the Hungarian stage history of The Tempest. My argument will be informed about and rely on these two fields in order to point out the place of Szikszai’s mixed, puppet and live actor production on the map of twenty-first-century Hungarian and European Shakespeares.