View source for University Stage Szeged

The University Theatre Szeged was founded at the Faculty of Humanities of Attila József University in the late 1950s. It was formed by occasional groupings of university students, with the help of a teacher who could be called a mentor (Károly István Horváth, Pál Bárdosi and others). Until 1970 the University Theatre Szeged was a heterogeneous ensemble, comprising several small groups. The groups staged one or two performances a year, which were presented only a few times, mainly at the university. Győző Daniss, István Lantos, Mihály Hadobás, László Kerekes and István Paál staged performances in the first half of the 1960s. Since its members were mainly students of the University of Szeged, the company was characterised by fluctuation. From the second half of the 1960s, István Paál became its artistic director, and by the first half of the 1970s he had created an experimental theatre company with permanent members – no longer just university and college students -: Tamás Dunai, János Ács, Erzsébet Dózsa, Árpád Árkosi, Katalin Pálfy, Ildikó Fehér, György Ambrus, Győző Duró, Tibor Solténszky and many others. For decades, it used the venue of the major lecture hall of the Faculty of Humanities, the Auditoriom Maximum, and later it expanded to include the JATE Club. Under Paál’s leadership, with his strict concept and directorial authority, the University Theatre Szeged had become from an occasionally operating theatre group to a company that had achieved national and international acclaim with its productions. In 1975, the management of the university, under the pressure of the local and metropolitan political will, liquidated a large part of the company through various procedures. Then Árpád Árkosi took over the management of the company, which was dissolved/reorganised in the early 1980s.

See the productions, the interviews and the reference list [https://hiaszt.hu/university-theatre-szeged/ here].