The premiere of the play opens one of Central Europe’s most important open-air festivals.
The Lévay-Kunze play Rebecca, which has toured the world’s musical stages, will now be played for the first time under the open sky in Hungary’s largest summer theatre with a capacity of 4,000 people.
The very first performance of the play was held in the summer of 1930 and directed by Sándor Hevesi.
Rebecca tells the story of a wealthy man who lost his first wife under mysterious circumstances and his new wife, who is played by Petra Gubik .
“There is a continuous spiritual battle, continuous character development, continuous self-marring and development, until she matures from a little girl into a real woman. She is a much more measured, much more sophisticated figure, but she often sticks out of the box of regularity and does things that are instinctive and sudden. She has an instinctive urge to break out of this socialite character until she gets to Manderley and becomes the lady of Manderley House,” explained the actress on her role.
The play first premiered in Hungary in 2010 at the Capital Operetta Theatre, where it was directed by Attila Béres.
“The driving force of the story is the need to confront ourselves, this is a very 21st century thing in my opinion. I had the stipulation that I didn’t want to do it with the old ones, because then I would be reviving something, heating it up, actually reproducing it” Béres said on reinventing the play for a modern audience.
The director of the National Theater of Szeged, László Barnák also takes the stage in the role of Colonel Julyan, who leads the investigation into Rebecca’s death.
“This piece is very intense and dramatic. The music also plays during the prose scenes, so it doesn’t only start when a song has to be played, but the tension is there throughout, and the dynamics and tempo of the performance must be very tight” he explained..
The musical piece can be seen a total of five times at Dóm Square in Szeged during the whole festival’s run.
