József Katona (1791–1830) was a poet and a playwright, also an amateur actor, and he was the author of the first widely successful Hungarian historical drama, Bánk bán [The viceroy], in the first third of the 19th century. His work was made for a literary competition and he published it in 1820, but the censors of the time did not permit it to be staged. Its first performance was after Katona’s death, in 1833.

Today there are two theatre buildings bearing József Katona’s name. One is in the writer’s home town, Kecskemét (a Fellner & Helmer building), the other one is in Budapest: the home of one of the most successful art-theatres, „the Katona.” The theatre director in 1982, when it was established, was Gábor Székely, and the artistic director was Gábor Zsámbéki, who has been the theatre director as well since 1989. The company’s first performance abroad took place in 1985, since then they have visited several countries – and have achieved almost scheduled successes all over the world. This is mostly the company’s merit but cannot be independent of the spaces they have at their disposal... The additional performance places of Katona have telling names: since 1991 they have had a chamber theatre called Kamra [pantry] operating successfully in a nearby cellar, and there is the tiny Sufni [shed], a tiny place in the basement of the grand theatre, converted in 2003.    

Today’s Katona József Theatre was formed by the reconstruction between 1975 and 1981, when the whole downtown area was rebuilt, when Pest’s famous Váci Utca was given a fancy paving and was advanced to the status of a pedestrian mall. Also, a new passage was born that can be reached from the long-famed Párizsi Udvar [Paris Court], too  –  but, unfortunately, it could not fulfill the role in public space formation that the designers had hoped for.  The stage door of the Katona József Színház opens from this – by now quite obsolete – passage. But the audience entrance is not much more conspicuous, it hides in the jungle of the downtown buildings.    

There was a far more expensive version in a project proposal for the reconstruction of the theatre, which would have reversed the original arrangement: the main entrance would have opened from the passage, and the staff entrance with the scenery transportation could have been located on the basement level, from the newly built underpass. This ambitious plan could not triumph, and the reconstruction retained the old arrangement. There is a tiny recess cut out of the street façade to give the main entrance some emphasis on the narrow street. Compared to this, what we find inside is really splendid: an intensely bright flood of light and a foyer tiled in white marble with similar stairs downward to the basement level, where the restroom hall and the buffet can be found, and from where the above mentioned „Sufni” opens, which was made much cosier some years later.

On their way from the ground floor foyer to the theatre hall, spectators are met, as a kind of warm-up, with a wide-streched, wall-like glass decoration, György Z. Gács’s work of art. Then they divide into two, to the left and to the right, just to enter the unpartitioned auditorium, where they can find comfortable seats in ascending rows, a lattice ceiling of a simple design with lamps of general lighting, and a proscenium opening of almost the same width as that of the hall. The stage is not too spacious, neither in depth nor in hight, but being technical well-equipped, it makes a lot of uses possible, including numerous forestage variations, for which, of course, some ingenuity is indespensable on the scenographers’ part.

An uncanny incidence: just as  in the case of the Örkény Theatre, the original plan was to make a cinema in the courtyard of the tenement building, still, it opened as Modern Színpad [modern stage] in the time of World War I, with the director being Artúr Bárdos. Later it was called Belvárosi Színház [downtown theatre], and between October, 1944 and the end of World War II it operated as military cinema. Then it was nationalized and from 1951 it was the chamber theatre of the National Theatre called the Katona József Színház. It was in this status that its renovation started – nobody expected it to operate separately. After the lengthy construction, there was a sudden decision made to become independent, which, after all, was a transmogrification of the place. This case clearly shows that Budapest needs a „standby” theatre, so that similar cases can be handled.