Our actors received this year’s Gábor Miklós Award
Janka Korodi and Tibor Pálffy received this year’s Gábor Miklós Award, which is given annually to the best Hungarian Shakespeare adaptations. The award was presented on stage in Sfântu Gheorghe, during the applause of the 20th May performance of The Tempest, by Tamás Ascher, Budapest director and chairman of the Gábor Miklós Award committee.
The Kossuth Prize-winning Hungarian director, university professor and distinguished artist gave a brief history of the prize before presenting it to the audience. Miklós Gábor was a Kossuth Prize-winning Hungarian actor, a deserving and distinguished artist, with many great Shakespearean performances to his name. “He was the most famous Hamlet in the 1960s”, but he also played Richard III, Lear’s Fool, Sebastian in Twelfth Night, Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Jacques in As You Like It, Jago in Othello, Prospero in The Tempest, and many other important Shakespearean roles. He died in 1998, and his widow, actress Éva Vass, founded an award in 2000 for the best Hungarian Shakespearean performance of the year. The prize is awarded on or near the anniversary of Miklós Gábor’s birth, on 7th April each year, by a professional board of trustees rather than by official state bodies. The prize money is a modest amount, according to the director, from the interest earned on the fund from Miklós Gábor’s legacy.
The Gábor Miklós Award Board of Trustees was chaired by Tamás Koltai, a theatre critic, from 2000 until his death in 2015, and is currently chaired by Tamás Ascher, with other members: János Meczner, director, György Spiró, writer, Ádám Nádasdy, linguist, poet, translator (also translator of the text of the performance of The Tempest in Sfântu Gheorghe), and Andrea Stuber, theatre critic, who was present at the award ceremony. This year as well, many Shakespeare performances were seen in Budapest and in the countryside, with some members seeing this performance live and others watching it on tape,” said Tamás Ascher. He himself loves this production, and considers director Viktor Bodó one of the most important, most imaginative and talented Hungarian directors, whom he taught as an actor, he said, adding that whether in tragedy or comedy, Bodó “unleashes a terrible playfulness in his actors”.
There are great roles in The Tempest, and in fact everyone in Sfântu Gheorghe was great, the director added, but the prize was awarded to the two actors who he said “bear the greatest responsibility”: the actors who played Ariel and Prospero. Winners of the Gábor Miklós Award include such renowned Hungarian actors as Zsolt László, Péter Blaskó, János Kulka, Zoltán Balázs, Judit Pogány, Roland Rába, László Gálffi, György Cserhalmi, Géza Hegedűs D., Imre Csuja, Gábor Nagypál, Kati Takács and the only Transylvanian actor so far, András Hatházi. It is the first time that two actors shared the award.
