Budapest, színházi város
Budapest, a city of theater

Summary/Abstract: What makes a city? We can formulate a number of scientific and everyday experience-based answers to this “poetic question”. In this paper, we seek an answer by clarifying the question and focusing on what makes a theatrical city. What quantitative and qualitative indicators must be met in order for residents and later analysts and researchers to feel and call the theatrical life of a city adequate, satisfactory, or even rich? Can we call Budapest a theatrical city? What physical and intellectual–cultural–artistic relationship is created and operates between the city as a community space and its institutions? And how can the dynamics of the processes be described in the case of a growing and strengthening settlement? We now connect the theoretical and methodological experiences of settlement history, cultural anthropology, cultural sociology and theatre history by examining the relationship between Budapest and its theatre venues, and we attempt to outline the characteristics that have had and still have an impact on the physical-architectural, administrative and artistic-institutional structures of the city structure in its theatre history. We present some historical examples of where and how a theatre is located, fits into the community space as a building and as a public institution, how it changes the city structure, or how an urban (living) space changes if it disappears. How did the theatre space expand along with the city in Budapest, which was developing into a metropolis, and how is the theatre structure being built further with essentially unchanged solutions? How does the expansion of urban planning and the audience, and the change in their tastes, form new centres in the newly conquered, built-up areas, and how does the change in the habits and needs of city dwellers affect the commercial and cultural institutional structure? These connections, to be explained later, can be well examined in the historicity of the constructed or "found" spaces of the play.

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