A joint production of Orlai Produkció and Katona József Theatre

Dante completed the Divine Comedy seven hundred years ago, in 1321, the year of his death. Our presentation will cover the part of Dante's mystical journey through Hell, guided by Virgil, where he encounters sinners who not only influenced his own time, but whose lives and deaths hold many lessons for posterity. Worthless men, swindlers, star-crossed lovers, thieves, murderers, suicides, prophets, sycophants, profiteers, feudators, traitors, appear in a sprawling jumble in the hellscape, including Dante's political opponents (for it was in despair at the desperate political situation of his time that he had begun writing The Divine Comedy two decades earlier), who could well be our contemporaries. The various moments in this adventurous story have different associations for each of us, depending on what Hell means to each of us in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Ádám Nádasdy retranslated the Divine Comedy in 2016. His translation has changed our relationship to this indisputably important, yet somewhat inaccessible masterpiece: by not archaizing it in an archaic, literary way, but by speaking in a contemporary, living language and - not incidentally - in a way that is understandable, Dante's world has come closer to the present, and the Dantean journey has become both poignant and entertaining.

The performance is supported by the Italian Cultural Institute of Budapest.

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