His theatre education avoided all the traps of a petrified, realist theatre tradition in Hungary before its change of regime. Pintér is considered as an intuitive, an autodidact who developed into an authentic fantastical artist of the scene and who uses the ephemeral theatre genre, ardently sectioning crucial subjects of Hungarian tradition and contemporarity.

In 1998 he gathers a group of actors, professionals and amateurs, that creates, under the name Béla Pintér & Company, their first show Népi Rablét ( Common Bondage).

Pintér's performances connect Hungarian folk art with post-modern shapes of theatre expression, uses elements of ethno-music and dance in a new way; an astonishingly critical and ironical way. The encounter of music and dance dethrones the domination of speech, taking the performance protocols and becoming the key generator of the storytelling. Each gesture, melody and motive, even the tiniest detail of costume design provokes playful significations. Ossified classical forms clash with everyday elements; from the point of language, resonant archaic text mixes with modern phrases. From the mixture of authenticity and kitsch he creates a surreal world that trembles on the line between dream and social banality.

Béla Pintér's shows are full of references and signs which swing forward and backward, carefully swaying the web of traces and information fragments to keep different stories together. From the starting sketch of only a few pages of written text grows a coherent and complex whole.

Critics as well as spectators, often superficially conclude that Béla Pintér's work as a writer and director is based on the improvisation of actors. The reason for this misunderstanding hides in the picturesque level of texts, lithe and unpolished speech, but also in the act which is brutally natural and self-conscious, and the humour is innovative and loud.

The company has been honoured three times with the best Hungarian independent production and once for the best musical theatre entertainment of the season.

In spite of that, Peasant Opera is astonishingly strict in genre, at first sight based on a traditional form with variations, divided on arias and recitatives and the music glorifies the joys and sorrows of rural life.

The frame of the opera is wedding troubles. Characters in the show are: the jealous "stepsister" of the groom, also in love with him; the bride's father who will soon turn out not to be her biological father; a station master with whom the groom's father is arranging the marriage of his stepdaughter in order to gain a piece of land; the bride's mother - a vamp; the bride's biological father who is also the groom's brother. The secrets of the past inevitably appear on the surface. Shocking events are supported by comic reliefs so that the destinies of characters become ridiculous and painfully hopeless. The success of Peasant Opera lies in the skilful juggling with a wide spectre of emotions. Stereotype figures: naive bride, unscrupulous farmer, drunken station master, dominant mother, suppressed father. they are delivered, by the heightening dominance of music, into the centre of the surreal situations, which, during the show, by a series of skilful qui pro quo interpolations, clearly legitimize their increasingly powerful persuasiveness.

The basic myths of incest, birth secrets and infanticide combine with the typical motifs of Hungarian folk ballads.

Peasant Opera mixes tragedy with humour with a perfect sense of proportion.

Link: Béla Pintér & Company