Dirt is a powerful intimate story with elements of ballads and folklore, yet with a generous dose of irony and canny social criticism. The story is set in a Hungarian village over four seasons. Irena and Attila have been trying to start a family for a quite some time. Yet, they learn that, because of complications during a routine surgery, they have lost any opportunity to conceive their offspring. They decide to resolve the situation by adoption. Yet, due to the two-year waiting period, they will eventually adopt two teenage girls. Rose nicknamed Dirt, and her friend Anita, who, as they claim, have made a blood pact. The village setting is first hostile to the two foster girls. With their new parents, love is far from being shared equally. What can a lack of love lead to? The tendencies towards extremism, nationalism and intolerance may start to seem trivial in comparison with the gradually unfolding human tragedies.

Béla Pintér (b. 1970) is a Hungarian playwright, stage director and actor. He is considered to be the influential figure of Hungary’s alternative theatre today. While deeply rooted in classical theatre tradition, Pintér’s singular approach to playwriting fuses comedy, tragedy and live music to create original, accessible and personal approaches to life’s absurdities and current events. After a childhood shared between the city where his parents worked and the village of his grandparents, he left – at the age of sixteen – his Catholic family following a harsh argument with his father, a fireman working in Budapest. In 1998, Pintér founded a group of professional and amateur actors, Béla Pintér & Company, and staged his first production titled Common Bondage. With the independent ensemble of experimental theatre and dance, Szkené, he has ever since been putting on stage one performance a year. All of them are award-winning. Béla Pintér & Company produced The Dirt back in 2010; during the rehearsal period it had been repeatedly reassessed and refined by Pintér’s co-workers.

Ján Luterán (b. 1984) is one of Slovakia’s youngest stage directors. Inclined to contemporary drama, he mostly focuses on contemporary plays and authorial projects. He graduated in theatre directing from the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. His graduation project There Was Once a Class (2010; first Academy of Performing Arts, later Andrej Bagar Theatre in Nitra) made him a well-known figure for both Slovak audiences and theatrologists. His style of stage directing is characterized by a detached view, a sense of original dramatic shortcuts, and the employment of vaudeville features with peculiar humor rooted in irony and sarcasm. After graduation, Luterán collaborated with several Slovak theatres (Andrej Bagar Theatre in Nitra, Slovak Chamber Theatre in Martin, City Theatre Žilina, Jonáš Záborský theatre in Prešov). His productions regularly participate in Czech and Slovak theatre festivals. He is the laureate of two awards from the Nová dráma/New Drama festival of contemporary drama and theatre, and was nominated for the Discovery of the Year Prize at the Kremnica Gags festival.

‘The play by contemporary Hungarian playwright Béla Pintér opens up multiple social topics, pointing out to our prejudices and predispositions to have recourse to simple solutions, even if they entail a form of radicalization and extremism. However, he does so with such a cynical humour, political incorrectness and unmerciful self-irony that we can’t but laugh. And sometimes he makes us laugh to tears.’
Peter Scherhaufer, https://enjoy.trend.sk/

‘Over the two hours you barely have a moment to breathe. You will experience all kinds of emotions, ranging from empathy, anger, disdain and disgust to hopelessness; either all of them concurrently or in short intervals. There will be moments of laughter, too. But this sort of laugh does not disburden you for long time. Béla Pintér, a contemporary Hungarian playwright, wrote an unrelieving play. If you just want to ‘get carried away’, The Dirt will do the job – there are no vain moments in the play.’

Jana Močková, Denník N