Budapest theater scraps anti-Semitic play

JTA — Budapest’s New Theatre will not perform the anti-Semitic play “The Sixth Coffin.”

Budapest website reported that Gyorgy Dorner, the director of the city-funded theater, informed Mayor Istvan Tarlos of the decision  Tuesday.

The play, which was to premiere in February, described a Jewish conspiracy set in 1920 to tear up Hungary and plunge the world into armed conflict.

Earlier this week, the acclaimed conductor Adam Fischer and other Hungarian intellectuals told JTA that they were leading a boycott of the play.

“The Sixth Coffin” was written by Istvan Csurka, a novelist turned politician who died last year, shortly after being nominated as co-director of the New Theatre. He once described Jews as “enemies of the nation.”

Instead of “The Sixth Coffin,” the theater will perform an earlier play by Csurka “about a completely different topic,” Tarlos said.

According to a parliamentary document from November, the New Theatre received at least $500,000 in funding last year from the city of Budapest.