Reception Studies in the Sociology of the Theatre : Directions and Possibilities of Research

The study briefly summarises the position of sociological research on theatre reception in Hungary and its findings to date, outlining the main research activities of the new Research Group on Theatre Education and the Sociology of the Theatre at the Károli Gáspár Reformed University. In the second section, we will present the report of an international questionnaire-based survey conducted on a large sample, which can serve as a methodological and theoretical basis for subsequent research. In 2005, the STEP (Project on European Theatre Systems) international Sociology of the Theatre research group, a collaborative partnership between several European universities, recorded detailed performance evaluations of theatregoers in four European cities between 2010 and 2013, with the aim of mapping differences in audience experience and attitudes in countries with very different theatre systems (the Netherlands, the UK, Estonia, and Hungary). The survey included 156 performances, and a total of 7,121 respondents participated in it. In addition to presenting the research methodology and the general results, this paper will focus on the evaluation of the relevance (both personal and social) of the performances.