The article examines selected performances of the Szentkirályi Theatre Workshop through
the concepts of acting presence and stage present time. The analysis focuses on performances
built from real family relationships, personal biographical material, and shared presence,
involving professional actors, amateurs, civilians, children, and animals. The intertwining
of theatrical and performative elements, together with fragmented dramaturgy and indeterminacy,
creates a mode of spectatorship in which presence functions as the primary medium
of transmission. Drawing on John Keats’s concept of “negative capability,” as well
as theories of autobiography and autofiction, the study interprets these performances
as open, non-linear structures that foreground lived presence over narrative coherence.
