Rural theatres were given the task of touring productions in their neighborhood after the nationalization of culture in 1949. Although cultural policy tried to institutionalize domestic touring, this encountered a great number of unresolved difficulties that undermined its “system” as early as the 1950s and 60s. Nevertheless, it accompanied rural theater-making for four decades, and disappeared only after 1989, as an anachronistic phenomenon, leaving a void nonetheless. The essay focuses on the documents of the Szigligeti Theatre in Szolnok, and explores how touring took place, what anomalies it entailed, what changes it underwent, and what effect it had. The essay describes touring as a dispositive, outlines the conditions for its evolvement and the needs to which it responded, points out its legal framework, material circumstances and everyday practices, and also the factors that gradually deepened its inherent dysfunctionality.