13th Madách International Theatre Meeting

Sometimes absence speaks louder than presence. At the 13th MITEM International Theatre Festival 2026 in Budapest, Russia does not take center stage and is not listed as a separate category in the program. Yet a closer look reveals, beneath the surface, an entire map of connections: the Russian theatre school, Chekhovian dramaturgy, directing biographies, and artistic routes leading from Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, and Almetyevsk.

There was something almost suspiciously neat about the programming. MİTEM opened with Richard III and closed with Richard III. On paper, that sounds like a clever curatorial decision, maybe even an elegant one. But after Itay Tiran’s production for Gesher Theatre, the symmetry felt less decorative than unsettling. 

There are productions that do not so much tell a biography as listen to it and Sardar Tagirovsky’s Broken Melody, produced by the Almetyevsk Tatar State Drama Theater, belongs to that rare category. It is not a monument to a composer, and not an illustrated chapter of cultural history. It is a delicate attempt to hear a human being in the place where, at first, only a name, a score, family memory, and silence seem to remain.

Nina Plavanjac’s The Aquarium, produced by the Subotica National Theatre in Serbia and presented within the Hungary-Serbian Cultural Season at MİTEM, is a chamber work about inheritance – not the comfortable inheritance of houses, objects, or family names, but the more dangerous transmission of silence, fear, and emotional reflex.

Davide Iodice’s Pinocchio. What Is a Person?, created with Scuola Elementare del Teatro / Conservatorio Popolare per le Arti della Scena and presented by Teatro di Napoli and Interno 5, is not simply a new staging of Collodi, a social project, or another performance about inclusion. It is a work that places its central question in the title and refuses to let the audience look away: What is a person?

The first production I saw last night at the 13th MITEM Festival at the National Theatre in Budapest, Queen of my heart, by Nicola McAuliffe, takes on a subject that is curiously absent from contemporary theatre: ageing.

MITEM (Madách International Theatre Meeting), held annually at the National Theatre in Budapest, is one of Central Europe’s major international theatre festivals. Since its founding in 2014, it has brought together companies from across Europe and beyond, positioning itself as a platform for dialogue between theatrical traditions, languages, and aesthetic approaches. Rather than functioning as a conventional showcase, MITEM has developed a reputation for carefully curated programs that reflect broader cultural and political questions shaping the region.

The new exhibition of the Nemzeti Színház brings to light the silenced stories of the past: the fates of actors who, between 1947 and 1989, were forced to make decisions under the shadow of political power. The exhibition is not only an act of remembrance, but also a provocation—raising questions about artistic freedom, responsibility, and the weight of the spoken word.

The National Theatre commemorates one of the most singular voices of contemporary European theatre: the oeuvre of Valère Novarina placed the creative power of language at the very center of the stage. On April 13, we pay tribute to his work with a book launch, a staged reading, and an exhibition.