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Every year, MITEM in Hungary brings together international productions that combine classical and contemporary works, favouring experimentation with theatrical languages and unconventional perspectives on the present, subjecting today's world to analyses that are anything but comforting.

This article offers a critical dramaturgical reading of selected performances presented at the Madách International Theatre Meeting (MITEM) in Budapest. Rather than functioning as a conventional festival report, it approaches the programme as a field of aesthetic and political tensions in which contemporary European theatre negotiates questions of identity, embodiment, and representation.

Marx’s Capital was part of the 13th edition of the MITEM theatre festival (Madách International Theatre Meeting), which took place from April 10 to May 11. Since its founding in 2014, MITEM has established itself as a platform for dialogue between theatrical traditions and aesthetic approaches. This year’s festival opened with Shakespeare’s Richard III, directed by István Albu (Romania), and closed with another Richard III, directed by Itay Tiran (Israel). The concept “From Richard to Richard” was not merely a curatorial gesture, but also a reflection on today’s “Europe in a state of emergency.” The program included works by Sophocles, Molière, Voltaire, Gogol, and Chekhov, among others.

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.