Since its establishment in 2014, MITEM (Madách International Theatre Meeting) has developed into a major platform for dialogue between theatrical traditions and aesthetic approaches. The 13th edition, held in Budapest from 10 April to 11 May, opened with Richard III by William Shakespeare, directed by István Albu (Harag György Company of the North Theatre, Satu Mare), and concluded with another production of Richard III, directed by Itay Tiran (Gesher Theatre, Tel Aviv–Jaffa).
The “from Richard to Richard” framework was not merely a curatorial gesture but also a reflection on the current historical moment of “Europe on alert.” Alongside Shakespeare, the progra
One of the festival’s most ambitious productions in terms of scale and artistic resources was Marx’s Capital, a production of the National Theatre of Budapest, whose premiere sparked a wave of criticism. “Many people seemed convinced that it was promoting Marxist ideology, including the head of the Institute for the Research of Communism,” director Attila Vidnyánszky says in an interview.
Quite the opposite, however: the Budapest National Theatre’s artistic director invites the audience to reflect on the consequences of the ideas propagated by Marx. The text, developed together with dramaturge Réka Szabó, draws not only on the correspondence between Marx and Engels, but also on speeches by Lenin and Stalin, as well as passages from the Bible.
This complex production also incorporates elements from Agón, a play by composer and philosopher Péter Pál Józsa. The work portrays humanity’s spiritual struggle, presenting human beings not only as the accused but also as accusers, searching for meaning and redemption.
From the moment the audience enters the auditorium, enormous masks gaze down from the balconies: Marx and Engels on the left, Lenin on the right side of the stage. At first glance, the production’s structure appears straightforward: we are witnessing a trial in which the defendants are Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mátyás Rákosi, Hungary’s communist leader between 1948 and 1956. Set against a stage painted in red and black, evoking an ancient Greek theatre, stands the defence counsel.
The audience serves as the jury. We will have to deliver the verdict, the prosecutor warns at the beginning of the performance, asking whether there are any proletarians, oligarchs, exploited workers, or prostitutes in the audience. Some spectators actually raise their hands.
Despite this carefully established premise, the nearly four-hour production gradually bends its own rules. We learn about Marx’s private life. Numerous nineteenth-century historical figures appear through video projections. Mao Zedong, Leonid Brezhnev, Nicolae Ceaușescu, and other dictators who emerged from the German philosopher’s ideas are represented as Matryoshka dolls. References to the influence of Marx’s work on both the recent past and the present soon follow: the terrorist attacks on New York’s Twin Towers, pornography, the entertainment industry, fake news, and excessive globalization are all invoked. At one point, the prosecutor even wears a MAGA cap.
Yet this is no ordinary trial, as passages from the Gospel of John are interwoven into the proceedings. The narrative gradually shifts toward a religious dimension, with frequent references to the Book of Revelation. The breaking of the Seven Seals—which heralds the beginning of God's judgments and the apocalyptic events set in motion by the Lamb of God—is announced by a little girl dressed in a white gown.
Processing the immense amount of text is made even more demanding by the director’s constant stream of visual imagery. Bundles of banknotes, a lamb covered with a black shroud, and a piano—symbolizing culture—suspended from the ceiling all appear on stage. Lenin and Stalin repeatedly take selfies with young people, the photographs then being projected onto the large screen at the back of the stage. A live orchestra—with a child serving as the drummer—further enriches the performance. Red ribbons are thrown toward the audience.
The acting is impeccable throughout, yet after a while even an attentive spectator can easily lose the thread of the densely layered production.
Toward the end of the performance, Adolf Hitler appears at the front of the stage, while Saint John is overcome, left hanging precariously from the ceiling. Hell erupts on stage: dressed in women’s clothing and wearing little devil’s pigtails, the quintet of defendants sing and dance amid the sounds of machine-gun fire and projections of tanks.
By transforming the theatre into an arena, the director creates a striking spatial arrangement in which everyone can see everyone else. Vidnyánszky actively involves the audience: actors invite several spectators from the front row onto the stage to wave the red flags of the revolution, while the house lights remain on for almost the entire performance.
In the end, judgment is entrusted to Jesus Christ.
“The German philosopher’s work is, in fact, merely a pretext for taking stock of the origins of principles that today are often accepted without question and that give rise to social phenomena such as cancel culture and wokeness,” says the creator of this spectacular production.
Reflections on Human Relationships
Another of MITEM 2026’s greatest strengths was the inclusion of productions representing a broad geographical spectrum. The programme featured performances from, among other places, Paris, Barcelona, Plovdiv, Skopje, and Leeuwarden. Ukraine was represented by the co-production The Government Inspector – Ревізор, staged by the National Theatre of Budapest in collaboration with the Transcarpathian Hungarian Regional Drama Theatre of Berehove, directed by Attila Vidnyánszky Jr. Russia, meanwhile, was represented through Tatar theatrical institutions.
Winner of two Golden Mask Awards—for Best Production and Best Costume Design—The Core of My Soul was presented in MITEM’s section devoted to ethnic and linguistic minorities. Produced by the Galiasgar Kamal Tatar State Academic Theatre of Kazan, Republic of Tatarstan, the production takes its title from the affectionate way Anton Chekhov addressed Lydia Mizinova (“Lika”)—the future singer, actress, translator, and literary and theatre critic—in his letters.
It is well known that the plot of Chekhov’s celebrated play The Seagull echoes events from Lika’s own life. They met in 1889, when Chekhov was twenty-nine and she was nineteen. Their friendship gave rise to an extensive correspondence that has repeatedly encouraged later generations to speculate about the true nature of the feelings that connected them.
Directed by Farid Bikchantaev, the production is built upon this correspondence. Fourteen exceptionally young actors transform these epistolary exchanges into an ironic and deeply entertaining reflection on the fleeting nature of happiness. Originally created as a graduation production, the performance was subsequently incorporated into the theatre’s permanent repertoire.
The stage contains only fourteen chairs. Seven identically dressed men, each wearing a pince-nez, are seated on the right, while seven women occupy the left. Every man is Chekhov; every woman is Lika. At times the two groups intermingle, while at others individual couples step into the centre of the stage. The severity of the Russian winter is conveyed with remarkable theatrical ingenuity through coats and jackets that, at one point, almost bury Lika beneath their weight. Particularly memorable is the train scene, in which the passengers revolt against the ticket inspector demanding to see their tickets.
The production unfolds at a lively pace and is carefully structured, relying on theatrical imagination and an accessible stage language in which the actors’ performances and the musical score combine to create a vibrant theatrical universe.
Part of the Serbian–Hungarian Cultural Season, The Aquarium is a psychological family drama. Written and directed by the young playwright Nina Plavanjac for the National Theatre of Subotica, the play explores three generations of women who pass down the same destiny from mother to daughter: they are repeatedly abandoned by the men in their lives and left to raise their children alone.
The youngest of them, Lenka, attempts to break this inherited pattern by moving abroad and choosing not to marry. Instead, she becomes involved with a married man who is also her supervisor at work. Her attempt to escape the family cycle, however, is cut short when she is forced to return to her childhood apartment after her mother, who suffers from dementia, is expelled from a nursing home. After years of silence, mother and daughter are finally compelled to confront not only one another, but also everything they have tried to bury in the past.
Past and present intertwine seamlessly in Nina Plavanjac’s production. At the centre of the stage stands a transparent cube in which the mother and daughter confront one another. Outside this enclosed space linger the ghosts of the past: the nursing-home caregiver (who also assumes the role of the grandmother), the husband who died as a result of alcoholism, and another daughter who has disappeared.
At the emotional climax of the performance, two opposing walls of the cube slowly move inward, and the mother collapses to the floor. Once she has joined the world of the dead, the daughter is left alone inside the chamber, which gradually sinks into darkness. Fish are projected onto the transparent walls, swimming in every direction.
The inherited cycle appears finally to have been broken, suggesting that the harmony of life has at last been restored.
A Masterpiece on Diversity and Identity
Among the 26 productions presented by 21 companies from 15 countries were several performances in which the body and rhythm took centre stage, including Characters of Thought (Union des Contraires; text, visual concept, and direction by Valère Novarina) and I’m Sorry (Troubleyn/Jan Fabre Company).
Pinocchio. What Is a Person?, presented by Teatro di Napoli and Interno5 of Naples, brought into sharp focus one of the festival’s recurring questions. Emerging from a programme that had gradually moved from classical stories of power and guilt, MITEM ultimately led its audience to a fundamental anthropological question: What does it mean to be human after the catastrophes of the last centuries?
In this production, conceived, adapted, and directed by Davide Iodice, Carlo Collodi’s story is reimagined as a mirror of contemporary society. “While you, society, search for an answer to the future, what am I supposed to do?” Pinocchio asks Master Geppetto, who in turn urges him to seek not answers but new questions. Iodice’s remarkable production—developed from a research project in 2023 and awarded the Special UBU Prize in 2024—is itself built around a series of probing questions.
The protagonists are young performers with neurodivergent conditions, including Down syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Williams syndrome, and Asperger syndrome. The almost empty stage is populated by bodies that challenge conventional notions of normality: children and adults, zoomorphic masks, donkeys, rabbits, foxes, and a large cross covered with books and carried by the Talking Cricket, crushed beneath the weight of prejudice and discrimination.
From a circle of dancers, pairs of mothers or fathers emerge one after another, introducing their beloved Pinocchios before placing long, curved noses upon their children's faces. One Pinocchio cannot walk; another dreams of finding a girlfriend, obtaining a driver's licence, or having a theatre of his own—a society willing to accept him. Pinocchio is Giorgio, Tommaso, Chiara, and Ariel.
Theatrical magic ignites from the very first exchange of words, as if sparked by the Blue Fairy's wand. Through an exquisitely composed score of movement and language, amid wooden logs, candles, dreamlike processions of mothers and fairies, the story of the world's most famous puppet becomes a meditation on vulnerability in an age where violence has become a permanent condition. It does so through the eyes of those who experience exclusion most profoundly.
Pinocchio. What Is a Person? reveals the extraordinary expressive power of the human body as a vehicle for storytelling. It is an exceptionally delicate work—not merely a theatrical performance, but the outcome of a process of participatory dramaturgy developed together with these neurodivergent young people from the Scuola Elementare del Teatro di Napoli, founded ten years ago by director and theatre educator Davide Iodice.
This kaleidoscope of stories exploring the human condition leads the audience to the poetic and political core of a theatre that serves as a mirror of the community to which it belongs.
Written by Irina Wolf
(01 August 2026)