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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.

A Bucharest production by world-renowned Romanian director Andrei Șerban; the final stage work of recently deceased French writer-director Valère Novarina; the premiere of a new production by the Feledi Project created as a Croatian–Hungarian co-production; and, thanks to the Serbian–Hungarian cultural season, several productions from Serbia have all been included in the program of the 13th MITEM. The organizers held the festival’s press conference on February 18 at the National Theatre.

The stage designs for the imaginary performance of Imre Madách's The Tragedy of Man (1864) were created by students of the Institute of Creative Industries of the University of Sopron under the supervision of Kázmér Tóth. 

The SzFE series has so far published volumes by Theodórosz Terzopulosz, Tadashi Suzuki and Eugeino Barba. Fabre’s work is another contribution to the fact that international theatre knowledge can become part of Hungarian education, and future theatre creators can enrich their individual vision with new forms and content.