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.
At a time when the proportion of older people is rapidly increasing—particularly across Western societies—their presence on stage seems to be diminishing. A striking paradox: the more elderly people there are, the less we see them in the theatre. Paradoxical, yes—but not inexplicable.
Despite the existence of various initiatives encouraging older people to engage in artistic activity, full-length dramatic works that place old age at the centre of the narrative remain rare.
The question arises almost inevitably—and I find myself returning to it often: can younger playwrights convincingly portray the experience of ageing without resorting to cliché or sentimentality? And even if they could, would they choose to?
My answer is: Probably not. The prevailing cultural economy appears to discourage such "risky" choices. One only has to consider how rarely older people are meaningfully represented in advertising.
The ageing body continues to be associated with slowness, dependency, burden, and technological inadequacy. These are not neutral descriptors; they form a stereotypical framework that legitimises exclusion, from the workplace, from education, and, by extension, from cultural representation.
Cultural markets do not merely reflect these assumptions; they reinforce them, creating a self-perpetuating cycle in which youth is positioned as high-value capital, while ageing is framed as aesthetically and commercially undesirable. Put simply: it doesn’t sell. Brutal, but true.
Within this context, what is often described as the culture of celebrity youth—or “celebrification”—transforms youth from a biological stage into a form of social and economic capital.
Productions centred on youthful bodies and narratives tend to attract greater funding and larger audiences, while older actors are frequently confined to secondary or comic roles. The result is not only underrepresentation, but a narrowing of how ageing itself is imagined and portrayed.
This is where the concept of ageism, as introduced by Robert N. Butler, becomes particularly useful: not simply as prejudice against older people, but as a broader mechanism of social organisation that determines who is visible, who is considered valuable, and who is entitled to speak and be represented. From this perspective, the absence of older age from the stage is not incidental, it is ideological as much as it is structural.
Theatre, however, as an art form grounded in live presence, has the potential either to reproduce or to challenge this mechanism. The ageing body on stage is not merely an aesthetic fact; it is a political gesture, a reclaiming of visibility within a culture that increasingly erases it. When approached with artistic integrity, the representation of old age can function as a form of resistance to age-based exclusion, forging a direct link between aesthetics and politics.
It is precisely here that the significance of Queen of my Heart , directed by Viktor Ryzhakov, comes into focus.
Without resorting to theatrical excess, dramatic subversion, or emotional overstatement, the production invests in detail, silence, and a kind of inwardness that recalls Anton Chekhov. Ageing is approached not as caricature, but as a complex existential condition.
The sensitivity of the direction and the precision of the performances do more than simply support the text; they create a theatrical environment in which the ageing body acquires weight, duration, respect and voice. In doing so, the production moves beyond offering a “good” representation of old age—it actively participates in rethinking it.
In this sense, the experience of watching the performance was not only aesthetically rewardingfor me, but also intellectually stimulating. Within a festival landscape largely dominated by youthful themes and aesthetics, Queen of my heart stands out as a quiet yet meaningful intervention, a reminder that theatre can still give space to those voices that contemporary cultural economies tend to marginalise.
More to follow in my upcoming review of the festival as a whole.
Written by Savas Patsalidis | 26th Apr 2026 | Critical Stages
(28 April 2026)