13th Madách International Theatre Meeting

From Toga in Japan to Naples in Italy, from East to West, numerous renowned companies and fascinating performances will arrive at the month-long 13th Madách International Theatre Meeting (MITEM) at the National Theatre. We offer unique experiences and genre-bending experiments for our theatre-loving audience – both loyal patrons and newcomers. Before the full program is announced in February, I’d like to highlight six performances for your attention.

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.

As part of this year’s “minority programme,” MITEM and the National Theatre have invited artists and researchers for a professional roundtable discussion. The goal of this meeting is to lay the groundwork for the founding of a World Assotiation of Ethnic Minority Theatres – an international platform designed to unite, support, and amplify the work of this diverse, vibrant, and often challenging field, giving voice and visibility to ethnic minority theatre artists and institutions worldwide.

Theatre is the mirror of the soul, a shared language that bridges nations – connecting past and present, tradition and innovation, people to people. In this spirit, I warmly welcome you to the 12^th Madách International Theatre Meeting (MITEM), which from April 25 to May 25, 2025, will once again open its doors to the world’s most outstanding theatre artists.

'I Am Blood (A Medieval Fairy Tale)' is a powerful ode to blood—the lifeblood that fuels both humanity’s darkest urges and loftiest dreams. “In today's perception, the Middle Ages were a cruel time, but actually not much has changed since then. We still shed blood for power, for money, for love. We still crave blood, and blood is worth more than gold. The play describes the burden of the body, which is subject to obsessions, fixations, suffering and disease.”

MITEM is 10 years old. The history of the Madách International Theatre Meeting began in the National Theatre in the spring of 2014, and now, in spring 2024, we will open our 11th festival. In 2023, Hungary hosted one of Europe's greatest cultural / theatrical events, the 10th Theatre Olympics, with MITEM as the backbone of the programme.

“Has the ancient god of theatre finally returned to his ancestral sphere, the theatre, and at the same time entered our hyper-modern, super-digitalised world? Does this return aim for the restoration of an earlier state or a radical renewal?” asks Erika Fischer-Lichte, a renowned scholar researching contemporary theatre.

Presentation by theatre historian Béatrice Picon-Vallin, Meyerhold - documentary, Director Valery Fokin, Manager of the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, talks about the world of Meyerhold’s directing and his methods