Northern Theatre Harag György Company

The press conference at the National Theatre focused on the 2026 edition of the Madách International Theatre Festival (MITEM). The festival’s chief organizer, Kulcsár Edit Ágota, presented the program and praised the featured productions. With this invitation, the Harag György Company’s Richard III makes history: it is the first production in the company’s history to perform on the main stages of both the National Theatre Bucharest and the National Theatre in Budapest.

Last season, the production received the most prestigious award in Romanian theatre, the UNITER Award, winning both Best Director and Best Performance. It has previously appeared in Chișinău at the 1st International Shakespeare Festival, in Bucharest at the 35th National Theatre Festival, and at the SEAS Festival in Constanța as well as the ATELIER Festival in Baia Mare. Its next stop will be Târgu Mureș at the INTACT Festival on March 18.

Organized by the National Theatre in Budapest, MITEM is Hungary’s only truly international theatre festival in terms of scope, selecting its invited productions from across Eurasia. Over its thirteen-year history, it has become one of the continent’s important theatre festivals, annually presenting outstanding workshops and creators of world theatre.

The Harag György Company was last invited to the festival in 2020 with Rasputin, directed by Sardar Tagirovsky, commemorating the recently deceased author Szőcs Géza. Previously, the company had also guest-performed there with the Hungarian-language world premiere of Pornó, written and directed by Visky András.

“It is always a great honor to participate in a festival of such significance, and it is especially meaningful that our production will open the event this time. We thank Vidnyánszky Attila for the invitation, through which the magical, folkloric number three continues to accompany the story of this production — something we often joke about with colleagues. The Richard III directed by István Albu received three UNITER nominations (two of which turned into awards!) shortly after its premiere, and now we can also say that the production will tour three European capitals (after Bucharest and Chișinău, now Budapest). Adding to this that this is our third invitation to MITEM with this production, it truly feels like magical numerology. Inspired by the ‘three’ in the title itself, we often joke that perhaps it is time for the Harag György Company to stage Six Characters in Search of an Author or Henry VIII next,” said István Bessenyei Gedő, the company’s artistic director. This year’s festival has another special feature: Sardar Tagirovsky, a resident director of the company, returns to the National Theatre stage with a production — this time as artistic director and chief director of the Almetyevsk State Tatar Drama Theatre, presenting one of his Tatarstan productions in the festival program.

The production from Satu Mare also received the UNITER Award for Best Director (Lucian Pintilie Award) and Best Performance, and was named Best Production at the Baia Mare ATELIER International Theatre Festival, where lead actor Csongor Zsolt Nagy received the Best Leading Actor award.

Also present at the MITEM press conference was Ioana Anghel, director of the Romanian Cultural Institute Bucharest, who warmly praised the production and congratulated it on its UNITER Awards. She also highlighted the outstanding achievements of Hungarian theatres in Romania within both national and international cultural life, noting that in the history of the UNITER Awards, a Hungarian theatre in Cluj-Napoca has received the most recognitions.

On behalf of the organizers, Attila Vidnyánszky also thanked István Bessenyei Gedő — as Director of the Harag György Company and President of the MASZÍN — as well as Milán Rusz, Ministerial Commissioner of the Hungarian–Serbian cultural season, for their participation in the dialogue aimed at strengthening European-level minority theatre cooperation. The results of this initiative are already visible in the MITEM program: Kirill Fokin, Secretary of the World Association of Nationality Theatres, emphasized at the press conference that this effort is represented by a separate festival block within MITEM, featuring Tatar, Scottish, Catalan, Frisian, and Turkish (from North Macedonia) theatre companies.