Attila Vidnyánszky, the General Director of National Theatre and the Artistic Director of MITEM: “At the launch of the first MITEM in 2014 I stressed the importance and need for openness. Now in 2018 we can talk about the success of openness. We opened ourselves to the world. In the past five years, we at the National Theatre have been hosts to some one hundred companies from 32 countries. Both public and professional feedback has reinforced that we are on a good path”.

It is significant that the Sophocles’ phrase was chosen as the motto of the present MITEM edition, while ‘Oedipus Rex’, the most famous Sophocles’ tragedy directed by Rimas Tuminas, is invited to the festival. The picture of Liudmila Maksakova as Iocasta is chosen as a symbol of MITEM this time.

Edit Kulcsár, the festival organizer: “We chose this sentence of Sophocles as the motto for the 2018 MITEM as we believe it to best encompass what the international theatre festival of the National Theatre will be about this coming spring”.

‘Oedipus’ shall be performed at MITEM on the 13th of April, 2018. Link: http://mitem.hu/en/programme/performances/oedipus-rex

‘Oedipus Rex’ is a cooperative project of the Vakhtangov State Academic Theatre of Russia and the National Theatre of Greece directed by Rimas Tuminas. The show suggests a bilingual form: the Vakhtangov Theatre actors perform the leading parts and Greek actors perform the Chorus.

The contemporary theatre lost understanding of what the ‘chorus’ is, and how it can be a character in tragedy or comedy. Russian theatre also does not have chorus. Only in the Greek culture of the 20th century the sense of the choral action and the understanding of the need for it was rebuilt, step-by-step.