Who Gets to Be Seen? The Reality of Inclusive Theatre.

By the final days of MITEM (Madách International Theatre Meeting) 2026 in Budapest, I had stopped trying to separate the performances neatly from one another. At first, they seemed to belong to different worlds: Shakespeare and Chekhov, family drama and political theatre, disability-inclusive performance, minority cultural memory, productions built from classical texts and others from fragile personal histories. They came from different theatrical traditions, spoke different languages, and demanded different kinds of attention. Yet one question kept returning. Not as a slogan or as a curatorial theme imposed from above. As a pressure inside the performances themselves. Who gets to be seen? Not merely represented and not placed on stage as evidence of diversity or cultural range. Seen, recognized as fully human…

The more I watched, the more I felt that this may be one of the central questions contemporary theatre is asking with renewed urgency. We live in a time that constantly names, sorts, measures, and classifies people. Public life turns human beings into identities, risks, voters, patients, migrants, victims, enemies, users… Categories may be useful, even necessary, but they can also become cages. Theatre, at its best, interrupts that reduction. It asks us to stay with a human being a little longer than our habits allow.

At MITEM, this struggle for visibility appeared again and again, but never in the same form.

Nikolai Kolyada’sThe Cherry Orchard began from a world after beauty had already been spent. The orchard was no longer there as a delicate image waiting to be lost. It had vanished. What remained was residue: plastic, noise, repetition, and the comic despair of people still speaking the language of a life that no longer exists. The force of the production was not nostalgia. It was exposure. Kolyada did not let Chekhov become porcelain. His characters were not museum figures wrapped in melancholy. They were frighteningly recognizable, intelligent enough to understand catastrophe, weak enough to postpone action. 

In thisCherry Orchard, people remain visible after the dream has disappeared. But visibility does not save them. They stand among the remains of inherited forms – family, class, beauty, memory, property, culture – and continue behaving as if those forms might still protect them. The orchard is gone, but the habits survive. Between those two facts, the production finds its comedy of ruins.

If Kolyada looked at historical residue, Nina Plavanjac’sThe Aquarium turned toward the more intimate ruins preserved inside a family. Its central image is painfully exact. An aquarium is transparent. Everything inside can be observed. Nothing inside is free. The play begins with a daughter returning home to care for a mother suffering from dementia. But the production is not simply about illness or care. It is about atmosphere, the emotional climate a family manufactures over generations until nobody remembers where it began.

Plavanjac refuses the easy comfort of assigning guilt. The mother is not only a victim of illness. The daughter is not only a victim of the mother. These women see one another too much and not enough. They know each other’s faces, tones, weaknesses, punishments. But a person can be watched every day and still remain unseen. That is the terrifying intelligence of the aquarium image. It does not hide the wound, but preserves it behind glass.

Davide Iodice’sPinocchio. What Is a Person? brought the question into the open with almost painful directness. What is a person? The simplicity of the title is part of its force. It arrives before the usual vocabulary: inclusion, diversity, accessibility, representation. Those words matter, but Iodice’s production goes deeper. It asks what happens before society decides who deserves full recognition. Who is considered too fragile, too difficult, too unruly, too strange? Who must be corrected before being accepted? 

ThisPinocchio is not a social project disguised as theatre. Its power lies in the way human presence and artistic form transform one another. The performers are not placed before the audience as examples of a problem. They are not there to request pity or approval. They are there to alter the conditions of seeing. The production does not ask the spectator to be generous. It asks the spectator to be changed. That distinction matters. Much theatre speaks about inclusion while leaving the central frame untouched. Iodice’s work challenges the frame itself. It suggests that personhood is not something granted from a safe distance by those who feel themselves already complete. 

Sardar Tagirovsky’sBroken Melody approached visibility from another direction – absence. Dedicated to the Tatar composer Farid Yarullin, the production could easily have become a monument. Instead, it chose listening. Yarullin’s life remains partially unreachable. The theatre does not force biography into a complete shape. What remains is music, language, memory, a coat, a pause  and a sound that continues after the body is gone. The audience, seated close to the actors and slowly moved through a circular stage structure, does not simply observe memory. It is carried inside it. That physical experience changes the meaning of remembrance. Memory is not an archive. It is a motion involving the body. It turns us. It changes our position before we have fully understood what we have seen.

At the other end of the festival’s emotional and political spectrum stood Shakespeare’sRichard III, which framed MITEM with unsettling symmetry. The festival began with Richard and ended with Richard. By the time Itay Tiran’s production for Gesher Theatre arrived, that structure no longer felt decorative. It felt like a warning.

Tiran’sRichard III was frightening because Richard was not alone. The production did not present tyranny as an isolated eruption of evil. It showed power as a social choreography: watching, calculating, smiling, adapting, waiting for the safest moment to survive. The court around Richard is not innocent. It is frightened, ambitious, intelligent, exhausted, compromised. It recognizes danger and still makes room for it. That is why the production’s most disturbing figure is not only Richard, but the public around him. Including us. This may be one of theatre’s most necessary political functions today: not telling us that power is dangerous, but showing how easily danger becomes entertaining, how quickly accommodation becomes habit, how quietly spectatorship can become participation.

Looking back, what connected these productions was not a single aesthetic, ideology, or national conversation. They were too different for that. What connected them was a struggle over visibility. Who remains visible after historical collapse? Who remains visible inside the family? Who remains visible before society’s categories? Who remains visible under power? The question changed shape, but it did not disappear.

That is why MITEM 2026 mattered to me not only as a festival, but as a map of contemporary theatre’s ethical pressure points. In a public world increasingly organized around speed, classification, and certainty, theatre continues to offer a slower and more difficult form of knowledge. It allows a person to appear in contradiction: ridiculous and wounded, guilty and dependent, absent and present, monstrous and seductive, fragile and powerful.

Perhaps this is why the question “Who gets to be seen?” feels so urgent now. Because to be unseen is not only to be absent from the stage. It is to be reduced before one has been encountered. At its best, contemporary theatre resists that reduction. It does not make the human being easier to define? but it makes the human being harder to dismiss. And that, in our century, may be one of its most important tasks.

Photography courtesy of Renato Esposito

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