Theatre

Artistic director and director-choreographer Balázs Vincze is very familiar with the tastes of dance aficionados partial to the traditions of bourgeois theatre and is superb at adapting familiar and popular literary classics to the dance stage. His wonderful sense of proportion enables audiences to follow plots in the language of dance. His contemporary choreographies built on classical foundations are unique, spectacular and of a high professional calibre without losing sight of the need to please the audience.

Modest Mussorgsky
BORIS GODUNOV
Opera in four acts with a prologue, in Russian, with Hungarian, English, and Russian subtitles

After earning tremendous critical and popular acclaim at last year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival, IMA is returning to Müpa Budapest, again playing in a tent set up next to the building.

Gaetano Donizetti
LA FILLE DU RÉGIMENT
Comic opera in two acts, in French, with spoken dialogues in Hungarian, with Hungarian, English, and French subtitles

Some people need to immerse themselves in the world of a true classic every evening: this family fairy tale ballet by the Szeged Contemporary Dance Company gives every member of the family the opportunity to do just that.

This full-evening "crime story" of a dance drama takes as its starting point Barcsai's Lover, one of the most estimable of Hungary's balladic treasures. After cuckolding her husband, a wife awaits a terrible punishment. But how did things actually get to this point?

Pursuing happiness, love and affection through countless adventures across this great wide world, but still eventually finding a final peace in the arms of his beloved, Peer Gynt is one of the most complex characters in 19th-century drama. The challenges of staging and absorbing the play are always exceptional tests of strength for the director and the audience.

Boris Eifman / ifj. Johann Strauss
THE PYGMALION EFFECT
Ballet in two acts

Carl Orff
CARMINA BURANA
Scenic cantata, in the original languages, with Hungarian and English surtitles

The world premiere of László Dubrovay's dance drama Faust, the Damned took place at Müpa Budapest in 2016, as part of the Budapest Spring Festival. This large-scale production inspired by Goethe's masterpiece debuted on the main stage of the National Theatre of Pécs in the 2023/24 season, and will run again in 2024 at Müpa Budapest's Festival Theatre.

Anna-Marie Holmes – Tamás Solymosi / Adolphe Adam
LE CORSAIRE
Classical ballet in three acts

A Székely gate is a symbol of ancient power, faith, hope, belonging to God, a channel of communication between heaven and earth. Its three posts represent the unity of body, soul and spirit, and its carvings are symbols that render protection, grace and blessing.

Giuseppe Verdi
RIGOLETTO
Opera in three acts, in Italian, with Hungarian English and Italian subtitles

Claudio Monteverdi – Máté Bella
L'INCORONAZIONE DI POPPEA (THE CORONATION OF POPPEA) – OPERA EXAM
Opera in three acts, in Italian with Hungarian and English surtitles

Giuseppe Verdi
LA TRAVIATA
Opera in two parts, three acts, in Italian, with Hungarian, English and Italian subtitles

Levente Szörényi – János Bródy / Levente Gyöngyösi
STEPHEN, THE KING
Rock-opera production in two parts, in Hungarian, with Hungarian and English subtitles

Giuseppe Verdi
AIDA
Opera in three parts, four acts, in Italian, with Hungarian, English, and Italian subtitles

Daniel Auber
FRA DIAVOLO, BANDIT OPERA IN TWO PARTS
Opera in three acts, two parts, in Hungarian, with Hungarian and English surtitles

Sergei Prokofiev
ВОЙНА И МИР (WAR AND PEACE)
Contemporary Opera
Opera in thirteen scenes, in two parts, in Russian with Hungarian and English subtitles

Medieval ballads often gave a voice to the position of women in society, whether they were elevated to heaven or simply reduced to dust. Female destinies will come to life during the song programme The Girl Who Was Taken to Heaven, where we will hear a bouquet of medieval Hungarian folk ballads.

Adolphe Adam
LITTLE CORSAIRE
Children’s production

Johan Inger – William Forsythe – Hans van Manen – Sol León – Paul Lightfoot
FRENETIC DANCE
Four one-act ballet in three parts

Sándor Csoóri is primarily known in the Hungarian collective memory for his political activity during the 1980s and the subsequent fall of Communism. Yet Csoóri is also an integral part of the era's literary history.

An overview of the half-century career of Zsófia Balla and her work at the forefront of contemporary Hungarian lyric poetry promises to be a true celebration of the art. Born in Cluj-Napoca (Kolozsvár) and originally trained as a violinist, she became one of the central figures in Transylvania's Hungarian literary and intellectual scene before moving to Hungary in 1993.

Philip Glass / Jean Cocteau
LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES
A ballet-opera by Philip Glass based on the story by Jean Cocteau, in French, with Hungarian and English surtitles

Zoltán Kodály
THE SPINNING ROOM
Folk scenes in Hungarian, with Hungarian and English subtitles

Dance drama based on Mihály Munkácsy’s works

Márton Simon is one of the most exciting and creative authors in contemporary Hungarian literature, a pivotal member of its middle generation of writers. The slammer, performer and poet has followed his own path from the very beginning and now can boast thousands of followers and readers.

The World of Ballet Remembers a Hungarian Legend

It could hardly be said that Zsigmond Móricz is an unknown figure in Hungarian literature. But to what extent does his image reflect the sheer diversity of his life's work? In recent decades, Zsófia Szilágyi's in-depth analysis of Móricz has done much to make the multifaceted nature of the author more accessible.

Born in 1982, Dénes Krusovszky enjoyed one of the most successful starts to a career of any Hungarian writer in the 2000s. Today, he has grown into one of the most distinctive and definitive writers not just of his generation, but of contemporary Hungarian literature as a whole.

Két hozzávaló szükséges: te és egy könyv. Érkezz korábban, olvass együtt a többiekkel, csendesedj el, és ha szerencsés vagy, mindezt a Fesztivál Színház színpadán elhelyezett babzsákok egyikén teheted meg.

For kindergarten and elementary school children

Attila Toronykőy
OPERA TOUR WITH PAPAGENO
60-minute guided tour of the Opera House. For primary school children.
Please note that this programme is in in Hungarian and we do not provide any translations.

Erzsébet Szőnyi
THE STUBBORN PRINCESS
Children's opera in two acts in Hungarian