FOG, Milan’s performing arts festival, is back with some rare treats for theatregoers keen to discover the best in cutting-edge work on international circuits, as well as emerging artists, with a distinctive voice. As the festival program indicates, “the selected productions radically explore themes that are poetic and surprising, urgent and necessary”. And FOG is still growing with 37 companies and artists from 22 different countries in this year’s edition, with a welcome second part scheduled for October and November.
Among the shows for this ninth festival: the Catalan company Agrupación Señor Serrano, the Belgian group Ontroerend Goed, Mexican playwright and director Anacarsis Ramos, and the Norwegian collective De Utvalgte.
Believing in Masks (Credere alle maschere), created and directed by Italy’s Romeo Castellucci, opened the festival. In a program note, Castellucci, who has written and directed the play, as well as designing costumes, set and lighting, offers the following detailed presentation: “Description of the Stage Apparatus for Believing in Masks. There is a room, at times white, at times black, draped at times in white fabric, if the room is black, at times in black fabric, if the room is white. It depends. There are no actors. There is a sofa against the back wall, nodding at Andy Warhol. There are words. White. Black. Red. Silence is requested. A certain number of spectators can be accommodated, but there are no seats. In the room there are a number of rigid masks. There must be even numbers. Each mask belongs to one person alone and will belong to them for their entire life.”
Believing in Masks (Credere alle maschere), created and directed by Romeo Castellucci. FOG Milano 2026.
While much of the above description is accurate, and reflects Castellucci’s attention to the visuals, the set and what actually happened in Believing in Masks on the evening I saw the show were rather different. Presumably during rehearsals, some aspects were reworked.
As audience members entered the theatre to see Believing in Masks, an attendant gave them a mask, with strict instructions to wear it for the entire show. About forty audience members were shown into what was a large, anonymous, brightly-lit room in the Triennale Gallery, taking their seats on wooden benches positioned on three sides. I found myself staring at the people sitting opposite me, each of them, wearing a rigid full-face mask. Old and young looked back at me. I had been given an old man’s mask, which felt uncomfortable since it made breathing difficult and restricted what I could see.
After we had settled down, two well-dressed men in masks began bringing boxes into the room. With each entrance, they opened a box and put an object on display – an ancient Greek vase, a bottle of milk, which one of them poured into a glass, an embalmed beaver – at least I think that’s what it was. Simultaneously, on the empty wall behind the objects, a word, totally unrelated to the object, was projected. For the Greek vase, the word ‘pipe’ appeared, for the beaver, the word ‘horse’. This discordance created a sense of chaos, nonsense, curiosity as to what was happening. René Magritte’s surrealist painting, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, sprang to my mind, which likewise disrupts the connection between words and their visual representations, albeit through negation.
Believing in Masks (Credere alle maschere), created and directed by Romeo Castellucci. FOG Milano 2026.
Later a large gas cylinder was brought into the room and was opened letting gas out, making the tension in the room palpable. Was this poisonous gas escaping? Was it a terrorist attack? What exactly was happening was left to our imagination. Then one of the masked attendants quickly closed the cylinder and carried it offstage, putting an end to our suppositions.
An old chair was brought onstage, but this was not any old chair. It was of the sort used in nineteenth-century mental asylums, the leather straps meant to restrict violent patients. Or was it an electric chair? For the first time, the word projected on the rear wall corresponded to the object onstage. Suddenly a masked figure got up from one of the benches, walked quickly towards the chair and sat down. He began writhing and convulsing, as if tortured by electric shock waves, before he collapsed. The sight was gruesome, the tension in the room heightened, but nobody spoke, nobody ran to his rescue. This action was repeated three times by other masked figures, who likewise had been seated on the benches. After the third figure, the pattern changed. A masked figure overturned the chair and proceeded to huddle inside it, writhing and convulsing like the previous figures. The visual image had changed, but the pain and suffering were no less. The end.
Believing in Masks (Credere alle maschere), created and directed by Romeo Castellucci. FOG Milano 2026.
With every production, Romeo Castellucci seems bent on reconsidering the roles of spectator and actor, in this case, drastically blurring the line between the two. As the action evolved, it became apparent that both audience members and actors were wearing masks and sharing the same space. From the very start, the figures who performed the electric chair routine were seated on the same benches assigned to audience members. Once we had put on our masks, each one of us, spectators and actors alike, were turned into anonymous, faceless beings, shorn of our identities. Furthermore, we were only allowed a restricted view of the ongoing action, due to the small holes for eyes in the masks. Still, our roles diverged, as the ‘actors’ performed the electric chair routine, having presumably rehearsed a series of carefully defined, movements, gestures and sounds. By contrast the audience members, sat as silent observers, as the scene of the electric chair unfolded in plain sight. As is well-known, a silent character can be an extremely powerful stage presence, and my fellow audience members were certainly that for me. I felt their inertness and lack of responsiveness to the scenes of brutality, reflected in my own behavior, and felt guilty. After the end of the show, looking at the rigid mask in my hand, I found myself pondering many questions. The enigma of spectatorship loomed large, without any easy answers.
Believing in Masks, 27 and 28 February at Milan’s Triennale.
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
This post was written by Margaret Rose.
The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.
