A Faust without words, created this autumn: at the Odéon, Romeo Castellucci reinvents the myth for one of the highlights of the 2026 Festival d’Automne.

A Faust almost without a word: this is the idea of Romeo Castellucci. The Italian magician of the stage-image empties the myth of its text to keep only what strikes like lightning: the image, the sound, the raw material. On stage, meaning begins to slip away, the light sculpts visions, the music of Scott Gibbons opens up abysses. Nothing is explained, everything is given to be felt. No need to have read Goethe to experience, second after second, the vertigo of a man who sells his soul.

Castellucci begins with a Faust before the pact: a man who has already confronted nothingness and what the director calls “the vertical collapse of meaning, the separation of words and things.” Mephistopheles will have no body; he will be “everywhere and nowhere.” Three performers, Gérard Bayle, Stefania Horodeyska, and Lorenzo Coletta, move among the sculptures and automata of the Plastikart Studio, in a dramaturgy by Piersandra Di Matteo.

Created in Montpellier on October 9 and 10, 2026, and then presented in Rome at the Romaeuropa festival, the show will run for four weeks at the Odéon before a European tour that will take it to the Holland Festival in Amsterdam in June 2027. Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2013 and a regular guest of the Festival d’Automne since 2000, Castellucci has created one of the highlights of this year's festival. Some dates are already sold out.

Find this show in our Festival d’Automne 2026 selection and in our cultural calendar.

ODÉON – THÉÂTRE DE L’EUROPE
Place de l’Odéon, 75006 Paris - Metro: Odéon (lines 4, 10), RER B: Luxembourg
From October 30 to November 27, 2026
Tuesday to Saturday at 8 pm, Sunday at 3 pm, no performance on Mondays
Duration: approximately 1 hour 30 minutes - Non-verbal performance
Tickets: €10 to €42