The Mystery of Buffo has received its fair share of criticism, and it happened to be the last performance I saw before leaving the festival. On my way to the train station, I skimmed through audience reactions. Most of the complaints felt entirely reasonable. And yet, I found myself genuinely loving it.

At the heart of the performance is Grammelot—a theatrical language built from onomatopoeia, invented syllables, rhythm, and physical expression. One actor, dressed entirely in black, performs alone for an hour, transforming seamlessly between servants and kings, saints and swindlers, conjuring an entire world with nothing more than his body and voice.

Why It So Easily Disappoints

The reasons are obvious.

There is only one performer. He wears black throughout. There is no set, no props, no lighting changes, not even a musical score. Everything depends solely on one voice, two hands, and a single body.

Nor is this a play in the conventional sense. If you enter expecting a coherent narrative or a profound dramatic argument, you may quickly grow restless. The storytelling is fragmented, and the language itself frequently dissolves into meaningless syllables—the essence of Grammelot. It sounds like speech, but not a single word can actually be understood.

So the negative reviews make perfect sense. This production makes no attempt to accommodate its audience. It refuses to flatter them, and it has little interest in delivering what most people would call “a good story.”

But One Moment Completely Captured Me

The moment that truly stopped me came during the King’s hymn.

The actor was portraying a king preparing for a ceremonial ritual, awkwardly wrestling with his heavy robes while simultaneously attempting to sing a sacred hymn. Holiness and clumsiness existed side by side.

Then he began to sing.

The sound was astonishingly ethereal and solemn, carrying the distant resonance of sacred architecture.

It felt immediately familiar.

I had heard something like it inside mosques in Turkey. I had felt similar vibrations beneath the domes of Orthodox cathedrals in Russia. It was not simply a melody; it created a space.

Although I remained seated in the theatre, the room itself seemed to change. The ceiling dissolved. The walls receded. I found myself enveloped by an atmosphere impossible to describe.

Physically, I never moved.

Yet mentally, I had already stepped into the world he was creating.

That Is What I Mean by “Romance”

A friend later asked whether the production was any good.

I answered, “It’s difficult to say—but there’s something deeply romantic about it.”

One performer, with nothing more than his voice, could transport you from a theatre in Aranya to a medieval marketplace, a magnificent cathedral, or a lonely road where a travelling minstrel wandered at dusk.

There were no projections. No LED screens. No surround sound.

Only vocal frequencies, rhythmic movement, breath, and imagination.

Isn’t that romantic?

We often speak about “presence” as though it requires physical arrival. The Mystery of Buffo reminded me that perhaps true presence has very little to do with geography. Presence begins when perception opens itself, when imagination becomes active.

The actor builds a world.

If you choose to enter it, then you are present.

The Story Is Merely the Path; Performance Is the Story

After leaving the theatre, if someone asked me exactly how many stories the performance contained, I honestly could not answer.

Was it about a king?

A trickster?

A saint?

Perhaps all of them.

Perhaps none of them really mattered.

Because I don’t think the protagonist was ever any of those characters.

The real protagonist was the storyteller himself.

A travelling performer wandering from town to town, earning a living with nothing but stories. One day he plays a king, the next a beggar. Sometimes his language sounds sacred; sometimes vulgar; sometimes it consists of sounds without meaning at all.

But none of that is the point.

The point is simply that he is there.

He tells.

You listen.

Perhaps that is why I connected with him so deeply.

I have always been someone who enjoys telling stories. I can tell the same story a hundred times, and every telling becomes a different story because the audience changes, the atmosphere changes, and I change with the moment.

Stories are fluid.

The storyteller is the constant.

So it doesn’t really matter if you leave the theatre unable to recount the plot.

All you need to remember is that, for one hour, you sat together in the darkness while a stranger built an entire world out of nothing but his voice and his body.

You entered that world.

And for that reason alone, the journey was worthwhile.