Performance | 12+
Belltable, 6.11.2026
Time: 8pm
Tickets: €12 / €15
UN-MASKING: Playing Someone Else, Becoming Yourself
Who are you when nobody is watching?
As part of 19th Polish Arts Festival.
And what if there is always someone watching?
A face. A role. A voice. A mask.
We put them on without thinking.
For a job interview. In a meeting. At work. At the dinner table. With friends. With strangers. In relationships. In rooms where we know exactly how we are supposed to behave.
Sometimes we choose them.
Sometimes they choose us.
Sometimes we wear them for so long that we forget where the performance ends — and where we begin.
Inspired by the restless, mischievous and deeply unsettling world of Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, UN-MASKING enters a world where identity is never quite our own. We are shaped by the gaze of others, pulled into roles, caught in expectations and trapped in forms — and sometimes, strangely, liberated by them.
A mask can hide you.
It can protect you.
It can make you someone else.
It can make you more acceptable. More successful. More desirable. More like the person everyone expects you to be.
Or perhaps, beneath the mask, something unexpected is waiting.
UN-MASKING is a theatrical encounter with the strange, absurd and sometimes uncomfortable business of being ourselves in the presence of other people. Moving between the intimate and the grotesque, the familiar and the uncanny, it asks what happens when the roles we perform begin to perform us.
Because perhaps we never simply are.
Perhaps we are constantly becoming — in the eyes of others, in the roles we inhabit, in the forms we accept, resist and reshape.
So the question is not simply:
How do we take off the mask?
Perhaps the more dangerous question is:
Who put it there in the first place?
And if you have worn it long enough…
would you still recognise yourself without it?
Come closer.
The mask is already on.
Credits
Written & Performed by
Justyna Cwojdzińska
Dramaturgy & Direction
Simon Thompson
