A distinctive annual event, which has become a beloved staple not only of Niçois theatre culture but also of Europe’s festival circuit, celebrates its milestone anniversary this year with a particularly rich programme.

In the intimate courtyard of a Baroque chapel, on an improvised bare wooden stage, a figure in a leather half-mask leaps impossibly high, his patchwork costume catching the evening light. The audience gasps, then erupts in laughter as Arlecchino lands in a perfect tumble at his master’s feet. This is not Italy in the seventeenth century; this is a scene in Old Town Nice, in early summer of every year since 2014.

From 20 June to 5 July 2025, the French city with its strong Italian identity will once again become a focal point for the vibrant popular theatre where centuries-old traditions meet contemporary artistic sensibilities. This year marks an even more special occasion: the Festival International de Commedia dell’Arte’s tenth anniversary.

What began in 2014 as an intriguing local initiative by Frédéric Rey, director of Centre Culturel La Providence and Theatre La Semeuse who also happens to be an ardent appassionato della commedia, has grown into a fixture of Nice’s cultural calendar and an event that now occupies a central place in the landscape of European commedia dell’arte.

Once marginalised as a relic or reduced to pantomime, commedia dell’arte has undergone a true renaissance. What accounts for this success?

While the art form itself is rooted in Renaissance Italy, its continued relevance depends on how it is reimagined for today’s world. Frédéric Rey’s guidance over this decade has been crucial. A worldly man who is effortlessly at home in many different cultures, he has both the vision and the delicate hand to maintain that careful balance of safeguarding theatrical heritage while fostering the creative reinvention that keeps commedia relevant and alive. He succeeds at consistently drawing together companies and artists from France, Italy, and elsewhere – even from the USA – who preserve the commedia’s stylistic rigour while pushing its expressive range. This bridge between past and present, tradition and modernity, and the tensions and affinities between cultures is part of the festival’s appeal – and the reason it has excelled.

This Year’s Highlights

The 2025 programme reflects this ethos with particular clarity and overflows with exceptional performances. Here are some unmissable favourites:

Leonardo: Da Vinci a Milano opens the programme with an Italian-language production by Atelier Teatro which explores the polymath’s Milanese years. Played in Italian and drawing on original source material, the piece demonstrates how commedia’s stock characters, mask work, and physical vocabulary can illuminate the interplay of artistic ambition, political intrigue, and invention in even complex historical biography.

Two productions directed by the influential Carlo Boso further underscore the festival’s standing. One reimagines Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the other adapts Flaminio Scala’s Le Fanfaron, both performed by students of the École Supérieure Internationale d’Art Dramatique, where Boso leads the commedia programme. Their inclusion reflects the festival’s long-standing commitment to actor training and to anchoring commedia dell’arte within a broader European theatrical framework.

France’s favourite playwright Molière, whose career was deeply steeped in commedia’s influence, is also present in this year’s line-up. His Bourgeois Gentilhomme, presented at Théâtre Francis Gag, draws out the irony beneath his polished 17th-century writing, which cleverly hid social critique directed at the very same elite that came to applaud the darling of the French court. The play’s exaggerated physicality and sharply drawn characters remain as effective now as when they first appeared.

The Archetypal Characters: Mirrors of Human Nature

Central to commedia dell’arte are its stock characters – traditional figures that have remained recognisable across centuries, each embodying universal human traits that transcend cultural boundaries. Audiences are drawn to their immediacy, physical wit, and the almost dangerous honesty of their classic types, but also to the truths it speaks. These masked figures say the things others avoid. They confront human absurdity not through solemnity but with laughter, irony, and grace.

Arlecchino (Harlequin) combines childlike enthusiasm with surprising cleverness. Always in motion, this quick-witted servant’s acrobatic physicality and resourcefulness make him the heart of many performances. In contemporary culture, we see echoes of Arlecchino in physical comedians who use their entire bodies as expressive instruments.

Pantalone, the miserly Venetian merchant, hunches forward with grasping hands that reflect his obsession with wealth and status. Despite his advanced age, he pursues young women while jealously guarding his fortune – a character whose financial acumen and less flattering attributes remain painfully recognisable today.

Colombina, the intelligent serving maid, possesses practical intelligence that exceeds her social station. Often the only character who sees through others’ schemes, she balances warmth with pragmatism. Her combination of charm and shrewd intelligence appears in public figures who navigate complex social situations with apparent ease.

Il Dottore makes extensive quotations and pseudo-intellectual pronouncements that mask fundamental ignorance. His rotund physique suggests indulgence, while his university credentials fail to provide actual wisdom – an archetype that appears frequently among those who offer authoritative opinions regardless of expertise.

Il Capitano, the boastful military officer, spins tales of heroism that grow increasingly outlandish. Behind his impressive appearance and military decorations lies profound cowardice revealed at the first sign of danger. This preference for spectacle over substance remains familiar in many contemporary settings.

Each character is both an archetype and a lens, offering insight not through psychological realism but through physical and moral exaggeration. They persist because they are not bound to any single time, class, or country.

Carlo Boso, Godfather of Modern Commedia

A regular of the Niçois commedia dell’arte festival, Carlo Boso’s influence on the contemporary revival of the art form is difficult to overstate. The prolific director, playwright, and teacher trained at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano under Giorgio Strehler and has since become one of Europe’s most influential commedia champions. He has written over a hundred adaptations, led international touring companies, and established training programmes that emphasise physical precision, improvisational discipline, and the collective spirit of ensemble work.

Through his pedagogical leadership at the École Supérieure Internationale d’Art Dramatique, and his longstanding involvement in the Nice festival, Boso has helped reframe commedia not as a quaint historical curiosity, but as a dynamic language of performance with deep relevance to the present. His productions, marked by sharp timing and visual clarity, are grounded in the belief that the oldest forms can still carry the newest truths.

Education, Accessibility, and Community Engagement

The festival’s pedagogical ambitions have been integral since the beginning. Frédéric Rey, trained in both classical and popular forms, places technical rigour at the core of his teaching. Work begins with the neutral mask to build bodily awareness and expressive control before introducing commedia’s more flamboyant types. This progression avoids caricature and encourages actors to discover characters from the inside out.

In addition to professional masterclasses, the festival offers public workshops aimed at students, amateur performers, and local residents. Here, participants explore the links between movement, voice, improvisation, and gesture – an approach rooted in commedia’s original function as a theatre of the people.

Accessibility remains one of the festival’s most compelling strengths. Although many performances are in Italian or French, the use of gesture, movement, and archetype allows meaning to transcend language. For international audiences, including the large Anglophone community on the Côte d’Azur, the festival offers a chance to engage with theatre that requires no translation. The universal nature of commedia’s traditional figures contributes to this accessibility. Characters like Arlecchino, Pantalone, and Colombina embody recognisable human traits and social relationships that resonate across cultural boundaries.

The venues themselves play a vital role in shaping the experience. La Providence, a former convent turned cultural centre in Vieux-Nice, remains the heart of the festival. Its courtyard stage, framed by stone and ivy, creates a sense of proximity rare in contemporary performance. Larger productions take place at Théâtre Francis Gag, while more intimate pieces are hosted at La Semeuse, a smaller theatre with strong community roots.

Honouring commedia’s street theatre legacy, the festival also ventures out to schools, community centres, and underserved neighbourhoods, where its humour and physicality reconnect it with its populist origins. By encouraging direct engagement and removing barriers between performer and spectator, it invites audiences who might otherwise feel excluded from formal cultural spaces.

A Living Tradition, Reimagined for the Complex 21st Century

This tenth anniversary is both celebration and statement. The 2020 edition, cancelled during the pandemic, temporarily interrupted the festival’s continuity, but by its deeply felt absence also deepened its sense of purpose. What the 2025 programme reveals is not only how far the festival has come, but how firmly it is now embedded in the region’s cultural landscape.

As the Festival International de Commedia dell’Arte de Nice enters its second decade, its significance extends beyond local cultural life to the broader European theatrical landscape. Under Rey’s leadership, the festival has become an important node in international networks dedicated to preserving and developing commedia dell’arte, quietly building a model grounded in craft, community, and continuity.

The festival’s tenth anniversary represents both an achievement and a promise: a testament to the enduring power of an ancient theatrical tradition and a commitment to its continued vitality in the contemporary world. The balance it maintains between preserving tradition and encouraging innovation ensures that commedia dell’arte remains not a museum piece but a living, evolving art form that continues to reveal insights about human behaviour and social relationships.

What takes place on these modest stages each year is not nostalgia, but renewal: timeless gestures, reimagined in the present, still able to surprise, provoke, and delight. For those visiting Nice between 20 June and 5 July 2025, the Festival International de Commedia dell’Arte offers an opportunity to witness theatre that bridges centuries while speaking directly to the present moment, where ancient masks reveal modern truths with the same clarity and humour they’ve provided for over four hundred years.

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All visuals courtesy of Festival International de Commedia dell’Arte