Bérénice | Romeo Castellucci

The great Italian director Romeo Castellucci takes on one of the most groundbreaking texts of Western literature. Racine’s "Bérénice" is transformed by Isabelle Huppert as we have never seen her before, surrounded by speechless male performers and bursting with the inner mourning of her lost love, which resonates inside her and around us. “Love is the Theater of Cruelty,” says Castellucci through this production, where a wounded heroine is stripped of her royalty, and 14 men make decisions on her behalf. "Bérénice" is presented as the immobile nexus of chaos, as the eye of the storm that sweeps us all away. As written by "Libération": “The actress and the director dig deep, exploring the nightmares of loss.”

"Bérénice" is a manifesto of love and loss, straddling the border between reality and the dream, between tenderness and madness. A stunning theatrical universe set upon the stage by Castellucci, with brilliant costumes crafted by acclaimed Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen, accompanied by an original score by Scott Gibbons, who expertly captures the solitude and abandonment in his composition. As Castellucci notes: “We truly enter into the real, into the darkness of the body, into all that remains hidden by the skin. Α theater made of real, fake, and phantasmized bodies. Education and chastity mark the boundaries of an erotic morbidity that shatters bodies; violence is now endocrinal, and the brakes are more powerful than the accelerator. This energy does not explode, restrained as it is by a body that no longer has words. Within this paralytic theater, "Bérénice" is probably the most immobile, static, and unnerving ‘tragedy’ ever conceived. And yet, it brings us to tears. And yet, "Bérénice" —one might say—"is me".”

Racine is contemporary precisely by way of his untimeliness. The alexandrine metre of his verses is the frozen form of a vision of humanity paralysed by a tragic impasse in its sentiments and a dysfunction of language. Love is the Theater of Cruelty.

Here, renunciations carry more weight than actions, blood or copulations. Education and chastity mark the boundaries of an erotic morbidity that shatters bodies; violence is now endocrinal, and the brakes are more powerful than the accelerator. This energy does not explode, restrained as it is by a body that no longer has words. Within this paralytic theater, “Bérénice” is probably the most immobile, static and unnerving “tragedy” ever conceived. And yet, it brings us to tears. And yet, Bérénice – one might say – is me.

Onstage, like a fixed star, one actress alone embodies “Bérénice”:

Isabelle Huppert, the synecdoche of the art of Acting in Western theater.

She is the actress, but also the actor, by definition; she is Theater itself, which becomes manifest in her, even before the meaning it carries.

Almost all the sounds in this performance – both heard and unheard – are generated by her voice, processed by sound artist Scott Gibbons.

-Romeo Castellucci