Romeo Castellucci, long known for his iconoclastic large-scale stagings of new works, classical texts, and operas, brings his Bérénice to the 2025 Holland Festival with Isabelle Huppert in the title role. Composed in alexandrine verse, the five-act play is set in first-century Rome, where the new emperor Titus must reject his lover Bérénice, a Palestinian princess of the Herodian dynasty that ruled Judaea, to maintain his political legitimacy. Their love, mutual and unresolved, is crushed under the violence of the state and the demands of empire. Castellucci’s production, developed with Isabelle Huppert in the title role and first premiered at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris and presented this past week at the 2025 Holland Festival, refracts Racine’s tightly coiled emotional structure through a sculptural, sonic, and choreographic vocabulary. Huppert moves through the piece with extraordinary command, flickering between effervescence, glittering spectacle, sudden rage, and dissolution. Her performance anchors the work while charging its surface with volatile human force. Bérénice emerges here as a figure held between the personal and the imperial, the intimate and the monumental, crushed beneath the machinic choreography of empire and the logics of theatrical form.
The production is organized in three distinct sections, each marked by a transformation in palette, costume, and sonic atmosphere. When the audience enters, a large blue silk show curtain ripples gently in the air, shifting from light to deep blue. It parts with a sonic croaking yawl to reveal Huppert’s Bérénice in a peach-toned sculptural garment by Iris van Herpen, standing in stark relief within a layered, textural space composed of black scrims, tall pleated curtains, and shifting mechanical architectural forms. This visual field is animated by a glitching sound environment, designed by Scott Gibbons, that mutates from industrial hum to spatial rumble to distorted voice, at times tethered to emotional states, at others used to disrupt and abstract the theatrical frame. Throughout the work, sculptural objects appear and disappear with ritual precision: a chrome bar dusted with glitter, a bronze Egyptian cat struck like a bell, mechanical spears that beat the scrims with flashes of light and loud noise. These are contrasted with domestic found objects: a white radiator dragged and offered like an altar, a washing machine (a callback to the Cain and Abel sequence in Castellucci’s Tragedia Endogonidia: #6 Paris NSFW), this one bleeding a red-stained cloth. A painting of an eagle floats in, and a monolithic black wall slowly rotates, revealing mirrored gold on one side. These images accumulate into a scenographic system less concerned with metaphor than with affect and action. In the second section, the walls are revealed from the black, like shadow in reverse, white and transparent, and Bérénice returns in a coarse sack-like garment, fragmented and diminished. Later, Titus and his confidant appear, embodied by two shirtless, lithe young men (Cheikh Kébé and Giovanni Armando Romano) engaged in a slow, synchronized movement sequence that evokes both classical frieze and adolescent swagger, vacillating between erotic and banal. The scene is scored with ambient gymnasium sounds: basketballs bouncing, sneakers squeaking. Theatrical references slide into the pedestrian and back again. Then is ruptures, twelve silent men, first glimpsed as senators through the curtains, strip naked in senatorial red sashes and enact a fevered, strobed sequence of wrestling, dragging, and ritualistic violence, climaxing with the hoisting and dropping of a massive, flesh-like slab, which they then pull over themselves like a skinned centipede led by a bust of Titus. These visual and sonic episodes do not illustrate Racine’s text but reverberate through it, cracking and shocking it to create a performative environment where emotion and politics are externalized through image, force, and form.
What lingered most was the tension between extreme visual control and the collapse it choreographs. Castellucci’s restraint in scenography—singular objects, a minimal palette, and carefully timed reveals— hums with embodied intensity. When the massive flesh-like slab is hoisted and dropped, again and again, it doesn’t just mark a climax of violence; it resonates like a failed offering, a ritual gone opaque. Huppert, amidst all of this, never disappears. Her presence is unwavering, even when her character is abject, overwhelmed by sound and objects. The glitter dusted on her hand at the beginning remains visible throughout, catching light in small gestures, a residue of former grace that clings long after sovereignty slips away. This decision, to allow one object to travel with her and shift in meaning over time, reflects a deeper dramaturgical logic in the piece: nothing resolves, everything echoes. What does it mean to witness Bérénice’s rejection staged not as a singular heartbreak, but as a system of forces, rhythms, and machines? At what point does empire transform abjection into spectacle, and how does performance resist or replicate that transformation? The piece never answers these questions, and doesn’t need to. Instead, it moves through them, staging both the durability and disposability of the female subject within a civic structure designed to erase her. What stood out was not a single image, but the way images kept breaking themselves open, loosening their meaning through repetition, displacement, or excess.
Bérénice sits firmly within the trajectory of Castellucci’s decades-long dismantling of theatrical language, but it does so with a clarity and refinement that feels sharpened by time. The red-stained cloth in the washing machine recalls the domestic horror of Tragedia Endogonidia: #6 Paris (NSFW), while the closing image, Huppert seated midstage, slurring and stuttering her final lines as enormous sculptural flowers wilt and fall, echoes the haunting collapse of beauty in Purgatorio. These echoes are not repetitions but mutations. Castellucci’s work has long explored the fragility of the sacred, the grotesque precision of machines, and the instability of the flesh. Here, those concerns converge in a performance that resists maximalism while remaining saturated with image and ritual. Within the broader field of contemporary performance, Bérénice participates in a lineage of postdramatic works that refuse catharsis and narrative resolution, aligning more closely with affective landscapes than plot. The piece also resonates with artists like Gisèle Vienne, Robert Wilson, and jaamil olawale kosoko, who use the stage as a site of interruption, delay, or excess. Yet Castellucci’s approach remains singular in its fusion of philosophical violence and scenographic seduction. He builds systems of sound, architecture, and movement, then lets them repeat and decay. In Bérénice, that decay is political, personal, and historical. Her disintegration is not just emotional, it is choreographed through material, time, and pressure. What emerges is a vision of performance as civic autopsy, where the body onstage bears the accumulated weight of empire, rejection, and ritual display.
Bérénice is not a reinterpretation of Racine, but a reckoning with its architecture, its limits, pressures, and hollowed-out interiors. Castellucci doesn’t adapt the play so much as detonate it, letting its formal elegance splinter into a field of images, objects, and conditions. What remains is not the arc of a tragedy, but a staging of systems that produce abandonment, the slow violence of sovereignty, and the spectacle of rejection and disappearance. It is a performance that demands endurance, not resolution. For those who follow Castellucci’s work, this piece marks a distilled and mature articulation of his evolving aesthetic concerns. For others, it offers a demanding entry into a field of contemporary performance that privileges density, friction, and affective disorientation over narrative ease. Romeo Castellucci’s Bérénice ran at the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam as part of the 2025 Holland Festival. To witness Bérénice is to encounter a piece that doesn’t comfort or console, but exposes the machinery of devotion, collapse, and control, at once intimate and civic, lush and annihilating.
