Romeo Castellucci has an extraordinarily interesting relationship with current affairs. I have been following the theatre artist for a good 25 years now, and each time he makes performances that almost accidentally have something to do with the news of the day. Although he prefers not to. He didn't make his project 'Democracy in America' because Trump then started attacking that democracy in his first election. It premiered after that election, but was conceived before then. Has Romeo Castellucci become accessible with Democracy in America? #HF17 

Bros, the impressive performance about what male brotherhood is capable of (spoiler: not much good), was conceived before men in uniform tortured black George Floyd to death on an American street. When I spoke to him about it, he revealed that he was rather bothered by those current events because he felt they got in the way of his universal message: 'Bros', Romeo Castellucci's theatrical liturgy of violence by men in uniform. To be seen in the Holland Festival 

With Hey Girl perhaps in 2007, the Italian grandmaster foresaw all the misogynistic violence and femicide so prevalent today. 

Jewish queen

And now there is Bérénice, first and foremost Jean Racine's 1670 play, but secondly the story of a Jewish queen of the Roman territory of Palestine, who is crushed by the machinations of male, Roman rulers who do not want a female colleague. In this case, too, Castellucci is not concerned with current events that force us here to draw monthly red lines through The Hague, but with the destruction of a woman's life.

Above all, it is also the performance of Isabelle Huppert. She is the master actress who, in her stage work, can take the liberty of working with the most progressive directors. These men have to agree to one thing though: Huppert is a text actress, she is not going to say nothing for an entire evening. 

Integral Chekhov

A few years ago, this is how she managed to dissuade Tiago Rodrigues from deconstructing Chekhov's Cherry Garden as usual for him. The Portuguese we know here from his work with Death Horse did not delete a single letter of Chekhov: Tiago Rodrigues directs Isabelle Huppert in The Cherry Garden at the Holland Festival: 'From Chekhov, the best friend of all actors in the world, we play every note' - Culture Press.

With Castellucci, that must have been a much trickier discussion. The Italian visual theatre maker is not so much into text, but by now at least as famous as Isabelle Huppert. I can so imagine that Huppert wanted text anyway, and so he did not. My guess is that a compromise may have been reached at the time. Huppert, in the title role of Berenice, kept all the lyrics that Racine wrote for that character. The rest of the text has been deleted, the other characters replaced by a group of male extras who embody in impressive imagery the patriarchal Roman mess, toga and all. But never simultaneously with Huppert on stage.

Gauze cloths

Thus was then created a wonderful performance, in which Huppert transforms into the very loneliest character in theatre history. She moves on an empty stage, surrounded by gauze cloths. Almost invisible through theatre fog, and also from us, the spectators in Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg, separated by gauze. 

She speaks her lines to the invisible men who con her, and gets nothing in return. The moment when she seeks solace from a dickish radiator heater is typical Castellucci. He manages to connect the banal perfectly with the Romanesque bombast we are used to from him. 

At the end, when the fog lifts and the curtains fall, the light is too much for the fallen queen. This creates a slap in the audience's face that provides lots of material for afterthought.