The complete untimeliness of Racine’s poetic verses, written in alexandrines, is what makes him contemporary. The dysfunctional language we know today comes from Beckett, Artaud and other poets, whereas Racine nullifies language through an excess of technique. He puts form under such a strain that nothing remains that is merely communicated. Thanks to the constraints of metre and rhyme, Racine gives technique the task of capturing meaning. He relies more on the pure form of the word than its content, and the form is what remains of the body, a mute body. Here, the alexandrines are like diviner’s tools whose purpose is to extract meaning, a meaning that comes only from the outside, from an outsider, and not from mere opinion, not from an easily accessible knowledge. Thus, with Racine, technique becomes an arcane greenhouse where unheard-of flowers, not born out of nature alone, are cultivated.

In Bérénice, the character only truly appears when the time has come to exit. Exiting the stage, like a Triumph, is enormously more important than entering. How else to describe “Berenice”, if not as a long, drawn-out exit strategy? It takes an entire art of rhetoric, along with an iconography and an impossible Christian usage of Greek tragedy, to conceive such a principle of movement. At the end of the tragedy, all the characters take their leave of one another without shedding a single drop of blood; the haemorrhage is internal. But even I, the spectator, at the end of the play – or the reading – am left speechless. Where is the drama? I felt it at every step, at every moment, but I cannot say that I witnessed it.

All the postures, the chastity, the politeness, the modesty, the love that loves – and for this very reason, abandons – serve to represent the Theatre of the Cruelty of love. Love as the Orient, the Land of Hope. Chastity, as the supreme form of morbidity. Everything is restrained and slowed down; in a word, the field of desire opens up before us in all the devastating virulence of this theatre. Here, renunciations carry more weight than actions, bloodshed or copulations. A paralytic theatre. One sole object: I don’t think there is anything more static and unnerving in the entire history of Western dramaturgy. And yet, it brings us to tears.

The words become concentric, like drug-induced fumes, and the dialogues are actually feverish monologues. “Bérénice” is a text that says nothing, and this is its oblation. This, in the end, is its madness, its way of being “contemporary art”.

On stage, like a fixed star, Isabelle Huppert portrays Bérénice, in the peculiar and ontological solitude of the theatrical character and the human being. Only two other actors will be present, appearing as Titus and Antiochus, and a few Roman senators. All of their words will be unintelligible, and blurred by Bérénice’s own voice. The sounds of the performance – all of them, both heard and unheard – are generated by Isabelle Huppert’s voice, elaborated by artist Scott Gibbons.

Isabelle Huppert is the synecdoche of the art of Western theatre; she is the actress, but also the actor, by definition. Isabelle Huppert is “representation as such” (one goes to the theatre to see Isabelle Huppert play Berenice), she is the flame calling us to gather. She is Theatre.