“What makes Racine contemporary,” says Castellucci, “is precisely his irrelevance. The Alexandrian meter of his verses is the frozen form of a human tableau paralyzed by tragic stalemate and the dysfunction of language. Love is the Theater of Cruelty. Here, renunciations carry more weight than actions, blood, or sexual encounters. Education and chastity are new erotic tools that bind the bodies; violence is endocrine, and the brake is more powerful than the accelerator. The energy, which does not explode, is held back within a body now stripped of words. A paralyzed theater, *Bérénice* is probably the most motionless, static, and unnerving “tragedy” ever conceived. And yet we weep. And yet Bérénice—one might say—is me .
On stage, like a fixed star, Isabelle Huppert [Molière Lifetime Achievement Award, ed.] portrays Bérénice, the peculiar and ontological solitude of the theatrical character and the human figure. Alongside her are only two other actors, playing Titus and Antiochus, and several Roman senators. All their words are incomprehensible and muddled by Bérénice’s own voice. Almost all the sounds in the play—heard and unheard—are generated by Huppert’s voice and processed by the artist Scott Gibbons. Isabelle Huppert is the synecdoche of Western theater; she is the actress, but also the actor, by definition; she is Theater itself manifesting, even before the meaning it conveys.”