The story of Andromache is (too) well known, often reduced to a single sentence that never changes: Orestes loves Hermione, who loves Pyrrhus, who loves Andromache, who loves Hector—who is dead. Decades of academic tradition, elevating Jean Racine and Andromaque, one of his earliest tragedies, into monuments of classical beauty as cold and eternal as marble, have gradually erased the scandalous subversive force of this web of interlocking desires spiralling toward death, madness and mutual destruction.

In order to reveal this burning, rebellious power, Belgian collective La Brute embraces radical simplicity. In a staging bordering on austerity, stripped of spectacle and built around costumes evoking an uncertain time and aesthetic, the company presents Racine’s text in its entirety. Through this sparseness emerge the violence and beauty of a merciless text, rediscovered almost as if for the first time, confronting us with themes that Racine’s tragedy addresses head-on, yet which contemporary societies often soften or erase: death, passion, and the brutal tensions between individual desire and collective order.

What if rediscovering the radical modernity of one of the repertoire’s most celebrated plays required not adaptation, transposition or contemporary reinterpretation, but rather exposing it completely bare, with as few effects as possible?