Berenice: Translated from Jean Racine's Bérénice by Rosie Hilal

Berenice is an academically rigorous, poetically sensitive and politically hard-hitting translation of Jean Racine's celebrated 17th century tragedy.

An adapted version of her text with movement was first staged in 2018 in a co-production between Theatre Forge and Exchange Theatre as part of Voila! Europe theatre festival under the title Becoming Berenice with original drum and bass music by Tomas Wolstenholme to sold-out audiences.

Unusually retaining the original French structure of rhyming 12-beat couplets, or Alexandrines, this modern English version seeks to highlight the Western colonial expansion in the Middle-East against which the story plays out, and of which we are arguably reaping the ever more violent repercussions.

This tale of one woman's emancipation in the face of star-crossed love is the first English translation of this European classic by a woman and a person of Middle-Eastern descent.