“C’est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée / It is Venus in her might seizing her prey”

Racine’s Queens takes three feverish monologues from three masterpieces by the French playwright Jean Racine—Bajazet (1672), Bérénice (1670), and Phèdre (1677)—and stages them as a one-woman odyssey through the stages of love. Performed in English and French, the performance centres on the idea of a love lost in translation, but universal in essence: What happens when a love affair is made impossible?

Jean Racine was one of the leading dramatists of 17th-century France. Racine’s Queens is staged and performed by Inge-Vera Lipsius as an exploration of a ‘new form’ of Baroque theatre—through a female lens—informed by her training at Ecole Philippe Gaulier and Ecole Jacques Lecoq. Lipsius is an American-Dutch director, theatre-maker, writer, and performer. Her latest piece, Facility 111 (original writing), was presented at Assembly at the Edinburgh Fringe 2025, and was featured in Lyn Gardner’s Top 20 Picks for the Fringe, receiving 4 stars from The Scotsman and Theatre Weekly.

In 2025, Lipsius’s play Quad Loop—the first play on the doping scandal surrounding Kamila Valieva at the 2022 Winter Olympics—was one of six pieces selected, from over 300 submissions, for the Bomb Factory Theatre New Writing Showcase at the Bush Theatre. In 2024, Quad Loop had its UK premiere at Pushkin House in Bloomsbury, London, ahead of the Paris 2024 Summer Games. Lipsius made her directorial debut at The Merchant House, Amsterdam, with Paranoia (2022/23), her adaptation (the first stage adaptation) of the post-war novella by the classic Dutch author Willem Frederik Hermans. She is a graduate of the University of Cambridge and Ecole Philippe Gaulier in France.

Staging, adaptation, performance: Inge-Vera Lipsius
Pictures: René Lazový
Video documentation: Balazs Weidner