Maximalist Minimalism: Montenez’s Hamlet in Van Hove’s Odéon Universe
There are directors. And then there is Ivo van Hove—the man who can stage emotional apocalypse on an empty stage and make it look like a blockbuster shot inside your nervous system.
At the Odéon–Théâtre de l’Europe, with the blazing troupe of the Comédie-Française, van Hove delivers a Hamlet that feels less like a revival and more like a controlled detonation.
Through a tightly focused cast, he plunges straight into the tormented subjectivity of the Danish prince. Hamlet is traumatized by his father’s sudden death and his mother’s suspiciously speedy remarriage to a throne-stealing uncle.
Scene after scene, the stage morphs into a mental war zone.
We are not watching Denmark.
We are inside a mind under siege.
Van Hove has often embraced the label “maximalist minimalist” (thank you, Ben Brantley), and honestly? It fits like couture.
His aesthetic is stripped to the bone: black stage, bare space, curtains like surgical partitions.
But emotionally it’s operatic.
The volume is at eleven even when nothing moves.
That paradox is his signature: reduce the décor, amplify the soul.
And none of this would be possible without his lifelong artistic (and life) partner, the visionary scenographer and costume designer Jan Versweyveld. Versweyveld—whose very name sounds like a gust of velvet slicing through space.
He has shaped van Hove’s visual universe for decades. Together, they’ve built an empire of light, shadow, glass, fabric, and architectural precision. If van Hove is the emotional arsonist, Versweyveld is the master of controlled combustion.
The costumes here—sleek suits, corporate silhouettes, contemporary severity—turn Shakespearean royalty into boardroom predators. Claudius doesn’t look medieval. He looks like he owns three hedge funds and your data.
This Hamlet marks van Hove’s fourth collaboration with the Comédie-Française, after Les Damnés, Électre/Oreste, and Tartuffe. A decade of shared language.
You can feel the trust. The precision. The appetite for risk.
The opening is pure cinema. A black stage. A man in a dark suit. Ominous music. Silence so thick it feels upholstered.
Then—snap—a vast white curtain drops like a blade and becomes a crumpled projection screen.
Close-up.
Extreme close-up.
Sergio Leone would applaud.
We zoom into Hamlet’s eye until we are practically renting space in his pupil.
The music swells. An explosion exhales.
We leave the rational world and descend into psychic freefall.
And in the center of this vortex: Christophe Montenez.
What. A. Shock.
For nearly two hours he doesn’t leave the stage so much as haunt it.
Clear gaze, slightly fractured voice, long blond hair slicked back like a fallen angel who discovered existential dread.
He is shy and feral at once.
His Hamlet begins with intellect—he believes in theatre, in art, in revelation. He stages the mousetrap to catch the conscience of the king.
The sequence—choreographed by Rachid Ouramdane—becomes the gravitational center of the show. Dance invades drama. Bodies pulse. The trap snaps.
And yet: art fails. The truth does not save anyone.
That’s when the pivot happens.
The youth, humiliated and powerless, radicalizes. Thought curdles into action.
Van Hove isn’t just staging Shakespeare—he’s staging the moment a generation loses faith in institutions and decides to burn the script.
The cast is razor-sharp.
Florence Viala’s Gertrude is elegance cracking under pressure.
Guillaume Gallienne’s Claudius is corporate rot in a tailored suit—he even doubles as the ghost, crawling reptilian across the stage like guilt made flesh.
Denis Podalydès gives us a Polonius so unexpectedly human, so gently paternal, that his fate hits harder than usual. Gone is the hysterical caricature; here he is almost tender.
Which makes the strangling scene feel like a live wire across the throat of reason.
And the music? Oh, van Hove doesn’t do polite Renaissance background noise.
He goes full “total theatre.”
We get Stromae’s “L’Enfer,” sung as Ophelia spirals into madness; Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” detonating during the play-within-the-play; and Bob Dylan’s “Death Is Not the End,” chanted and danced by the ensemble at the funeral.
It’s half ritual, half rock concert, wholly unforgettable.
Then comes the monologue.
“To be or not to be.” In the translation by Frédéric Boyer, it lands like a late-night confession into a camera lens.
Not rhetorical. Not museum-grade.
Urgent. Exhausted. Dangerous.
“To die: to sleep, nothing more.” In Montenez’s mouth, it sounds less like poetry and more like a viable option.
Visually, the evening is a succession of indelible frames: Claudius praying in cold corporate lighting; Gertrude shattered under her son’s fury. A strobe-lit duel between Hamlet and Laertes that feels like a nightclub at the edge of annihilation. Ophelia wanders soaked in her white nightgown.
The final carnage unfolds like a slow-motion car crash you cannot look away from.
Van Hove has often cited Patrice Chéreau as his absolute master, and you can sense that lineage—the physical intensity, the erotic charge of bodies in space, the belief that staging is moral architecture.
But van Hove is no disciple. He is an architect of emotional implosion in his own right.
This Hamlet doesn’t politely ask, “Who’s there?”
It asks, “What happens when clarity becomes unbearable?”
Answer: revolution.
Violence.
Beauty.
Applause that feels like survival.
I left stunned, exhilarated, slightly rearranged at the molecular level.
Shakespeare didn’t feel four centuries old.
He felt like breaking news filmed in extreme close-up.
By Giulia Dobre
Paris, Theatre de l'Odeon, le 20 Fevrier 2026.
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Luv you Giu and your writing! Hugs!
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