The contemporary mask or the agent of the strange

What might Lady Macbeth look like today? A monster, a dragon, a woman, a man, a totem? It's a bit of all of these things in the image Munstrum Theatre has given of her in its Makbeth , inspired by Shakespeare's famous play, premiered in February. This is thanks to the mask worn by actor Lionel Lingelser, who plays the Lady. The fetish object is at the center of the theater that this company, founded by Louis Arene and Lionel Lingelser, has been inventing since 2017, as an artifact of their superlative and queer theater, working at the heart of questions of identity and post-apocalyptic sentiment.

Emblematic of this revival of masked work, the Munstrum is not the only one to rediscover the powers of the persona . The mask has made a spectacular comeback in the performing arts in recent years, not only in theater, but also in dance. It is revived by artists of the younger generation, who flee like the plague from a naturalism that has become invasive.

For Louis Arene and Lionel Lingelser, it was an obvious choice for the "physical, sensual, raw theatre of antagonisms between laughter and fear" that they wanted to create, a theatre of catastrophe, identity and metamorphosis.

"But we didn't recognize ourselves in the existing traditions, these wooden or leather masks with often very marked archetypes. We wanted to move towards a strangeness, a disquiet, to erase as much as possible the border between the mask and the face, to create a disturbance. And therefore to erase the expression, so that the mask becomes a projection surface, with the idea of giving birth to a people of enigmatic dolls, of slightly ghostly characters," they explain.

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