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Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro is a fast-moving comedy in which desire, jealousy and social tension intertwine. Figaro and Susanna wish to marry, but their plans are disrupted by Count Almaviva, who aims to claim Susanna for himself. Around them, a web of misunderstandings and shifting alliances unfolds, with the Countess quietly exposing her husband’s failings.

In this production, the entire opera takes place inside the Count’s study. His character is inspired by the Flemish writer Louis Paul Boon, who kept in his own workspace a collection of nude photographs of women, meticulously categorised by size, hair colour, age and similar criteria. This so-called feminatheek creates a deeply unsettling and destabilising environment for all the other characters. What once seemed the legacy of a generation shaped by the ideals of May ’68 — free love, openness, personal liberation — has hardened into entitlement and authority.

The Count’s world also carries the melancholic undertone of Michel Houellebecq’s Les Particules élémentaires: a generation once fuelled by utopian freedom now drifting into disillusionment, detachment and self-absorption. Within this atmosphere, the Countess tries to cope with her husband’s behaviour through heavy medication, underscored on stage by a Damien Hirst–like wall of pill containers. Together with Susanna, she attempts to contain the Count’s conduct. Meanwhile, Cherubino embodies everything that defies classification and resists any fixed labels.

The result is a Figaro that both invites and unsettles, examining how one generation’s promise of freedom can become a burden — and a challenge — for the next.