The theatre of Léna h. Coms develops a world in which myth becomes a tool for thinking about the present. Drawing on ancient tragedy, Symbolist literature, and philosophical poetry, her writing gives rise to works that exist at the boundary between theatre, performance, and fable. Foundational narratives — Medea, Oedipus, Penelope, Orpheus, and biblical figures — are never reinterpreted as historical reconstructions. Instead, they become contemporary archetypes through which love, exile, memory, the living world, and mechanisms of domination can be explored.

At the heart of this dramaturgy lies a principle of doubling. Characters enter into dialogue with their reflection, their double, or the life they might have lived: two Medeas emerging from a single choice, a man confronting his own soul in Nihil Delirium, Penelope confronted by the shadow of Odysseus, or two birds unable to share a common perception of the world. Identity is never fixed; it is constructed through contradiction, through the gaze of the other, and through the lives we might have led.

The works are also permeated by the motifs of Eros and Thanatos, approached not as psychological drives but as genuine theatrical objects. Love is a force of creation as much as a power of loss; death becomes silence, metamorphosis, or renewal. In Tempests, the Sea and the Sky shape the world together before watching their children forget their origins; in The Two Medeas, passion reveals as much as it consumes; in The End of the World Is a Beginning in Itself, every apocalypse paradoxically opens the possibility of rebirth.

The theatre of Léna h. Coms belongs to the legacy of Symbolism while proposing a distinctly feminine rewriting of it. Whereas Symbolist playwrights often placed women in the roles of muse, virgin, or fatal figure, her works give them back their voices and their power to act. Medea, Penelope, the Sisters of Oedipus, and Eve/Mary Magdalene are no longer satellites revolving around male heroes: they become the centres of gravity of the narrative, carrying philosophical thought, memory, and creative power. Symbol no longer serves to idealise the feminine, but to explore universal experiences — desire, exile, transmission, motherhood, grief, and metamorphosis — through voices that have long been relegated to silence. This reworking of Symbolism thus brings the sacred, myth, and contemporary concerns into dialogue, within a form of writing in which poetry becomes as much an act of emancipation as a theatrical language.

Nature, finally, occupies a central place. Animals, plants, oceans, volcanoes, and birds are never merely scenery, but subjects in their own right, carrying their own memory and sensibility. This organic vision of the world runs through both the plays and the artist’s visual practice, where species become intermediaries between the human and the sacred. The living world is conceived not as an external environment, but as a community of interdependent forms of existence.

Through a dense, musical, and often incantatory language, Léna h. Coms creates a theatre in which the grotesque stands alongside the sublime, humour disarms tragedy, and the spectator is constantly invited to pass through the mirror of myth. Her plays offer fewer answers than poetic experiences: spaces in which the great narratives of the past recover a profoundly contemporary power of emotion and reflection.