Lisaboa Houbrechts

Lisaboa Houbrechts (°1992) is an author and director of theatrical works situated at the intersection of visual art, opera, dance, and music and spoken-word theatre, with a distinct international profile. The British arts magazine The Stage named her one of the top five theatre directors in early 2025. Lisaboa Houbrechts resolutely opts for the grand gesture and tells epic stories centred on gender and sexuality, connecting the small with the large, the intimate with the monumental, the personal with the political, and the non-religious with the mystical. She is drawn to divine rituals and creates universes of an indeterminate spirituality for humanity trapped in a chain of desires.


Lisaboa Houbrechts graduated with top honours from School of Arts | KASK - Drama in Ghent in 2016. Four years earlier, she had founded her own company, Kuiperskaai, together with Victor and Romy Louise Lauwers and Oscar van der Put. She created her first productions as a writer and director with the Kuiperskaai company. Even then, her work was characterised by a large cast, unpredictable interaction between image and text, and an intelligent fusion of various disciplines: performance, music, choreography, literature and visual arts. This is evident in works such as De Schepping/The Creation (2013) and The Goldberg Chronicles (2014), which the press described as “an immense clash of energies”: “the language is colour, the acting is image, the music is paint.” In 2016, Lisaboa made a huge impression with her dazzling adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and in September 2017, 1095 premiered, based on a text by Victor Lauwers. “It’s bursting with daring and the joy of acting,” wrote Lotte Philipsen in Knack.

Her desire for grand gestures did not go unnoticed. In 2017, Guy Cassiers invited Lisaboa Houbrechts to take part in the P.U.L.S. (Project for Upcoming Talent for the Large Stage) programme at Toneelhuis. She collaborated with Alain Platel, Ivo van Hove and Jan Lauwers, and in 2018 created a raw and idiosyncratic adaptation of Hamlet. In it, she opens up new perspectives: she focuses on the destructive relationship between Hamlet and his mother, Queen Gertrude. By demonstrating Gertrude’s innocence, Houbrechts brings her to the heart of the repertoire. At the age of twenty-seven, and with the perspective she brings to Shakespeare’s world, Lisaboa Houbrechts made a grand entrance into the small community of those who matter within the European theatre scene with Hamlet.

In 2019 came the dazzling and musical Bruegel, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the 16th-century painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder and the era in which he created Dulle Griet: the woman reviled as a ‘man-woman’ because she steals objects for hell. But what if she isn’t stealing them, but actually trying to save them? Houbrechts seeks to subject historical narratives to a fresh perspective. Bruegel, like her other work, is baroque and bold, yet also playful and disarming. Just as in Hamlet, Houbrechts plays with the female perspective in Bruegel, yet it is not a production about feminism or women’s rights. Houbrechts’ entire oeuvre is a rejection of binary thinking in all its forms, and a plea for flexibility and fluidity. With her fluid aesthetic, she forces the viewer into a mental split.

Houbrechts continues to explore her interest in live music on stage in the moving I Silenti (2021). Fabrizio Cassol, who got to know Lisaboa during her internship with les ballets C de la B for Requiem pour L. – a creation by Alain Platel, and Fabrizio Cassol – asked her to direct I Silenti for Théâtre de Namur. This extraordinary story takes its starting point from the figure of Tcha Limberger, a renowned blind Roma musician. I Silenti links the Porajmos, the forgotten Roma genocide during the Second World War, with fragments from Monteverdi’s madrigals that speak of love and war. Two worlds merge. A formidable ensemble of singers and musicians surrounds Limberger, whilst the Indian dancer Shantala Shivalingappa evokes echoes of the lost mother, the lost Indian origins of Tcha and his people. Lisaboa wrote ‘The burning secret of the archive’ in Etcetera about the performance and the journey leading up to it: https://e-tcetera.be/het-brandende-geheim-van-het-archief/

In 2023, Lisaboa Houbrechts created the poignant Grandpa Puss; or how God disappeared at laGeste, a text she wrote herself in which – guided by the music of Bach – she explores the boundaries of the divine and uncovers a dark trauma. Her narrative spans three generations; she looks back on the era of her grandparents, her parents and her own generation. With an intergenerational cast of children, singers, dancers and adult performers, she explores how small-scale history is interwoven with the larger narrative, the intimate with the monumental, the personal with the political, and the past with the present. In this family epic, baroque chaos and intense theatricality go hand in hand with stillness and an indefinable spirituality. Houbrechts manages to link the feeling of a classical Greek tragedy to a very unique, modern story. Grandpa Puss; or how God disappeared was selected for the TheaterFestival 2023.

Lisaboa Houbrechts is an internationally sought-after director. In 2023, she adapted and directed Euripides’ Medea at the renowned Comédie-Française in Paris – she is the youngest director to have been accorded this honour. In her adaptation, she staged a surprisingly meditative infanticide that formed part of a positive transgression. In 2024, she staged Yerma at Dramaten in Stockholm, Lorca’s timeless drama about childlessness and revenge. Immediately afterwards, her production of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice premiered at the Hanover State Opera. In 2025, she directed Richard Strauss’s opera Elektra at Theater St. Gallen in Switzerland. In September 2025, she directed Vinter/Winter by Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse at the invitation of the International Fosse Festival in Oslo.

In the 2024–2025 season, Lisaboa Houbrechts will take on the direction of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage at Toneelhuis and KVS. Once again, an iconic story about an enigmatic woman, to which she has applied a new dramaturgical approach. She taps into the emotional layer that remains beneath the surface in Brecht’s work and translates it into musical and abstract-visual poetry. As in her earlier work, Lisaboa Houbrechts explores female guilt, intersexuality and infertility in Mother Courage.

In addition, since 2022, she has been responsible for the artistic direction of Toneelhuis, alongside Görges Ocloo, FC Bergman, Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe and Olympique Dramatique.

She is currently preparing her next project, Siddhartha, which will premiere at the Ruhrtriennale in September 2026. For this, she is adapting Herman Hesse’s iconic novel into a grand musical theatre production featuring compositions by New York-based Caroline Shaw.

In 2027, Lisaboa will create a production about the painter Caspar David Friedrich and will collaborate once again with laGeste on the production Moeke Kip.

update 04.2026