Raw 'Hard to be a God' by Mundruczó lingers on the surface #dekeuze

Things happen in places like this that cannot bear the light of day. We are deep in Rotterdam's container port, among the neon-lit transhipment yards and dark warehouses. In one of those raw warehouses are two truck trailers. One is set up as an illegal sewing workshop, the other is filled with earth and rubber tyres. They form the backdrop for Hungarian theatre-maker Kornél Mundruczó's performance 'Hard to be a god'.

The show tells the fairly inimitable story of Karoly, who wants to make symbolic torture porn to blackmail his father with it. That father once raped his sister and is now an MEP. Three women are lured to this sewing studio under false pretences to participate in those videos. Things do not end well for them, partly because the foreign film director has rather sadistic tendencies, damaging the ladies to the point of rendering them useless.

Then there is a madam who looks after the girls and a doctor. The latter in turn turns out to be an angel, who only dares to intervene when it is actually already too late. The style Mundruczó uses for his performance is fiercely realistic. The sewing workshop is decorated down to the smallest details and the actors' actions also leave nothing to the imagination. The girls are subjected to vaginal examinations, abortions are performed with a piece of iron soaked in Cif and people have sex on the workshop floor. Especially intense are the videos shot in the second container. The spectators cannot clearly see what happens in the container, but they do see the end result on video: a back is doused with boiling ater, a naked woman gets blood all over herself and is buried alive, there is beating and humiliation. Yet, as a spectator, you keep watching because the video creates a double distance. Not only is it theatre (and therefore not real), that video still ens creates an extra layer of safety. Literally, because the screen that shows the projections is also the screen that hides the torture chamber from our view. Combined with the unsubtle acting style (the actors scream, curse and hit, but introspection does not take place), 'Hard to be a god' threatens to become a rather flat whole of screaming texts and explicit images.

Yet you would do Mundruczó an injustice with that conclusion. The director shows us what we would rather not see, but what does happen every day in places like the port of Rotterdam. Thanks to European regulations, women from the Eastern Bloc come to the West every day and are horribly exploited there. We don't want to see that, but it is reality. At least Karoly then uses the women to make the world a little better in his own sick way. Moreover, in all that ugliness, Mundruczó occasionally manages to evoke a beauty that is not there in reality. Occasionally the characters interrupt their pursuits to perform pop songs in wonderful ways, with even the dead coming back to sing along. This is not to say that 'Hard to be a god' is a successful performance. For that, Mundruczó tries to put too much into the performance. It is a pamphlet, a parable about the European Union, a revenge tragedy and then there is a religious aspect. These individual layers are all so sparsely developed that they only stick to the surface. This is a pity, because with his explosive directorial style, Mundruczó could have told more interesting things than he does.

Hard to be a god, seen: De Rotterdamse Schouwburg, 22 September. Still to be seen until 24 September