Irrepressible, funny, touching Fast Car Ray. A boy whose head is never still, who does not sleep, to whom everything comes in and who just cannot manage to love himself. His illness, Tourette's Syndrome, makes him delusional and desperate. Tick-tock. On and on, on and on. Like a racing car.
Fast Car, the musical theatre performance Renske van den Broek commissioned by Plaza Futura, is the main performance of the Autumn Collection this Friday night. Afterwards, Van den Broek tells Oscar Kocken's radio show that she based the play on the books of professor of neurology Oliver Sacks because he talks about his patients in such a loving and nuanced way. It's not hard to start loving Ray's (Dion Vincken) monologue a little in the hour, too. Vincken portrays a wonderful, realistic character, endearingly himself, without inhibition. He races down the motorway at 280 kilometres per hour in his BMW, rattling and rapping until he has to gasp for breath and drumming until he drops. On his own, but also together with drummer and vibraphonist Jan van Eerd. Their lightning-fast, rousing drum parts, with which Ray tries to get a grip on the chaos in his head, impress. As do the deafening motorway sounds, the car radio and the electronic beats, which reinforce his story. The conversations with his psychiatrist, in which he invariably begs for medication, are both funny and painful. From peeling onions in his dayroom to arguing with an organic greengrocer to the black mamba, a venomous snake with a black palate. His associations are fast-paced, new questions constantly spring to mind; he doesn't wait for the answers. Once in a while, Vincken makes direct contact with the audience through a joke, which seems to fall into good ground, but as far as I am concerned did not have to. I bounced along with him a long time ago.
When his psychiatrist finally relents and prescribes him the anti-psychotic drug haldol, Ray switches from fifth gear to first. He becomes sluggish, cannot get out of his words and is a shadow of the Fast Car Ray he once was. During his transformation, the atmosphere in the hall also changes. The laughter subsides and gives way to silence, touched smiles and even an occasional tear. Pain in my stomach I get from this new 'OV Ray', drooling on the bus, too slow to press the button. The apathetic Ray, who likes watching chore programmes because in them everything works. And the Ray who fills up at Lady Gaga's 'white Eastern Bloc glamour'. Although I normally don't know how quickly to zap this pop icon away, now her sounds enter me with a brief screech. In short: Fast Car, go see it.
Meddler
The same evening, 'Bemoeial II' by theatre-maker and cultural anthropologist plays Menno Vroon. As in his earlier performance Bemoeial, he goes in search of the answer to the question: as a theatre maker, can I make the world a better place? Vroon turns out to be an idealistic guy. He would love to do it, improve the world, but he also wishes he did not want to, because it cannot be done.
So the answer to his main question is found pretty quickly. But Vroon wonders a lot of other things. As a theatre-maker, should he move from 'here' to 'there'? What will he do there? Could he teach them things? Would he be able to make them happy? Are they also concerned with here there? And will they see the good things or the bad things? He is curious about how people live and look at the world somewhere else.
With his background as a cultural anthropologist and campaigner at Greenpeace, it is not surprising that he asks himself these kinds of questions. But what exactly are we as theatre audiences supposed to do with it? He deploys mime to illustrate his quest. For instance, his performance begins at dusk with a man, theatre-maker Fabián Santarciel de la Quintana, looking at us. He says nothing, merely alternates between standing and sitting. Minutes pass and for a moment I fear he will go on like this for three quarters of an hour. I breathe a sigh of relief when Vroon himself enters the stage a moment later. After reading a speech from Thomas Bellinck ('We were dying and then we got a prize'), he starts stomping. Panting, he ends his stomping among the onlookers, who look at him somewhat in despair. He strikes up a conversation with someone and wonders if that kind of focused attention to each other could make the world a better place. No, he concludes again.
Through this kind of interaction with the audience, Vroon does manage to involve us in his questions. We think sympathetically with him and thus he has achieved his goal. The performance ends with a video clip of a man from Senegal, subtitled: 'Thanks for leaving us alone Menno. (...) Don't come to us. We have our own ideas.' So Vroon won't go to 'over there'. He will stay here and perhaps continue his quest in Bemoeial III. It is to be hoped that he will surprise and challenge us more then. And that he no longer scares us with such a primal boring beginning.
Autumn 2010 collection of Theatre Kikker, visited Friday 29 October 2010.
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