An unfathomable well of sadness in Thousand Yard Stare at #DeBasis

air base Soesterberg is full of large hangars, warehouses and other massive buildings. All dream locations for theatre-makers, it seems. Director Ilmer Rozendaal created for her show Thousand Yard Stare another choice. She placed the solo in a small, airy oak grove containing an old and dilapidated bunker. The timelessness of this place proved ideal for her small and human story.

A young boy comes running, a soldier. He is confused and panicking. Rolling on the ground in despair, he prays to God: 'forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.' He addresses the audience; his eyes feral and his posture and face twisted. Involuntarily, he scrapes his throat too hard, licks his lips a little too often. This soldier suffers from war neurosis, shellshock. 'The worst soldier's end is staying over,' he says. Skittishly, he looks around him. To stop remembering and forget how it was, that's what he wants. 'Bring me the peace I fought for!' he shouts to the blue sky shimmering between the oak leaves.

Gradually, a picture emerges of where this soldier fought. He tells in tangled snippets about the trenches he dug with his mates; how everything was orderly at first, but soon turned into a bloody, smelly, muddy mess. A picture of World War I is thus conjured up with just a few sentences.

The narrative is muddled, as befits this man's state of mind. Childhood memories, descriptions of the hellish conditions in the trenches, a conversation with one of his victims, anger at God and fear of living alternate. A sort of thread is the story of the newborn child the soldier finds in the midst of the fighting. Whether that is dream or reality does not really matter because for him it is reality. The child, of course, represents the innocence he so sorely lacks in these harsh conditions. The loss of the child - like Christopher carrying Jesus across the river, but this time failing in his mission - is therefore an unfathomable source of grief for him.

The newly graduated director Rozendaal already proved her skills as a play and text director earlier this year in an extraordinary staging of Medea - also in the open air - for which she won the Ton Lutz directing award. This time, she also shows her staging skills. The young actor Bram Suijker plays his role with abandon and fire, spitting out his words, ranting, cursing, laughing and crying at the ghosts in his head. Sometimes he overpowers himself a bit but then he always picks up the pace and surprises with an unexpected movement or sound. What is clever is how he reacts anxiously to the sound of cars unexpectedly whizzing around or planes flying overhead. Suijker literally explores every corner of the bush but it never comes across as contrived or forced for a moment.

The text, written by Alexander Schreuder, is poetic and evocative but occasionally a bit excessive and overly detailed. The precise descriptions sometimes obstruct the view of the game and the storyline. And the ending of the story is also nebulous. Have we perhaps not been watching a survivor after all? Is he not also proud of his actions? 'Don't remember me,' he mutters before walking away, into the forest. The question remains of what not to remember.