A clearing in the forest. It could be idyllic, but from the forest come suspicious noises. Men are singing and pulling tractors. The echoes of explosions echo.
It's all just fake. It's just theatre - which nevertheless instils fear. Daria Bukvic, a newly graduated director from the Drama School Maastricht, made a performance about her mother. Who fled war-torn Yugoslavia. Destroyed can be seen closer, at Air Base Soesterberg. The soldiers, the real ones, have left. Actors playing soldiers replaced them.
They creep out of the forest, the soldiers in Devastated. They come from left and right and they look around spying. Between them, in a square, lies a comrade. Was he wounded in battle? Many questions remain open. Bukvik uses no text, no spoken words. She prefers evocative images.
Suddenly, we see a woman. Daria's mother for sure, we think childishly pleased. The woman is sitting high above the square, on a ledge of a dreary building. It is one of the many bombproof aircraft shelters left at Soesterberg as reminders of the Cold War. Grey concrete, an intimidatingly high roof. For the woman, the ledge is sentry and shelter at the same time. Intense, she peers around her. Is she looking out for someone? For the fallen soldier who lay beneath her in the square?
Daria's mother, Bukvik once told me, had been separated from her husband for years during the Yugoslav war. Of the woman on the ledge, at least one thing is certain: she is all alone. An attempt by her to make herself cosy, with a chair, a lamp, a book, does not succeed too well. Too many thoughts overwhelm her.
What then passes by the spectators could be her imagination. Wonderful is the image of a bizarre farm cart. Pulled by a deer (well, by an actor with antlers on his head), embellished with a cheerful pianist and decorated with letters that are also paper aeroplanes. The woman reaches for the planes, for the signs of life that are so terribly important to her. But one letter really gets to her. It comes not from the cart but from the roof of the shelter, like a butterfly fluttering along the concrete wall - again, a beautiful image.
Meanwhile, the strange noises continue. They come from all sides, including from the shelter itself. War noises mingle with folk sounds, with music from a Yugoslav childhood. Melancholy for lost innocence surfaces, and longing for a better time.
Bukvic, accompanied by Soldier-of-Orange-director Theu Boermans, also achieves the surreal atmosphere she wants to evoke by having her actors move very slowly. The combination of delay and stillness makes the woman even more isolated than she already is.
Too bad only that Devastated is over so quickly. And that you don't know what happens to the soldiers, played by five students from Maastricht. Some storyline, however simple, would have given even more substance to the performance. Next time, then: Bukcik has plenty up her sleeve!
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