Horror story of theatre show Coast overwhelms its narrators

Exactly how Little Red Riding Hood was eaten by the wicked wolf, the fairy tale does not tell. Fairy-tale-telling parents limit themselves to the before and after. And that the evil wolf is cut open by the hunter, freed from Little Red Riding Hood and filled with stones eventually ends up in a well to die is part of the winding down of the happy ending. Enough horror for the little ones.

As long as reality does not overtake the fairy tale.

Playwright Wajdi Mouawad faces that problem. How do you tell that a father gets a stick shoved down his arsehole, after which on the man's member, which has become hopelessly stiff due to that act, his doch... This is where I stop myself. Writing on would cause an internet ban curse, deletion from Facebook and more such things. But these are things that people tell in Wajdi Mouawad's play Coastal because they happened and because for them those events impede any otherwise normal existence in the present.

But how do you tell? If you can even get those lyrics out of your throat? Interesting question for the Ro Theatre actors, who, under the guidance of director Alize Zandwijk, are by now quite used to stage antics. In 'Branden', a play by Wajdi Mouawad that was finally brought here by Zandwijk's company after a worldwide victory tour, they finally reached a sublime level. The art, which is ultimately needed to make the story digestible, entered into a beautiful marriage with the authenticity of the not always professional actors Zandwijk likes to feature in her performances.

In retrospect, what was told in Branden is child's play compared to the story of Coast. In that play, now on show at its own Ro Theatre, Wilfried, a westernised child of Lebanese parents and beautifully played by Nasrdin 'fokking golden calf' Dchar, tells how he fails to bury his dead father. Not in the West, where his father's in-laws accuse him of murder, not in Lebanon, where the mountains where his father was born are filled with the corpses of the civil war.

The design is as effective as ever, but this time the road movie that the play actually is failed to really touch me. It stuck to rather drawn-out ramblings with an otherwise extraordinarily infectious acting corpse. Thinking back on why that bad experience happened, I cannot help but conclude that the narrators were not up to the task of telling their story this time. They themselves already think what they are telling is so bad that they are turning it on rather than toning it down. This is killing the effect because it leaves us, on the sidelines, no room to experience their feelings in our own way. We have to go along with their method of processing, and it is strange. Thus, the performance unintentionally creates distance.

A howling accordion then remains a howling accordion, even if played virtuosically by Oleg Fateev. If the first part still wants to end effectively in a smartlap on the edge, part two runs from larmoyant via shock to predictability.

That I prefer to hear a story from someone who wants to remain above his suffering, from someone who does not want to overload his audience with light-heartedness, may of course be something very personal. But for me, it is the only way I let such a story come in. That succeeded, for example, with the stories and powerpoint presentations which a number of Beirut-based theatre-makers have shown in Dutch theatres in recent years. They remained astonished-neutral under their stories. Out of respect, because no sense shown, however authentic perhaps, can do justice to it.

I missed that modesty the Friday night I attended the performance 'Coast'.

Still to be seen in February 2012