Inattention is hard to stage. But Kris Verdonck (assisted by Marianne van Kerkhoven as dramaturge) does it, at the risk of alienating his audience. The absurd logic of Charms - the world upside down, a reality that applied not only to Stalin's Russia - finds its way to the stage of the City Theatre in a slowly constructed litany of austere scenes.
Domestic situations, including roller skates, mops and plastic gloves, strip the performance of any possible prestige. What is witty and could be played out splashily gets bogged down in helplessness far more often than you would like as a spectator. The three actors, with Jan Steen leading the way, are excellent as anti-heroes in a plotless oeuvre of countdown rhymes, hilarious dialogue and cartoonish scenes. As true antipodes, Icelandic singer Erna Ómarsdóttir and her colleagues master the repertoire of deceitful innocence and unrestrained cruelty.
Where in the 1980s (Chaim Levano, Hauser Orkater) the absurdism of Charms still connected with a cheerful kind of civil disobedience, today bitterness seems to have taken over, as if the sweetness of rebellion has left us. Frightening is the repetition, not even an open-minded cucumber salesman can do anything about that. Only the music machines can move with their true innocence.
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