2014 was the year of The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, award-winning stage adaptation by Ivo van Hove. This year, that performance has been outstripped by 'Passions Humaines', written by Erwin Mortier, magisterially designed by Guy Cassiers. Again at the Holland Festival, confirming its place as a stage for the great debate on art. Two plays in which architecture, artistry and social vision are themes. And that is where the similarity ends: For Passions Humaines is untoldly deeper, more multicoloured and richer than The Fountainhead.
Human drives, or Passions Humaines, are not just about the sculpture of that title, which is what the play initially seems to be about. Ako winner Erwin Mortier, the play's author, seized on the bizarre history of this work by artist Jef Lambeaux to describe an entire century, an entire country, and an entire people. And this Belgian does it so cleanly that it puts the pamphleteering work of the American grandmother of neoconservatives Ayn Rand in the shade.
In a nutshell, the sculpture Passions Humaines was controversial even when it was first presented in Brussels in 1889: pornographic according to Catholics, innovative according to liberals. King Leopold II, who had set up his private colony Congo had looted and massacred to beautify Brussels, nevertheless commissioned it. He commissioned a still young and unknown architect Victor Horta to create a pavilion to be built around it, so that it would occupy a place of honour in the Jubilee Park created by the art-loving monarch.
Architect and sculptor did not agree on the plans, and shortly after its opening, the pavilion with the sculpture inside was closed to the public. The forgotten corner of royal private property was still given as empty real estate in 1967 to the king of Saudi Arabia, who wanted to build a mosque on it, but this ran aground on protests from the population. The still-obscured 'Human Drifts' fell further into disrepair until the pavilion finally qualified for restoration in 2014. However, the 'drifts' themselves remained off limits until mid-May this year.
Mortier sets the fate of the sculpture as a symbol of the way Belgians themselves have always dealt with their own and national feelings. Two of the main male characters, a critic and a trade unionist, are embroiled in a homosexual relationship, while both are also married, but there is also discussion between anarchists and liberals, art lovers and haters, the king and his mistress. All this is subtly interwoven with the political history of Belgium, which in the 19e century was really only allowed to exist as a buffer between notoriously quarrelsome Britain, Germany and France, and thus actually symbolises the European idea.
How topical do you want it to be, without laying that topicality on thick? The writer gets it right through warm-blooded dialogue, in which passions flare up but never violently ignite, and the direction shapes it like a relief, with sliding panels and sounds of a tropical orangery in the chilly north. Like no other, Guy Cassiers can couple beauty with eloquence. He once managed to bring Marcel Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time' to the stage and did the same a short time later with Musil's 'Man Without Qualities'. Great literature, great themes, but so full of attention to the human form that depth comes almost naturally.
Far too much has been written and said about the meaning of art in recent years. Even in Belgium, liberal austerity forces artists to make grand apologies, sermons to their own parish and cries in the wilderness. A stage work like Passions Humaines takes those pleas to the next level. It also shows how the rich and powerful use and abuse art for their own gain.
Passions Humaines can still be seen at Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg tonight (16 June 2015), Information.
Photo above: Kurt van der Elst
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