Horror and humour vie for power at Festival Boulevard #tfboulevard

Project Cloud, the latest experiential artwork by Bossche city artist Lucas de Man, may need a disclaimer. Anyone entering the seven-storey work had better not do so in the company of a solid existential crisis. The visitor before me did, and still needed a very good talk with a psychological counsellor afterwards. Which fortunately was available, which is another great thing about Festival Boulevard: the wellbeing of the visitor is paramount at this huge, multi-coloured festival.

I had only Joop, my recently deceased hangover, to mourn and could therefore mostly appreciate the beautiful game of life questions, choice and fantasy that Lucas the Man offered me.

Computer game

That game takes place in a dark stairwell, through which you are guided by a sweet voice on your headphones. It's a bit like an old computer game, in the Myst or Riven category, but without the ability to retrace your steps. Here you must always move forward, into the next corridor, up or down the next staircase and through the next door, at some point also facing the futility of your own choice stress. Time no longer plays a role, neither does place.

You end up on the roof of an unused school building, overlooking Den Bosch, engulfed yesterday by menacingly chasing clouds. Not for the psychologically weak, then, but a purifying experience for everyone else.

Heavenly Mud

For instance, I was fairly free of mind when - after a festive and very successful Hieronymus Bosch dinner full of heavenly mud, waiters turned into sausages and tree trunk puree by the Flemish cooking theatre company Laïka - I joined the performance Ill Youth by Flemish theatre Zuidpool in the main hall of the Verkadefabriek. That was a great bummer, which must be attributed mainly to directors Koen van Kaam and Jorgen Cassier. This illustrious duo took the big attraction of this show, young up-and-coming actors from Flemish theatre courses, to god.

Beginners are of course allowed to make mistakes, and every generation is allowed to do so, but let's keep it within the rehearsal space. Van Kaam and Cassier thought to perform Ferdinand Bruckner's play 'Krankheit der Jugend' as a half-washed version of Japanese Kabuki theatre. In this ill-informed case, that means the actors all face the audience and are assigned two emotions: neutral or totally emotional, and two attitudes: sitting on the floor or standing. And that tea is drunk sitting down in peignoir.

Salt bags

Quite apart from the fact that traditional Japanese theatre is a craft, even more a way of life, it was totally out of place as a form idea for this naturalistic text. The young actors had no contact with each other, but stood on stage like bags of salt, reciting their lines one after the other, always in the same vacuous tone. Invariably also without really listening to their counterpart, or even showing any suggestion that what was heard was being collected. Outbursts of anger were identical, the tempo constant, and because they apparently had to play 'big', the young savages turned into poor imitations of the Grootsche Theatre we know from black-and-white TV, with names like Ko van Dijck or even Louis Bouwmeester: rolling erren, clichéd turns of phrase, old-fashioned gestures, wide-open eyes and, to top it all off, an embarrassingly humourless aria replayed. It ain't over till the fat lady sings, they say, but here it took at least another hour or so afterwards before we were allowed to grab our coats.

If this is to be the epitome of the up-and-coming generation of Flemish theatre makers, one must hold one's heart. Then the peak of the Zuiderbuur stage is behind us. Tell me, it is not. Send these directors on a course. Pottery or something.