Due to success re-runs: Conversations with my Mother

In 2013, production group Diamond Factory and ensemble New Amsterdams Peil presented the full-length show Conversations with my Mother. Director Matthias Mooij (1976-2014) and composer Benedict Weisser (1967) asked seven male authors to write a fictional telephone conversation with their mother. At the heart of the piece is the fundamental inequality of communication between mother and son.

'I recommend all mothers and sons to go and see the performance, it will do the perennial relationship good,' wrote the NRC. The Volkskrant was equally positive: 'Strikingly close and relatable, the seven scenes create the image of a mother and son who cannot let go of each other.' Conversations with my Mother will soon go on tour again, again with the musicians of Nieuw Amsterdams Peil and with the same cast. I spoke to Weisser and Mooij before the premiere three years ago. By then, the director was seriously ill and died in July 2014.

How did the idea for this show come about?

Mooij: 'The thought bubbled up when I was once travelling in the car with the actor Bart Klever. He was talking on the phone to his mother and it struck me how musical such a conversation actually is, and how universal. Silences fall, there are many repetitions, sentences remain unfinished, all musical motifs. I also recognised a pattern in the conversations with my own mother, because although Klever is already of age, I sometimes heard in him a child of four.'

Weisser: 'Sylvia Stoetzer, artistic director of Diamantfabriek, paired me with Matthias and I was immediately enthusiastic about his idea. I also recognised in this my own phone calls from the Netherlands to my mother in New York: the line was often bad, we regularly fell silent and the time difference made us seem to live in different worlds.'

The libretto is based on fictional telephone conversations written by authors such as Abdelkader Benali, Tommy Wieringa and Marcel Lenssen. Why this choice?

Weisser: 'While brainstorming, we thought that we should not limit ourselves to one mother-son relationship, but pull it wider. Otherwise the libretto would become too static.'

Mooij: 'We wanted to capture the complexity of a mother-son relationship without falling into clichés or a one-sided perspective. By commissioning texts from authors in different age groups, we hoped to get a richer spectrum of perspectives. In essence, it's a universal thing: you want to be with your mother, but also strive for independence; it's a kind of struggle you fight throughout your life, after all. Moreover, as time goes on, the relationship changes, because as a child you are cared for by your mother, but later the roles reverse and you take care of her.'

Rugs from worn shirts

The décor is largely determined by shirts and rugs. What is their function?

Mooij: 'That was an idea of our designer, Piia Maria. She comes from Finland, where according to tradition, people cut up worn shirts and shirts of the deceased into strips to weave rugs from them. Thus, you can find rugs all over Finland that are brimming with memories of past times and deceased loved ones. In the course of the play, the stage image becomes denser and all sorts of things happen to those shirts. You can think of them as personifying the different sons and their mothers.'

How did the music come about?

Weisser: 'The seven texts are very diverse and kaleidoscopic and I saw it as my basic task to forge them into a unity through my music. I work with a small amount of material, which develops very gradually. Within that, I try to discover something new each time, in order to maintain tension from scene to scene.'

'The somewhat awkward manner of communication between mother and son evokes associations for me with cogs that don't mesh properly. That's why I built in a rhythmic awkwardness. Right from the very first bar, the five musicians of Nieuw Amsterdams Peil play in a kind of polyrhythm. The intention is to sound one five-part chord, but they never quite come together - in English, you might say: the gears do not mesh. They also sometimes sing and speak at the same time.'

Erard piano versus spinet

'I also use three different keyboard instruments. First, an Erard piano from the early nineteenth century, a transitional instrument between the fortepiano and the modern grand piano. It has a "hot" sound and remains transparent even in the most extreme registers. This makes it ideally suited to super rhythmic music, and it combines beautifully with the percussion.

Opposite is a baroque spinet, cold as ice, which I connect to the chilly violin. Finally, there is a modern, but actually already dated, Korg synthesiser. It sounds very warm and present, but is monophonic and so can only produce single notes. It fits nicely with the lows of the bass clarinet and double bass. This gives me many possibilities to colour the diversity of the lyrics.'

Besides the material from the seven authors, there is also a lament, based on other sources. Which ones and why?

Mooij: 'The lament is an important song form in classical music and many of the lyrics are about fear - of loss, the mother's aging and so on. But of course it also happens that the son dies earlier. We decided to bring in this perspective at two-thirds of the piece, to tip things off.'

Weisser: 'Sylvia came up with the book Falling out of time which David Grossman wrote about his son, who was killed in the Lebanon War. We had previously approached him for this project and he gave us permission to use an excerpt from his novel. The great thing is that singer Keren Motseri is also from Israel. When I asked Young Hee Kim if she had something similar, she immediately mentioned Arirang, a kind of unofficial anthem of South Korea, which is also about the loss of sons. This matched Grossman's lyrics perfectly.' 

Mutual dependence

Mooij: 'Because the two grieving mothers sing a lamento in their own language, they come very close to themselves for a moment. The son gets totally confused at that moment, because he is suddenly the subject of impermanence himself. What comes next is a kind of echo of things we have heard before.

A relative calm emerges, in which for the first time a real conversation takes place between mother and son. At that moment, the viewer also looks himself in the mirror. Because that is what it is ultimately about: two people trying to communicate with each other in a situation that is fundamentally disturbed. Between mother and son there are always those mutual dependencies and expectations.'

Playlist: 

Festival Cultura Nova at Cultuurhuis Heerlen - 30 August 2016
Compagnietheater Amsterdam - 30 September 2016
Theatre De Vest Alkmaar - 6 October 2016
Musis & Stadstheater Arnhem - 21 October 2016
Theatres Tilburg - 17 November 2016

This article was originally written for Musicof.nu