Do you write a review for people who are still going to the show, for people who have already been or for people who want to be informed? It is and always will be an eternal dilemma.
The Holland Festival performance 'En Manque' by Vincent Macaigne can only be seen on Thursday 8 and Friday 9 June at the Compagnietheater. So the chances of you, the reader, being there are relatively slim. But should you still go, stop reading now. This performance deserves an open mind, not preformed by me or anyone else.
Pep talk beforehand
The evening begins tantalisingly. First the earplugs handed out at the entrance. Then the introduction, by dramatist Tom Helmer, who offers us a pep talk cum mental self-defence course and wishes us that open mind. This introduction puts its finger on the sore spot called 'Holland Festival audience'. Every year, we see how the festival attracts not only cultural omnivores but also an audience of chic grey pigeons, stray schoolchildren with crisp bags and corps balls who come 'because it's proper'.
In a more than average experimental performance, this regularly leads to unrest, indignation and runaways. Lovely actually, all this commotion in our down-to-earth Dutch cultural landscape.
Earplugs in
Just as the first elderly people walk away, I plug in my set of earplugs. Just in time, because the volume knob goes up considerably after that. As an audience we have already been dragged out, kissed, shouted at by an Italian lady in a gold glitter suit and walked around the stage, decorated as a gallery. And viewed replicas of famous paintings of beheadings and martyrs there.
Director Vincent Macaigne is known to French audiences at large as romcom actor. As a creator, he takes a less lovely approach. His theatrical language consists of grand gestures: gallons of blood, smoke machines, loud music, bright strobe lights. Subtle it is not and it reminds me of the painter Jackson Pollock. No refined brushstrokes but wild, seemingly uncoordinated, landscapes of colour and movement.
The screaming Italian is the character Sophia Burrini, raised in the valley, in poverty, but married to one of the richest people on earth. She now lives on 'the hill'. Valley and hill are a recurring metaphor for underworld and upper world, plebs and elite, imprisonment and freedom. She turns away from the isolated life above and descends to the valley to pursue an idealistic foundation set up.
Her daughter Lisa, meanwhile, is plotting an attack on the affluent class. She wants her mother killed as the ultimate sacrifice to the people and her beloved Clara.
Houllebecqian generational conflict
Apart from a clash between the have's and the have not's this raucous action performance also thematises millennials' resistance to the baby boomers. What can you still resist when everything is possible and allowed? When your life is set up as a welfare paradise?
What the young people are left with in this performance is melancholy, loneliness and guerilla. Anything to create some kind of meaning after all.
In the underworld disco, the audience is drawn onto the floor to dance and drink beer. I can't dance but I join in. There is no academic distance appropriate to this performance. A few players wander lonely among us. They are the wallflowers, the seekers at a decadent party. Above the stage, the ceiling cloth sinks deeper and deeper under the weight of water.
With this scene, Mancaigne knows better than anyone to evoke associations of, on the one hand, an approaching apocalypse (read here the interview colleague Bertiena had with him.) and, on the other hand, a birth. His theatre may be grand, but it is not crude.
Purified, I walk to the cloakroom where three little ladies are blowing off steam. " Shameful!" " This is unacceptable" I hear them say. In short, a Holland festival performance Pur sang.
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