Review Hebriana: Dead-end lives

Put three neurotic sisters with their mother hen and errant brothers-in-law together in a parental holiday villa with beautifully translated lyrics by Las Norén and you're bound to get some nasty Scandinavian family stuff.

But there, fortunately, is the approaching acquaintance Axel, a convincing role by Mark Rietman. Even at the start of the performance with the tableau de la troupe side by side in front of a slowly raised canvas, he makes me silently giggle; belly slightly forward, arms just too tense along the seams of the slightly too short terlenka trousers, pale short-sleeved shirt with above it that beautiful trony of 'the lost man'.

Irony

His self-pity-soaked reflections form a chain of irony that makes this harsh piece by The National Theatre bearable. As the family at the start weighs up the severity of disasters of that year 1986 - Chernobyl, Olaf Palme's murder, AIDS, polluted 'dead' beach and sea in front of their house - his personal distress puts it into perspective. Axel's boyfriend has run off, a previous partner chose to jump out of the window, and Axel suffers a lost life between his own bed and that of an institution where he does feel at home.

So Erik, whose stage work Axel edited, dragged him along to the annual family gathering to celebrate the Midsummer Night that the mother of the house wants to keep in honour after the death of husband and father. Her façade opens with "Admit it, it's wonderful here after all" and has its final demise with the final scene when the couples dutifully reveal holiday plans.

Socially successful, but...

They have each been together for over 15 years: the moderately career-minded actress Lena (Keja Klaasje Kwestro) with author Erik (Joris Smit), p.r. manager Anna (Jacqueline Blom) with financial manager Jonas (Hein van der Heiden). At the core initially is the tense relationship between hysterical Lena and control freak Anna; the former unwittingly childless, the latter hearing 15-year-old daughter Mia say goodbye by phone to her suffocating, loveless family.

Anna settles for the proverbial dullness of her husband, who wants to remedy his mid-life crisis as a social-democratic politician, but Lena breaks down from the elected safe existence with a listless partner. Their DNA comes from mother Ingrid (Betty Schuurman), who tries to tuck her who's misery away under a thick layer of vain fortitude.

Recognition

This tragedy - it's not going to happen - culminates in a family dinner, for which director Eric Whien 'teases' his audience by putting the table at the back of the stage. With the even stronger effect of viewers' recognition that you have, sometimes or often, sat at such a table yourself, or may sit at it again at Christmas.

Hebriana aka Britt-Maria (Soumaya Ahouaoui) accentuates this futile sociability by ignoring the family dinner and her suffocating mother. And incurs her full loads of criticism for ingratitude and refusal to interact. Hebriana has found peace in a psychiatric clinic for seven years. In the play, she initially stays out of the picture for a long time because of a walk, but once she returns, she gradually assumes the role of possible saviour in the family tragedy.

Taciturn, with an expressionless face, sporadically showing emotion in her poems, so mostly enigmatic, she is attractive to Erik and especially Jonas who makes a futile effort to play chess with her.

Erik Whien passes

Director Erik Whien has succeeded magnificently in giving this fine cast of actors ample scope to deepen and exhaust their roles. Just when you think: now we know, you find yourself listening mesmerised for not one, but two hours to dialogues that are as catchy as they are soulful; and the gripping finale follows like a burnt-out night candle.

The advance publicity stated that Whien struggled with why Norén titled this family drama Hebriana, after Hamlet's youngest sister. He felt it was a "disguised directorial cue from Norén...listen to her! So Hebriana reveals herself as a kind of oracle who not only writes - and tears up again - beautiful poems but also acts as a medium on behalf of the deceased father, as for sister Lena who asks: 'Should I divorce?' The answer can be guessed.

Freedom

I think Norén's message is also: everyone is crazy, but one is diagnosed as such and voluntarily locked up. Once Hebriana screams: 'I'm not sick!' So we see a beautiful play with the familiar elements of Scandinavian tragedy: existential loneliness, suffocation, alienation and search for answers with futile escape and lack of art of living.

Actors said in the Volkskrant that Whien helps and guides them to fully grasp deeper meanings of text, but then gives them freedom to dramaturgically shape their roles. About his directing style, Jacob Derwig puts a sharp contrast: 'He is no Theu Boermans who prefaces everything, no Eric de Vroedt who fills you completely with stage directions, but he lets you search for yourself and occasionally points the way.'

Earlier version 33 years ago

This publicity did not yet reflect the fact that, thanks to the translation by Norén's admirer Karst Woudstra, Hebriana already had its Dutch world premiere in February 1989 with the same Nationale Toneel, directed by Ger Thijs in a nearly four-hour (!) long 'talking piece': with Guido de Moor (Axel), Elisabeth Andersen (mother Ingrid), Anne Wil Blankers (Anna) and Hans Croiset (Jonas), Rudolf Lucieer (Erik) and Josée Ruiter (Lena), and Will van Kralingen (Britt-Marie). In beautiful newspaper archive Delpher of the National Library, I found reviews from Algemeen Dagblad, and The Truth, and Wed, and de Volkskrant and NRC Handelsblad.