Poison in theatre: when the grief of loss settles deep in your body

Giving up a loved one poisons bodies, which then repel each other. Is there consolation for pain from cruelty?

Annual death about a thousand children under 20, most of them babies. And 600 people die in traffic, thankfully far fewer than before, but more since 1945 than in the Holocaust. There are no collective commemorations for it, relatives often suffer in silence.

'First we lost our son, then ourselves and then each other'. The unnamed couple who Carine Crutzen and Stefan de Walle Playing in Venom directed by Johan Doesburg A couple trying to come to terms with a divorce after little Jacob's earlier death in a road accident.

They meet, nine years after the 1999 New Year's Eve when he closed the door behind him for good, in a hall of a cemetery; with as a backdrop the ugly chairs that everyone recognises from those gatherings where you don't really want to be. With her, the grief of loss is her life; he has learned to live with it.

That is, ostensibly, because Lot Vekemans in the beautifully written Poison devotes most of the text to his coping with the loss and relationship thereafter. How Jacob's grief seized his body, and he sought anaesthesia in vain with running.

Ditto for the mother with addiction to sleeping pills. Far fewer words are intended for the deep distress of her that she sparingly points out and, for instance, 'all the psychologists, psychiatrists and psychotherapists' she has been to and who - like many others - swear to resign. She: 'Why do we have to give everything in life a... place. Like it's a thing.'

Her grief as a whole being, Carine Crutzen shows godlike beauty, not larmoyantly but in her posture of desperation and despair; neck, shoulders and especially hands express the distress. Meanwhile, she reacts to him with sharp cynicism, though.

This is how he started a new relationship; she knew nothing about it. He is also working on a novel about loss, the story of which he pours over her like unwanted intimacy. She: 'Displaying your grief that's pathetic, isn't it?

Her bitterness initially clashes with his pent-up anger, good for crackling arguments and running away by him as men tend to do. After his return, they slowly but surely come together; with the classic, brilliantly played out, alternately distancing (she) and attracting (he) magnetic tension between husband and wife. Until the laugh is there that once brought them together, just for a moment.

And how do you start such a story, and most importantly, how do you make it end? Plenty to give away. Just one then, because it's so horrifyingly beautiful, from his mouth after returning to the little room: 'The car wouldn't start...I mean: the car would start, but I couldn't start it...I mean, I couldn't.'

You don't have to be an experiencer of child loss to be deeply immersed in Venom. If you are, you notice - thankfully - soon after the beginning that every couple is different with every loss. In this relationship, for instance, there may be little room for melancholy, melancholy that can make you happy through your misery.

Thanks to the wonderful actors Crutzen and Van de Walle, text, direction and all the efforts around it, as a spectator you feel again, especially after years of full and half breaks, why live theatre is so invigorating. How privileged we are to experience this; well-to-do citizens rushing into the theatre, passing the accordion player outside in the pouring rain whether it is not there.

Good to know

Korthals Ensign brings Poison across the country in 70 performances. The trailer is online, as well as our interview with Stefan de Walle. Directed by Désirée Nosbusch, Lot Vekemans' Poison is currently being made internationally filmed as 'Poison' starring Trine Dyrholm and Tim Roth.