Which sentence stuck with us? The question to the audience comes from Madeleine Matzer after the performance of 'Smart'. It is a rather loaded question, as the play is about very direct loss. When a child has just died in a stupid accident, any sentence you remember is worth its weight in gold.
The obtuse accident that is the subject of the show concerns the few seconds a consultant glanced at his smartphone because his little daughter was apping where he was staying. Those seconds were long enough to cost the life of another girl who had just taken a pan of soup to grandma on her bike. Under the wheels of his SUV.
Smartlap?
In case you were thinking: that borders on a smartlap and therefore exploitation and is therefore evil, you might be right, were it not for the fact that context and those involved are beyond any ethical doubt. Madeleine Matzer, director of the theatre company named after her, has 'integrity' etched on her forehead, so to speak, and writer Peter de Graef is one of the best of his kind. Moreover, the commission for this performance of barely an hour comes from the Yannick Foundation. Which is named after Yannick Frijns, who was crushed to death on 31 March 2016 while riding his bike by a woman who was texting while driving. That Yannick foundation was set up by Yannick's parents, who want to use that fund to work towards a ban on smartphone use while driving.
So the conversation turned to how much we in the audience recognise in the narrator of this performance. Gürkan Küçüksentürk plays the text written by Peter de Graef with enough friendly distance not to make the perpetrator's story too larmoyant. Because that risk lurks when - after such a terrible accident - you can only let one of the two people involved speak. The girl - nameless in this performance - only gets a name at the very end. Not for nothing was the sentence in which that happened also the one most mentioned as most impressive.
Midship
I myself was hit hard and centre stage by Sanne Danz's set. Or rather, by the super simple animation shown there. No words, then, but a very simple stylised and tiny silhouette of a girl with blowing hair on a bicycle. Anyone who has seen the famous Oscar-winning animated film ''Father and Daughter' has seen, will recognise that image. Innocence en route to destruction. In this day and age, when images from Ukraine defy any imagination, a cut like that still chops rock hard.
Not that the text doesn't impress, because it does. Whether it scares us adult car drivers enough to leave the smartphone off while driving from now on remains to be seen. It is an addiction for many people, made possible in part by app makers who spend years studying the best colour, the most seductive sound to maximise the endorphins flowing through the body.
Addicted
A girl about 18 years old said at the end that this show, which like everything else in the postcoronagraph catch-up is only on a short tour, should also be shown in schools. Because that's where the generation that has yet to get into the car, while already addicted to cycling with smartphone in front of their eyes, sits.
This piece of Smart has a purpose, and usually I hate performances with a purpose. Not this time. She did make sure I looked at the dark outside in a nice mindful way on the train back.
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