'Broos' opens as a kind of cruel game show, with lead actress Lottie Hellingman in the centre of the stage, sitting on a chair above which hangs a large, grey rock. "I took happiness for granted," she begins resignedly.
Hellingman's words are by director Madeleine Matzer. She wrote them down for 'Broos' after hearing a mother of a 17-year-old daughter with Down's syndrome say that in all this time she had been asked only once "how she was doing". In one hour and twenty minutes, Matzer reveals in poignant sentences the life of a parent with a child who, like an unmovable stone, never separates from her:
"Living suffering is never relieved: it is like a stone thrown into the river. The water has to divide and adapt, because it cannot get the stone out of its place."
Spoken word
It is one of the longer sentences in the play. Otherwise, the text consists almost entirely of short, intelligible lines that Hellingman, in the role of mother Kyra, recites passionately, sometimes softly and quietly, the next time furiously and wide-eyed, but always in rhythm. It makes her come across as a spoken word artist. Not necessarily rhyming, but often assonant with stanzas like:
"so beautiful
so fragile
so passionately powerful
love wrapped in a body"
or
"My daughters
behaviour is
hard
cross
square
and thus my great debt"
The short statements make 'Broos' easy to digest and give the piece momentum. The listening bow can also remain tense thanks to well-timed musical interruptions. Hellingman performs them with vocals and ukulele, together with guitarist Helge Slikker, who also plays the role of Menno, the father. He does this by occasionally answering "yes?" when Hellingman calls his name or moving slightly with her during a dance scene. Menno supports his wife Kyra, though he really stays in the background. Kyra and he have a strong bond, do argue once, but stay together. 'Broos' really revolves around Kyra's story.
With minimal use of music and scenery, 'Broos' has to rely on Hellingman's monologue - and it succeeds with flying colours. Hellingman's strong emotions make a mother struggling with intensive care, bordering on burn-out, clearly imaginable. Her sadness and frustration crash into the audience.
Manufacturability
What 'Broos' also painfully exposes is the paralysing, limiting notion of social engineering. Mother Kyra wonders if she could not have prevented her daughter Romy's disability if she had not eaten that bit of blue cheese, or lit that one cigarette. Would Romy survive "in this vacuum-packed perfect perfume world", where "social engineering is the credo/everything is for sale"?
As a viewer, you don't really find out, but it's not really necessary to know either. 'Broos' is Kyra's story and that is impressive enough. Absolutely realistic too, according to parents of a child with Down, who tell their stories during the "afterglow": a section after the performance in which spectators engage in conversation with each other under Matzer's guidance. That is why 'Broos' is definitely worth seeing, but mainly because it is simply a moving play.
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