Quantum entanglement, supersymmetry. The nerd in me could not get around the mystery of cosmic twins, which hundreds of billions of light years apart yet simultaneously take over each other's state when one of them is seen. Or something like that. In Blood Sister, Matzer's latest play, it is not billions of parsecs, but an Atlantic Ocean and 17 years of life that two identical sisters have between them. Without having managed to really grow apart.
Blood Sister is Madeleine Matzer's last direction as artistic director of the company she founded 20 years ago. In that time, the Bossche theatre club has acquired a very special place in the national theatre scene: small plays about sometimes big dramas, a female view of the world and always close to the audience. Theatre to love, in short.
Heredity
The play's text is by Maaike Bergstra. The twins at the centre of Blood Sister ran away from each other after a childhood in identical clothes, partly because of the painful death of their domineering mother. Their lives each went their own way, including on opposite sides of thinking about health. One became a physician, the other sought it in nature and nutrition.
But however much they no longer have anything to do with each other, there is too much that binds them together. This has to do with heredity, with the writing talent they share, but also with the child of one seeking contact with the childless other, the secrets they each want to keep from each other in their own way, and the healing one carries for the other.
In vitro
Anyway; 'a lot going on on this plate' is what they say at Masterchef, and it has to be said: writer Bergstra stuffed the play so bursting with lines that you have to be careful not to occupy yourself only with them. That you even get a deeper sense of the beautiful find by designer Sanne Danz, who deploys a stereoscopic shot as a backdrop: for we see a doubled shot of the heady rapids Trollhättan in Sweden that was tamed by a hydropower plant. Does that have meaning?
The ivf theme, all too familiar to me, which is an interesting one in Bergstra's oeuvre role plays would also be worth a play on its own, whereas now it is mainly just another complication in the already troubled relationship between the sisters. A fascinating one, though.
What keeps the play gloriously alive is the play of the two actresses. Lotte Dunselman and Wendell Jaspers beautifully shape the inner and outer struggles. Dunselman has that stately American that belongs to a woman who made a medical career there, and Jaspers is able like no other to shape inner struggle, anger and vulnerability into the tough woman she is underneath as well. For Jaspers alone, you have to go and watch, every time, she is an acting canon with the allure of a rockbitch.
Stillness
Madeleine Matzer has an eye for what binds the sisters together, despite all their attempts to get as far away from each other as possible. Beneath all the just short of full eruption conflicts, love lurks, and it is thanks to the director's eye that the actresses manage to make that bond palpable. Ultimately, it is that welcome stillness that turns the minimally designed ending into a smashing final chord.
It is to be hoped that Madeleine Matzer is not taking her retirement too seriously.
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