At Foreverandevergem in Theatre Festival Boulevard, it's quite a shame the Pinoys are not BNs

So we don't have that, in the Netherlands. Art families that are so big and still together that they can all put together a full-length location theatre show, including a band. Of course, we have the Krabbé'tjes and the Croisetjes, but after that it kind of stops. Maybe the Van Kootens could put something together with the Derwigjes, but that's still too small. No, a real fake baby theatre piece with 13 roles is not going to work here. Maybe the Bauertjes? Nah. With us, the popular families are mostly in the reality TV corner, like the Meilandjes. 

Because we don't have Marijke Pinoy, Arend Pinoy, Delfine Bafort, Lotte Pinoy, Mark Delany, Gilles Vandecaveye-Pinoy, Cesar De Sutter-Pinoy, Titus De Sutter-Pinoy, Nelly Debeuf, Lola-Rose Delany, Teddy Delany, Ellis Mikky Pinoy and Lio Pinoy here. So those are all kind of family, and they all do something with theatre, film, music or modelling. Except for Mark Delany, that is. Who does something with sliding doors. Which also comes in handy for the set.

Bernadette

This could be a joke, if it were not simply true. Because Mark is the most recent husband of Lotte, daughter of Marijke, who fathered that whole family like a Mother the Goose with a total of three husbands. 

In Flanders, all this could develop without a scary little man on right-wing chat shows shaming it. Art as a family business is also more common in Belgium, take Circus Ronaldo. Such family businesses also connect folk art and elite art, things that are enviably often mixed up in Belgium. You also don't get booed by one group if you go with the other. The Pinoys are the textbook example of this, as Marijke Pinoy was founder of Cie Cecilia, one of the main groups that also caused a furore in the Netherlands in the 1990s, with a play like Bernadetje, about a bumper car ride and the Pieta. 

Berlicum

Anyway: a Dutch audience naturally has a little less of this foreknowledge when they board the delightfully clean-smelling electric Bossche city bus to the outskirts near Laar, above Berlicum and near Camping Namaste. A wonderful trip, and with the sweltering setting sun also a welcome, cooling experience. 

For the show Foreverandevergem, there, in the meadows, has been found a farmhouse under conversion that resembles the Pinoys' family home in the West Flemish town of Evergem. It is all beautiful.

Water bird

In Foreeververandgem, the family comes together one last time to celebrate that the last son left at home is finally going out into the wide world. A very loose plot unfolds around the banquet table, involving quite a bit of Chekhov. Because, yes: country house, family, departure, actors talking about theatre? Then cherries soon fly around your ears, waterfowl fall from the sky and brothers and sisters are omnipresent, up to and including a forest spirit. 

Directed by Gilles Coulier and Yves DeGryse, whose company Berlin is doing something beautiful with a block of flats in a different location near Den Bosch, it is all portrayed in a very burgundy way. The music is beautiful, the watered-down voices and the atmosphere of Chekhovian desolation hanging pleasantly in the afterglow of the evening air. Mater Familias Marijke Pinoy quotes from Cherry Garden, where she mixes up the roles of homeowner Lyubov and house servant Firs a bit, and this rounds out very nicely towards the end. 

Flemish reality

What we miss in the stands is the Flemish reality, in which the play premiered in the real Evergem. This beautiful location is not the real family home of the Pinoys, and besides: we do not know the Pinoys as a real family, so to us they remain mostly fictional characters. Then again, we might want more to experience than the loose dances, and intimate family scenes.  

Though the final image remains universal and deeply moving. Because ending like that is not what anyone wants, but is going to be experienced by many people. 

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