Absurd, absurd!
12th-16th October at 20.00.
Studio Theatre, rue Waelhem 69a, 1030 Brussels
ETCetera’s next multilingual production after “Fin de Siècle” in 2009 is an evening of 3 plays dedicated to classic writers of the Absurd movement: unreal and real at the same time, and very funny.
Pic-Nic, by Fernando Arrabal in Spanish, is set in the First World War trenches; Victoria Station, by Harold Pinter in English, is about a London minicab “dispatcher” and his driver; while La Cantatrice Chauve, by Eugène Ionesco in French, is set in the English suburbs in the 1950’s.
Each will have “surtitles” in the other 2 languages.
The plays are directed by 3 of Brussels’ most experienced directors (see over), and include some very established actors such as Eduardo Aladro-Vico, Martin Whitworth, Christine Marchand, and Brian Holland.
Vincent River by Philip Ridley
A man. A woman. An empty room that soon will be filled with spilled secrets. And, oh yes, a convenient bottle of liquor to make the spilling easier. “Vincent River,” written in 2000 is almost doggedly naturalistic. It takes place in real time, in the present tense, in a recognizable London. Vincent River, starts deep and gets deeper, as both characters are peculiarly confessional right away. With no time for a gentle emotional warm-up, we struggle to immerse ourselves as fully as we would like in the repercussions of the murder of 33-year-old homosexual Vincent.
Hounded by the prejudiced taunts of the neighbours on her Bethnal Green estate, Vincent’s mother Anita has been forced to move to a new flat. Here she waits, in an almost furniture-free room, with only a bottle of gin for solace. Davey, who has long lurked outside, has finally been invited in. It was he who found Vincent’s body, he says, him and his fiancée.
The final destination of the piece is clear from 10 minutes in but as Ridley handles so adeptly the accretion of layers of detail, it makes the journey worth following. Moments of black humour and blacker horror sit side by side, as Davey offloads the knowledge that has been burdening him onto the one person who is desperate to hear. First staged 10 years ago at the Hampstead Theatre, London the themes of this play are, sadly, as resonant today as they were then.
‘Philip Ridley doesn’t write plays so much as dark hallucinations in which the world is skewed through his penetrating vision, so we look at it through new eyes… As the truth is exhumed and the dead seem to walk again there is a redemptive sense that it is through honesty in our personal relationships that absolution can be found.’ (The Guardian)
This is the latest in a series of great shows brought over from Bedford’s Swan Theatre Company in collaboration with the English Comedy Club.
