EEN HOND BEGRAVEN bac to 27 January.
London
EEN HOND BEGRAVEN (BURYING THE DOG)
If performance collective, with texts by Karst Woudstra and Heiner Muller
BAC Studio One To 27 January 2002
Runs 1hr 30min No interval
TICKETS 020 7223 2223
Review Timothy Ramsden 13 January
The good old days, when the past was the future, recalled with expert eyes for detail.There was a time – known as the seventies – when going Dutch could mean a glimpse of paradise on earth; relaxed attitudes to sex and drugs plus performance collectives whose work defied and transcended boundaries of theatre.
Now, with a crackdown on soft drugs and sex, there's only the likes of Muriel, Bart and Peter to give us glimpses of the old, self-obsessed avant garde.
Muriel, Bart and Peter are not creating stories, but re-creating an evening in their precious lives, a crucial eve, when little symbols had great significance.
Peter lives in an office conversion, with a row of urinals from the area he couldn't afford to convert. Symbol one. His friend Muriel's coming for a meal, and if you wonder why she'd want to eat next to half the old office Gents', it works well as she spends more time than enough using the offices for a series of varied purgations.
Life becomes complex when Peter's brother, and alleged bald hunk, Bart arrives unexpectedly. This is good for us, if not Peter, as his arrival allows some nice business with a cassette player masking as an entryphone.
If (they're a Dutch theatre collective) have lives crammed tight with symbols. A stray dog has followed Bart. It's run over and, disguised as a bin-liner stuffed with linen (Muriel makes the point explicitly), brought on before burial. Also biting away at the brothers is their father's Nazi past (given the men's likely ages, this would set the scene around the seventies) which is also to be laid to rest.
Not to be left out, Muriel – a compulsive confectionery consumer - bears her own symbolic potential in the rounded form of a phantom pregnancy. Like the blokes, she smiles as she explains, always speaking in that slightly inflected but ever-so-clear English that Netherlanders perfect.
They seem nice people all, whoever they are, but not so nice I'd buy a second-hand painting from them - half the set consists of pictures offered for sale (cash only, for preference). And they don't miss a trick, or a tick, of that old Dutch modernist landscape.
2002-01-22 14:41:33