The NoteBook and The Proof

Company De Onderneming, Antwerp
Venue The Royal Lyceum Theatre
Address Grindlay Street
Reviewer Thelma Good

This company's dramatisations of Agota Kristof's trilogy of novels is intricately, striking and elegantly conceived and gives birth to an incredible theatrical experience with an lightness and economy of touch.

The adaptation into two plays of the trilogy was created by Der Onderneming (The Enterprise)by their collaborative working technique where there is no director and the project maker finds what they call soul mates to develop the production. It's clear when watching that the integrity of soul mates working together ensures the strength of this company's approach.

Kristof's books are set during and after the second world war, and concern the lives of twin boys Claus and Lucas who become detached from their parents and then from each other and what happens when Claus, 50 years later, tries to find Lucas. During the War they keep a notebook where they only write down the truth. Living with their stern grandmother they harden themselves and each other by learning to ignore pain, both physical and mental, to survive.

Both plays are performed on a nearly bare stage, where the side walls of the theatre are visible and at the back the actors go to change and wait in the halflight. Many of the scenes are played in a light comic style which ensures that we keep engaged with what is at heart dark and troubling. Sometimes the darkness is subtle hinted at - the government official in the second play you realise is in that country's version of the KGB. The give away? His recurrent gesture when he talks about the past, stroking his brow and ending the gesture by drawing his hand across his eye, you know he is distancing himself from his past actions.

The Notebook is performed on the unadorned stage floor and deals only with the twins' early lives, seeing the events solely through their young eyes. Robby Cleiren plays Lucas who is the boyish, seemingly less troubled twin and Gunther Lesage is Claus who increasingly develops a more visible and heartless damaged behaviour. Carly Wijis plays most of the women characters, as Harelip she gambols about the stage capturing the almost feral nature of the simple girl. Whilst as the Priest's maid she is a more knowing and more kindly woman. Ryszard Turbiasz as the grandmother with her big apron stomps up stage after an altercation with the frustrating boys left in her care and then sweeping the apron up across one shoulder he returns as a soldier, or detaching the bib and donning a clerical hat becomes the priest who the twins blackmail.

All the cast play each character they take on with clarity and definition, so that we instantly get each character change. The Notebook seen on its own is a fine theatre piece where humour is used sometimes macabrely enriching the theme of how events can make individuals crucially different, if we, like the twins, unknowingly choose to respond to our lives with harming strategies.

The Proof starts with two film phrases - this is based on a true story and then the disclaimer - any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely accidental, projected for us to read. The play then shows us again and again how individuals and governmental machinery rewrite history, so truth vanishes as if it was never there. In its structure the play too confuses and nearly mystifies the audience as we see Claus the twin who got across the border at the end of the war return to try and find his twin. With scene after scene causing us to question what we have already witnessed and what is being portrayed before us.

In flashbacks we get scenes which seem to show how the separated twins lived. Lucas the twin he is seeking becomes a printer and a poet, and Claus is stuck in an orphanage after the war with his heartless belief in being truthful and an unexplained limp. When Claus returns there seems to be no trace of Lucas, the authorities after examining the twins' notebook conclude it was written only by one person. Again and again the play throws what seems to be a neat ending into the air with another twist, enriching the underlying theme of Kristof's novels, what is fiction, what is truth. And the audience faces how disturbing it is when there is no certainty.

Together, Der Onderneming's The Notebook and The Proof are fascinating productions which examine in a distinctive theatrical style how in trying to survive traumatic incidents both countries and individuals rewrite their pasts so they can live with them, with Truth as the eternal victim.
Run ended
© Thelma Good 24 August 2001