Ontroerend Goed, Internal.
In 1839 Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to R. H. Horne that 'the luck of the third adventure is proverbial.' You know...third time lucky and all that. The Flemish theatre company Ontroerend Goed seems to have given a new meaning to that old proverb of perseverance. Because they were lucky three times in a row. In 2007 they received the Fringe First Award for their play The Smile Off Your Face. A year later they struck gold again at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, reaping another Fringe First Reward with Once and For All We're Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up, this time on a conventional stage (in The Smile members from the audience were blindfolded and put in a wheelchair, after which they were taken on an individual journey through a series of encounters with performers from the Ghent-based ensemble).
And now Ontroerend Goed did the hattrick thing with Internal, which got another Fringe First (and a Herald Angel to boot). In The Scotsman, the newspaper that gives out this prize in recognition of outstanding new stage writing premiered at the Fringe every week during the festival, Susan Mansfield describes how theatre in the 21st century is rewriting the rules of the thespian art as a communal experience. Limited audiences or even one-to-one theatre seem to be en vogue. Internal is a fine case example of this: the production is designed for an audience of five, each of whom will spend time in a one-to-one encounter with a performer, then talk in a group, answering questions about themselves in a format somewhere between speed-dating and group therapy. It operates on the borderline of semblance and reality, obliterating that fine line in the very process. The actors are five performers in search for a partner, the play/performance being their individual playground where you can get to know them 'in a cosy and spontaneous atmosphere'. It all fits in with the mission statement of Ontroerend Goed. They describe themselves as 'a theatre performance group that creates intimate, individual performances as well as larger-scale theatre plays. Following this double track, we give ourselves the freedom to explore the boundaries and codes of performing arts and to open up theatre to the variable expectations and tastes of a wide and diverse audience.' Theatre as a crowbar for your mind, in other words.
Ontroerend Goed, Once and For All We're Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up. Photo by Roger Cummins.
Currently Ontroerend Goed are showing what they are all about Down Under, after travelling to, among others, New York, Los Angeles and Montreal. The Sydney Theatre Company is presenting Once and For All We're Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up at Wharf 2 until August 29. According to a review in the Sydney Herald, Cate Blanchett, who is presently an artistic director at the Theatre Company, 'spent opening night mesmerised from the first moment the boys and girls of the Ontroerend Goed and Kopergietery companies wandered on to the stage and began breaking all the rules'. She testified of this in a radio show, calling Once and For All an amazing and impressive instance of 'chaos', a kind of 'circus without the lycra'. One Australian critic called it 'brutal but tender' and noted that 'this radical Belgian production makes up for the lack of depictions of teenage life on stage, television or in film.' Seems like a clear case of a must-see show. Or as Neil Cooper wrote in the British newspaper The Herald about Internal and the giddily confused elation it gave him: 'I wouldn't have missed it for the world. You shouldn't either.'
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