In ‘Slaughterhouse Five’, after the book by Kurt Vonnegut, something crucial is missing ★★★☆☆

‘That’s how it goes.’ In the satirical anti-war novel Slaughterhouse five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut, that phlegmatic phrase occurs 106 times. Main character Billy Pilgrim says it every time someone dies, or when he mentions another senseless cruelty. Vonnegut based Pilgrim on his own experiences as a prisoner of war at the time of the apocalyptic bombing of Dresden in February 1945.

His book is considered one of the greatest anti-war classics: an insane mix of horrors, slapstick and absurdism, of carnal, earthly scenes and delirious cosmic adventures. Because Billy Pilgrim is ‘loosed from time’. He moves effortlessly back and forth between war, marriage, childhood and post-war career, in large, non-chronological time jumps. In addition, he goes on a freak alien adventure when he is kidnapped and put on display on the planet Tralfamadore.

From the Tralfalmadorians, Pilgrim learns that time is not linear. A person who dies at one point is alive and well at another point in time. That insight helps Billy deal with his traumatic experience, with disappointment, sadness and death. And with the incomprehensible cruelty and great suffering of man. That’s how it goes.

‘Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt’

Director Erik Whien is now venturing into a theater version of that wonderful book at Theater Rotterdam. A venture in which a lot goes right, but also something crucial is missing. Koen Tachelet made a new adaptation, which, although it excels in clarity, has lost a lot of madness and humour. Against this are beautiful theatrical images, intriguing philosophical questions and incredibly clever acrobatic play by Bram Suijker as Billy Pilgrim.

The opening image is immediately breathtaking. In it, Suijker descends slowly from the sky – a falling man, wandering lonely in the void. That’s how it must have felt for the 22-year-old who heard the bombers pour their scorching payload on the city, only to find chunks of human-shaped charcoal in the devastated moonscape, and who had to cremate intact dead bodies with a flamethrower. How to ever share that experience, let alone overcome it? Pilgrim’s extreme long-suffering was the only answer for Vonnegut. When his wife Valencia asks Billy how it was, that war, he replies: ‘Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt’.

Director Whien remains faithful to the tone and language of the book: the staccato style, the laconic tenor. This requires a perilous balancing act by Bram Suijker, who must be simultaneously unfazed, witty, ironic and deeply tragic. Suijker certainly has the desired agility for this, and a beautiful, naive kind of innocence mixed with devilish charm. Yet he does not maintain this precarious balance throughout the performance – or it is ultimately simply impossible for the spectator to sympathize with someone who remains so untouched. You know it’s his defense mechanism, but you don’t feel enough of what’s underneath.

Time travel as a metaphor for trauma

There is one beautiful moment in which Whien explicitly shows that time travel is a metaphor for trauma. Billy lies in bed next to his wife after the war, and moments later he embraces a dead body in wartime. For a traumatized person, time stands still. He continues to relive the moment, he has escaped the horror and yet experiences it every day. That fact is moving, but the moment is too short to let that feeling take hold.

In addition, in addition to being a character, Suijker must also primarily be a storyteller – a common pitfall in book adaptations, which keeps the viewer at an extra distance. In the smooth editing, we skim past the scenes a bit too quickly: as a result, little dynamic can arise between Suijker and his fellow actors – Hannah Hoekstra and Jip van den Dool – with the exception of a few short moments in which Hoekstra as Billy’s daughter Barbara briefly loses humanity. makes palpable: her loss, her pain, her worries about her errant father.

All in all, this intelligent, aesthetic staging remains somewhat cerebral, even though the war in Ukraine makes the whole thing painfully topical. In particular, it is one beautiful, existential decor find that touches the deepest. On the backstage, a gigantic inflatable baby unfolds in no time at all: the bulging belly fills with air, with life, the baby kicks its fat legs, only to shrivel horribly quickly. Live and die in one moment. Because yes, that’s how it goes.