“It is good to keep distance from each other.” Tense, with wide eyes, actress Ilke Paddenburg stares into the audience as philosopher Marie Deniet in ITA’s latest production The laws. She is serious: we, the spectators, have to be careful of her, because before you know it she has won us over. That’s how it goes with her. She needs us to be able to turn the incidents from her life into a story, she tells us, just as others have used her for this time and time again.
Connie Palmen became famous overnight with her debut novel The laws was released in 1991. It revolves around this Marie, philosophy student and aspiring writer, who thinks she still has a few things to learn and experience before she is ready to be a writer. Hence, she relates to seven different men in seven chapters; an astrologer, an epileptic, a philosopher, a priest, a physicist, an artist and a psychiatrist. Through these encounters she becomes acquainted with different ways in which you can interpret life and your own place in it. Director Eline Arbo recognized her young self in the searching Marie and adapted it The laws into a play.
That’s quite an exciting choice. The laws is not just about those interpretations, or about a young woman who gets to know her own voice as an artist. It is also, and perhaps especially, about a girl who has so firmly internalized misogyny and underestimation of women that she measures her self-worth by the extent to which powerful men desire her.
Palmens Marie is a classic femme fatale: a chameleon who effortlessly takes on the colors of the desires and fantasies of the person she sets her sights on. She excels in her ability to mirror the desires of others, and above all not to sully that mirror image with something like her own personality.
It is not without reason that she is called Miss ‘Deniet’. This is her cry for help to us. Because who is she actually? Isn’t ‘being someone yourself’ a prerequisite for being able to write?
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Severely injured
The laws disguises itself as philosophical coming of agestory, but between the lines it is a grim book about a seriously injured, detached, self-destructive young woman, who thinks she is using the men around her, but in reality allows herself to be abused by them. The laws describes her crusade to develop into an autonomous writer and thinker, despite her tendency to conform to the desires of others. Against the patriarchal cliffs.
Although she remains very faithful to Palmen’s text in her adaptation, Eline Arbo seems to send the character into Palmen’s ruthless arena with slight reluctance. Her Marie Deniet is light-hearted, more innocent, more guileless than the Marie from the book. Arbo thus protects her. Her Marie is more surprised than cunning, curious rather than determined. There is no question of Marie’s toxic self-contempt at Arbo.
In Arbo’s hands, the majority of the scenes are perfect The laws energetic, witty, smooth, loud. In this way she prevents her staging from becoming a cerebral affair, but she also pays a price for all that lightness. The first five people Marie meets are such weirdos that it is difficult to imagine that Marie is eager to hand herself over to them. The ideas associated with the characters also die under the bold acting style. Conversely, Paddenburg’s Marie is so blue that you also wonder why her co-stars want to commit her to them so necessary.
It is also literally not entirely clear what we are looking at. The stage design, an enormous turntable, refers back to Arbo’s performances Doors (2021) and The years (2022), both of which also revolved around women with ambition, fighting against a patriarchal system. But while the turntable in those performances made times or characters visually intertwine, here it seems mainly of practical use.
Other visual choices also seem somewhat interchangeable, because they are illustrative. An enormous tube with sand running out of it as a ‘work of art’. Stars that light up when the astrologer or physicist talks about constellations.
All-consuming love
Only when the artist, played by Eelco Smits, enters the stage does Arbo seem to have found something to grab hold of and the performance becomes more accurate. The artist is the first to mention Marie by name. The first one she can’t get a hold of. The first too, who notes her asides towards us – a directorial choice reminiscent of the time when a crucial character in the British TV series Flea bag is the first to realize that the main character also addresses the viewer directly. He sees her. More than half of the performance we see how Marie, finally, stops her attempts to please. Now that she herself is consumed by a greedy, addictive, all-consuming crush, she can no longer tolerate being a character in other people’s stories. Writing can no longer be postponed.
The fact that we, the silent audience, help her with this is a powerful discovery. Because ultimately that is what Arbo’s interpretation of The laws is about: about the need to be seen. Or also, the other way around: about our responsibility to see others as openly and unbiased as possible. A person needs the eyes and ears of another, perhaps that is the only ‘law’ that the performance ultimately puts forward, in order to ‘become a person. Someone with their own life and with eyes that see something themselves, in their own way and not in someone else’s way.”