Beautifully meandering Hans Dagelet is the pivot of the Indisch interior ★★★☆☆

Like a true King Lear, the father gathers his children, grandchildren and supporters to divide the inheritance. He doesn’t have long to live and wants to get things done before then. Only he is not a king, but an architect in retirement, he has no kingdom to divide but the contents of the family house in Wageningen, which is full of Indian items – from dance masks to native dishes.

That is the premise of the new play The Indian interior by Bo Tarenskeen, who also directed the performance and plays one of the sons. Great performance by Tarenskeen, because he turns a lot of things upside down in this family tragicomedy. At the same time, there is also something strange about his performance: what begins as an almost classical play with recognizable characters, slowly changes into sometimes elusive philosophical treatises. The characters then seem to distance themselves from their daily worries and perform verbal delights. The fact that Tarenskeen is not only a theater maker but also a philosopher is clearly evident here, but it does get in the way of a clear dramaturgy in the long run.

The premise is clear: father distributes his things, his three children (played by Bodil de la Parra, Reinout Bussemaker and Tarenskeen himself) are not waiting for it, and in the end everything goes to the thrift store, because it turns out to be kitsch. At the same time, those things stand for what binds this family: the Indian past, the melancholy present or not, the roots, and the desire to uproot itself. Each of the three children has their own vision of this and that sometimes results in funny but also vicious mutual confrontations. Tarenskeen manages to keep the tone light at first, but gradually it becomes a lot more serious, for example when a grandfather and a grandchild philosophize about what actually is a soul.

timing

Like the old father, Hans Dagelet is the pivot of the performance. He swirls almost lucidly around his descendants, and away from his past. Because of his beautifully meandering text treatment and his sometimes inimitable timing, you want to keep an eye on him constantly. The acting of Mingus Dagelet is equally idiosyncratic, who in this case plays his grandson and already seems to be wrestling himself from the family regime. He did not become an architect like the others, but an architecture critic, and that is a completely different profession.

In the fragmentary format, The Indian Interior think about amusement by Judith Herzberg, with all those asides and those generations intertwining. The difference is that with Herzberg the language seems deceptively simple, precisely to cover up the underlying suffering; Tarenskeen’s language is much more weighty.

The performance is performed in an almost bare stage house, with the characters as errant set pieces. This abstraction works well, because it keeps the performance away from tempo-dulo nostalgia. Halfway through there is a musical interlude, with John Coltrane’s version of My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music. Hans Dagelet then dances out his thoughts almost weightlessly.