Suppose you have to take shelter until something blows over, until it is safe to go outside again. Thunder is crashing, it’s storming, something big and dangerous is passing over the city. You duck into a building and there are more people seeking shelter, a caretaker awkwardly hands out bottles of water. Suppose it takes a long time and boredom sets in. What would you do?
In Ground Floor, a ‘philosophical musical about finitude’ by theater company Orkater, the gathered group of people quickly begins to share experiences and life wisdom. Everyday situations and thoughts are described in the recognizable style of writer Maartje Wortel, who with Ground Floor wrote her first theater performance. The characters talk in chattering sentences with unexpected twists.
“Dying is not easy,” the actors sing, for example, in a scene about a plane crash that almost happened, concluding with: “just like living.” These kinds of textual surprises make you smile or move you. There are just a lot of them. What you can quietly absorb in a book quickly becomes overwhelming on stage. Many of the dialogues are so rich that you can hardly keep up with them in the hour and a half that this performance lasts.
Rhythmic uh’s
Ground Floor starts quietly, directed by Suze Milius and Marijn Alexander de Jong. The stowaways wander in the non-descript space of a business building. There is a memo board with photos and magnets; there are hinged windows that the caretaker quickly closes with a stick. Someone is looking outside, someone is playing Tetris on her phone. The scenes slowly become more theatrical. When the lights go out, the actors illuminate each other with whatever they find: the emergency exit sign, the lid of a terrarium. Ultimately, there is even a stage on which the classic musical quality is enhanced with a little choreography.
Sometimes the characters seem interchangeable: none of them really rise above the others. A superior lady with a suitcase (Annelinde Bruijs) is just as searching as the clumsy concierge (Reinout Scholten van Aschat) or the timid courier (Hélène Vrijdag). If you listen carefully, you can piece together their life stories. Someone wants to climb the social ladder, but ends up stranded. Someone struggles with high expectations.
Recurring themes can be discovered in the short conversations (struggling with life or death, loneliness and unrest), but many scenes feel like islands, only held together because the characters are in the same space, condemned to each other. Due to the multitude of fictional experiences, the performance is difficult at times.
Fortunately, the music of Annelinde Bruijs provides a driving force. She composed songs that are made up of spoken language. Repeating uh’s or ha-ha-ha’s create an addictive rhythm, with piano sounds and buzzing beats underneath. For example, the actors weave short affirmations (‘yes, yes, yes’) through a vocal line. Combined with Wortel’s text and the tight acting of the actors Ground Floor an unconventional musical that will haunt your sleep for a while.