Swinging, the actors and musicians of the Leedvermaak trilogy pull you to the bottomless pain of a family ★★★★☆

Isaac (‘the savior’), that’s how violinist Dory calls her only child, who, as the mistress of the elderly, Jewish Simon, is thrown into her lap at the last minute. The child is named after her father, who was murdered in Auschwitz. She hopes Simon, camp survivor, can see if Isaac resembles her father. But the memories hidden under a rock threaten to seep out of Simon’s head through dementia.

The arrival of the illegitimate child must make up for what cannot be healed. Even Lea (Dory’s fellow violinist and Isaac’s half-sister) and her mother Ada (Simon’s traumatized wife) embrace the new life. This son can pass on what they did not dare, could not share. Ada: ‘At least that’s something. Because that was not the intention. The intention was that no one would be left, so that no one could mourn for anyone. Yes, that was the intention, but she didn’t succeed.’ Dory: ‘But I want a happy child!’ Ada: ‘That will be right. (…) Because it knows all the time that it was almost never there.’ With one sneer, Ada gets upset about a bowl of nuts eaten by Simon. Implicitly, she villainously reduces him to that starving camp inmate.

This dialog off beading thread (1995), between the strongly playing Malou Gorter as Dory and Betty Schuurman as Ada, is one of the many sharp and subcutaneously so revealing scenes from the amusement-trilogy. The National Theater presents the three famous plays by Judith Herzberg as an evening marathon for the first time. For five hours, the audience follows how three generations from Jewish families struggle for decades with the silence about unresolved traumas. Exes, friends and Lea’s mother in hiding (who feels unseen and deprived of a child) stoke the fire with their clumsily expressed pain. The fact that each part takes place at a party makes the contrast between light overtones and dramatic undertones even more poignant.

Director Eric de Vroedt has strongly exploited this contradiction in his approach. Besides ‘saviour’, Isaac also means ‘he who may laugh’. And there is laughter, in De Vroedt’s almost dancing direction by amusement (1982), beading thread (1995) and Simon (2001). Sometimes grotesque comedy is even played by the close-knit ensemble of actors. Rick Paul van Mulligen scatters in supporting roles with wacky gestures and funny accents. Antoinette Jelgersma is shockingly dry when she, like the provincial and non-Jewish Reed, in her urge to belong, drops painful sentences about a course in creative writing about the Holocaust. And Tamar van den Dop laughs like the effervescent Lea shrilly away from her deep-seated sense of insecurity.

The painful hilarity of this trilogy can already be felt from the start during Lea’s third marriage. On an empty stage, characters meet fast-walking as they criss-cross the corridors of the banquet hall looking for toilets, snacks, chairs or wedding guests. Sometimes they catch themselves in an embarrassing thought or hold back the party pass for awkward encounters. The wedding itself – the trilogy begins in 1972 – is only seen in frayed Super-8 films, full of jerky skits and drunken party songs.

During the day beading thread the subservient musicians of the New European Ensemble amplify the great unrest amid all the gaiety with slightly poignant compositions by Florentijn Boddendijk and Remco de Jong, such as the disruption of Ada’s and Simon’s 45th wedding anniversary due to the announcement of Dory’s pregnancy. Later, in the never played in the Netherlands Simon Isaac proves to be a binding factor and the ensemble orchestrates a generation-transcending house party on brightly lit meters around the (very long) deathbed of father Simon.

Unfortunately, sometimes sentences are lost in the energetic, light-hearted playing style, especially with fast scene transitions. A matter of playing more often. Due to corona infections, the entire actor group has only recently been on stage. Fortunately, cleverly varying details in decor, hairstyles, make-up and costumes speak volumes about the era in which events take place.

For five hours, actors and musicians swing everyone to the bottomless pain of this family chronicle. Will all the links after Simons die like ‘loose beads rolling on the floor, just like that’, as Leah predicts her comatose father? Or will war ghosts continue to string new generations together? ‘Dying is not a bad thing. Being let go is much worse,” Lea said. The marathon ends with a surprising cliffhanger. Who knows, Herzberg (87) will give the actors a redeeming short final chord. It’s almost May 4 and 5.