The three of them are in a holiday bungalow: mother Andrea, daughter Joosje and Joosje’s good friend Laurens. Andrea (a wonderfully dryly funny Raymonde de Kuyper) was actually supposed to go to the seaside resort with friends, but they canceled at the last minute. Laurens (Daan van Bendegem, who also wrote the text together with Brecht De Backer) is mainly there as a lightning rod, because the bond between mother and daughter is tense.
In Katwijk we witness the first evening in that bungalow. Three acts – aperitif, dinner, washing up – form the framework for a particularly funny, poignant and illuminating piece about the clash of generations and about how, despite all that painful clashing, you can still keep talking to each other.
We find Andrea and Laurens at the kitchen island – Andrea drinking white wine, Laurens diligently cooking. As a compliment, Andrea Laurens adds that it’s nice to have a gay person as a friend: they can cook so well. ‘I have a lesbian daughter myself,’ she says, ‘and I have not yet been able to discover the benefits of that.’ She chuckles: of course she wouldn’t make such a joke in front of her daughter; she thinks twice about entering that ‘minefield’ in his presence.
Ow, ow, ow. And yet: something about the plump way in which De Kuyper places these kinds of poignant sentences takes you in for her. At the same time, within a few sentences it is of course also crystal clear how lonely and rejected Joosje must have felt, growing up, under the wings of this tone-deaf woman.
Stylishly you seem to travel back in time, or visit an English theater company, so cinematic-literally is Hester Jolink’s stage image (there is actually real cooking going on at this kitchen island), and so ‘well-made’ the piece. Thematic feels Katwijk very contemporary.
Pain and miscommunication
It is beautiful how Van Bendegem and De Backer refuse to take sides and make it palpable how both mother and daughter actually long for the other’s acceptance and appreciation. How not only Joosje appears to have felt rejected, but also Andrea, who has had to endure her daughters’ unfiltered hatred since Joosje’s puberty. And who simply misses her daughter.
The pain of these characters, let Katwijk beautiful vision can essentially be traced back to a tragic form of miscommunication, a miscommunication that gradually comes to symbolize forms of miscommunication at a social level. You can have each other’s best interests at heart and still, unintentionally, hurt each other deeply. Yet they become miles apart from each other. No longer being able to tolerate each other. Try it, the piece says, try it anyway. Seek rapprochement, be open, empathize. The other person is more vulnerable than you think.
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