In the scorching heat, the audience gathers in the middle of the day at a sand excavation in Castricum, where actress Manja Topper is dug into a mountain of sand in a bright pink outfit. She plays Winnie Happy Days (1961) by Samuel Beckett. Despite her rather limited freedom of movement (later she will even be up to her neck in the sand) and the fact that, she says, every day is a copy of the previous one, she is determined to approach her day as positively as possible.
Her husband Willie (Marien Jongewaard), who often moves just outside her field of vision, only has to say a single word to his wife and happiness overwhelms her. You can hardly call it communication what takes place between the two – but if he were no longer there, even if only as a potential recording power, what would be left of Winnie? Do you still exist, Beckett asks in his piece, if there is no one to notice your existence, to absorb your thoughts? Why would you even get up in the morning, brush your teeth, comb your hair? Winnie shudders at the image that, without Willie, she is left with her lips pressed together [zich] out [zou] staring all day long.
Topper illustrates Winnie’s tireless optimism with a tight smile that barely leaves her face. When the lack of response becomes too much for Winnie, Topper’s words, spoken at a rapid pace, enter the falsetto, giving them an accentuated girlish timbre. While this fits with the character’s resistance to aging and the loss that comes with it, it also makes it harder to hear the subtleties in Beckett’s text. The result is that Toppers Winnie can be read more easily as a seriously confused individual than as a tragic enlargement of the struggle we all fight from a certain moment on, against the advancing awareness of our own finitude, and the deep loneliness that accompanies it. No flood of words, no matter how wide the smile that comes with it, can cope with it.
Scene from ‘Waan’ by BOT.
Photo Rene den Engelsman
A diptych
The musical theater performance Delusion by BOT, perched in the middle of the Paardenmarkt in Alkmaar, seems to accidentally form a diptych with this Beckett, the performances flow so beautifully into each other. In a van with an old caravan behind it, singer Job van Gorkum arrives at a run-down campsite, while he sings about the ineffectiveness of his life with a straight face.
Delusion is a theatrical concert, created by four idiosyncratic musicians (in addition to Van Gorkum, also Doan Hendriks, Tomas Postema and Geert Jonkers). The visual power of the instruments they play live is at least as important to this group as the music they produce. For example, as for previous performances, the group built robotic automatons; a self-propelled toddler tricycle with mechanically driven drums on it. A bald doll’s head, banging against the caravan in a steady rhythm. Something surprising happens everywhere on the stage, every image is completely original.
But the apparently more conventional music making is also a visual feast at BOT. The four men crammed together in the small caravan play steamy punk. Distorted thrash metal sounds are extracted from a guitar with a meter-long neck using a screwdriver. An iron, converted into a stringed instrument. A cooler that doubles as a bass. A singing bear. Why? For what purpose? These men are just messing around, it seems, but this is done with so much pleasure and conviction that, from the stands, it is impossible to stop smiling.
Enthusiasm
These lost men throw themselves into their musical adventure with at least as much enthusiasm as Beckett’s Winnie approaches her day. “I would/ I hope/ how,” Van Gorkum sputters in one of his lyrics. “I have to/ I’m going/ I will,” stutters one of the others. Intending to do something – but what? “If you know, say it,” it sounds from four throats, looking for an answer. A little later the question itself is searched for.
Does it matter that when push comes to shove, there are no answers, no guidance, no meaning, no prospect other than an inevitable end, ever? Does that matter, when you always have the freedom to, in the meantime, dance with all the passion you have in you with a set of fishing rods?
Beckett would undoubtedly have enjoyed it.
