Isabella's Room -Jan Lauwers and Needcompany

Needcompany’s Isabella’s Room provided challenging aesthetic defamiliarisation in its radical objectification of onstage materials. Director Jan Lauwers mixed an easy, off-hand performativity with dense allusions. Twentieth century history and life became a room, a clutter of objects and people. Characters died during the narrative, but did not leave the stage. The past remained.

The conceptual centre was an assemblage of African and Middle Eastern art works and objects which Vivianne De Muynck (Isabella) told spectators were first left to Lauwers by his real father, and then to the fictional Isabella by the paternal liar who raised her. Like everything in this production—actors, musical instruments, voices, words—these materials stayed immutably themselves, objects incapable of transformation yet thick with an opaque past. Lauwers did not offer transcendence through sharing culture or history. Rather he relied on a knowing ignorance and distance. Stripped of their colonial contexts, the stone penis, the slave’s shackles and the Ashanti bronze remained simply that: objects about which one knew a little, but which one could not fully comprehend through a blithe, 90 minute show. As one of Isabella’s lovers said: “You’re a liar Isabella! You told me people were good!” Like theatre itself, Isabella’s Room was a world of lies, some beautiful—that she was raised on a lighthouse, betwixt land and sea—but also ugly—the rape of her mother, the bombing of Hiroshima transformed into an aesthetic image, “as if the sun had exploded and scattered its ash over the earth.”


Delivered as a series of interrupted monologues, the performance effected an easy familiarity, mixing storytelling, verbal poetry and physical interactions on an open, white stage. In sifting through the beauty, banality and ugliness of this century of war and love which Isabella endured, choreography was both invested in and yet discarded as wanting. Lauwers compares his dramaturgy to Jean Baudrillard’s description of postmodern society as “beyond the end”, characterised by “extreme phenomena.” Lauwers’ confusing yet entrancing project expressed the political, social, aesthetic and emotional ambiguity of this condition, in which history seems to have ended, yet, as the cast sang in the finale, suffering, life, love and violence “go on and on.”

text by © Jonathan Marshall

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youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTSKCNxRMLY