The open wound as eternal truth

In Pieter De Buysser’s plays, there are always all sorts of things going on. More than he could sum up in a short piece like this. But we’re happy to let him try. As he explains it, “Immerwahr is a stage play. It’s about Midas and Ellen. Midas is an entrepreneur who loves Rachmaninov and progress. Ellen is carrying out research for her doctorate in sociology and doesn’t like character descriptions. Midas and Ellen have a son, and that young family is about to go through some drastic experiences.”

The title Immerwahr (“ever-true” in German) is not the kind one would expect from someone with a critical mentality like De Buysser. “‘The eternal truth’: that does indeed sound optimistic, maybe even pretentious. But perhaps it would help a little to justify the shameless arrogance of the choice of title if I point out that Immerwahr is also actually the name of the woman whose fate was a source of inspiration for the play: Clara Immerwahr. She was the wife of Fritz Haber, the inventor of mustard gas and of the fertiliser that made the Bayer chemical business the Moloch it is today. The story of Clara and Fritz is one of the total collapse of love, ideals, and resistance. A complete fiasco. A utopian dream that degenerated into total devastation. After Ellen sees a play entitled Immerwahr, her fate becomes entangled with that of Clara Immerwahr. To use a tragic cliché: from then on, there is the devil to pay. The whole play is an exercise in keeping the wound open, in life in the not-yet. And from there, beginning again and again. For every utopia carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. For us, no moral triumph is possible. A utopia fails, once it has succeeded.”

This time, De Buysser has chosen the form of the “classic chamber piece”, which he performs (in English) with the Estonian artist Maike Lond. He recalls: “I was acting at a festival in Riga and there I saw Maike Lond’s production 10 Journeys to a Place Where Nothing Happens. Maike has an incredibly intriguing stage presence and a highly distinctive style, in the performance tradition. So tackling the chamber play tradition with her not only created playful and very significant contrasts, but also gave the impulse for a new language. For me, it’s also something completely new to play a dialogue with someone, as in recent years I have travelled around Europe with shows in which I am onstage on my own. This production, too, is a performance in which narrative provides the backbone; for me, however, it represents a completely different approach to theatre. I immersed myself in the tradition of chamber pieces: the compositional practices of Ibsen and Strindberg, as well as Pinter and Bergman, were a major source of inspiration. Many of their representative strategies now appear naïve, but you can still get a huge amount of power, beauty, and pleasure out of them.”

PIETER DE BUYSSER & MAIKE LOND: IMMERWAHR 10 & 11/3, 20.30, €8/12/16, KAAISTUDIO’S, Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van Vaakstraat 81 rue Notre-Dame du Sommeil, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-201.59.59, www.kaaitheater.be

(© Katrien Vermeire)